Workplace
A "workplace" under the model WHS Act (s8) is any place where work is carried out for a business or undertaking. This includes vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and any place workers go or are likely to be in the course of work — not just a fixed site.
Legal context
The model WHS Act's "workplace" definition is deliberately mobile and broad. It covers fixed sites (offices, factories, farms, schools, hospitals), mobile sites (vehicles, vessels, aircraft, mobile plant), and anywhere workers go for the course of their work — a customer's home, a roadside, a remote camp. The duty travels with the work. For multi-site businesses, each location is a workplace and each may have site-specific arrangements; RAE IQ's multi-workplace model captures this with workplace_id scoping on every operational table.
Where this shows up in RAE IQ
Related terms
PCBU
PCBU stands for Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking — the primary duty-holder under model WHS legislation in Australia. It is broader than “employer”: a PCBU can be a company, a sole trader, a partnership or an unincorporated association, and the duty applies whether or not workers are paid.
Worker
Under the model WHS Act (s7), a "worker" is anyone who carries out work in any capacity for a PCBU — employees, contractors and their workers, labour-hire staff, apprentices, trainees, work-experience students, volunteers and the PCBU itself if it is an individual doing work. The definition is deliberately broad.
Primary duty of care
The primary duty of care (model WHS Act s19) is a PCBU's overarching duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers and other persons at the workplace. It is the foundation duty from which most other WHS obligations flow.
Platform pillars
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47 WHS and HSWA terms with legal context, FAQs and regulator references.