WorkSafe SWMS Template: What the Regulator’s Template Gives You, and What It Leaves Out

The templates published by SafeWork NSW, WorkSafe Victoria and the other regulators follow the model Code of Practice for construction work. They give you the structure a SWMS must have: a header for the PCBU, the principal contractor and the site; a space to describe the high risk construction work; a table with columns for the job steps, the hazards, the risk and the controls; a place to record how the controls will be implemented, monitored and reviewed; and sign-on lines for the workers and the person responsible. Most also include a one-page explanation of when a SWMS is required and a worked example for one activity. They are free, they are authoritative on layout, and they are the same in every state in all but the regulator’s name.

A regulator’s template is deliberately blank. It contains no hazards, no controls and no job steps for your trade, because the regulator cannot know what work you do. Everything that makes a SWMS useful on site, the sequence of the task, the hazards specific to that work, the controls chosen against the hierarchy of control and the standards they come from, has to be written by someone who knows the trade and the law. For a sole trader doing a familiar task that is an evening’s work. For a contractor who needs SWMS for a dozen activities across two states it is weeks, and the quality of the result depends entirely on who wrote it.

Use the regulator’s template when the task is unusual enough that no pre-filled document would fit, when your client’s system requires their own or the regulator’s format, when you are writing a SWMS for a one-off activity you understand thoroughly, or when you want to check that a SWMS you already have carries every section the regulator expects. In each of those cases the blank form is the point.

For the common trades, electrical, plumbing, carpentry, concreting, excavation, demolition, working at heights and the rest, the hazards and the controls are well understood and largely the same from job to job. A pre-filled template written by a hygienist for that trade already carries the job steps, the hazards, the controls, the codes of practice and the Australian Standards, in the same layout the regulator uses, prepared for the state you work in. What is left for you is what only you can do: adjust it to the site, add the site-specific controls, consult the crew and sign it on. The templates on this site are written to be edited in Word; they are not a substitute for that site-specific step, and a regulator will not accept a template that has not been adapted to the job.

Whichever starting point you choose, the duty is the same. The SWMS must be prepared before the high risk construction work starts, developed in consultation with the workers who will do the work, specific to the site and the task, kept available at the workplace while the work is done, followed, and reviewed when it stops working or when the work changes. A blank regulator template that has been filled in badly and a pre-filled template that has not been adapted fail that duty in the same way.