After more than twenty years advising injured workers across Western Australia, there’s one mistake I see more than any other on mine sites: a worker accepts that their statutory workers’ compensation claim is the full extent of what they’re entitled to. In many cases, it isn’t even close.
If you work on a mine site, you’re often working in an environment with multiple employers, contractors, and operators all overlapping on the same patch of dirt. That complexity can work in your favour, but only if someone actually unpacks it for you.
The Starting Point: Workers’ Compensation Is a Safety Net, Not Compensation
Western Australia runs a no-fault workers’ compensation system under the Workers’ Compensation and Injury Management Act 2023. Every employer in the state is required to hold insurance so that if you’re injured in the course of your employment, you can claim against that policy, regardless of who was at fault. It doesn’t matter whether your employer breached their duty of care, and it doesn’t matter whether you contributed to the incident. You simply need to show the injury arose out of your employment.
Because it’s a no-fault system, the trade-off is that everything is capped. A workers’ compensation claim currently gives you access to a structure along these lines:
- Around $273,000 for wages and weekly payments connected to the injury
- Around $160,800 for treatment and medical costs
- Around $19,000 toward getting you back into the workforce, typically through a vocational rehabilitation provider
- A discretionary allowance for things like travel costs related to treatment
This system exists to support you, and it does its job. But it was never designed to compensate you for the true financial impact of a serious injury, particularly if that injury ends your career on site. Think of it as a safety net rather than a settlement.
Where a Common Law Claim Comes In
Separate from the statutory scheme, you may also have what’s known as a common law claim. This applies where a party owed you a duty of care, breached that duty, and it was reasonably foreseeable that doing so would cause you injury. If you can establish that, you may be able to pursue that party through the District Court of Western Australia.
If the party at fault is your employer, there’s an added threshold: you need to be assessed at 15% or more whole person impairment by an approved permanent impairment assessor, using the AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment (5th edition) together with WorkCover WA’s own permanent impairment assessment guidelines. This assessment is purely objective, it doesn’t account for pain, only measurable physical impairment.
If you sit between 15% and 25% whole person impairment, your claim against your employer is capped at roughly $573,000, less anything you’ve already received through your workers’ compensation claim. If you’re assessed at 25% or above, that cap disappears entirely, and your damages are based on what you can actually prove you’ve lost.
Why Mine Sites Are Different
Here’s the part that catches a lot of mine workers out. On a typical mine site, you might be employed by a labour hire company, placed with a mining contractor, working on a site owned and operated by a mining company. Three separate entities, three separate sets of obligations.
Your employer, even if it’s the labour hire company, owes you what’s called a non-delegable duty of care. They can’t hand that responsibility off simply by placing you with someone else; they still have to ensure the work you’re doing is safe.
The mining contractor directing your day-to-day work and giving you instructions may owe you a separate duty, because it’s their decisions shaping the conditions you’re working in. Importantly, because that contractor isn’t your employer, the 15% whole person impairment threshold doesn’t apply to a claim against them, you simply need to establish an injury and a breach of duty.
The mine owner or operator can also be in the picture if they had influence over the activities you were carrying out or conditions on site.
This matters most in exactly the kind of case that often gets written off too early, a worker who develops a lower back injury that, even after surgery, doesn’t reach 15% whole person impairment. On the numbers, that worker can’t pursue their employer through common law, and their statutory claim is unlikely to come close to replacing a mining wage, particularly once that injury makes them difficult to place in future site work.
But the story doesn’t always end there. Take a truck driver who develops a back injury from constantly driving over poorly maintained, pothole-riddled haul roads. The mining contractor may have employed the driver, but it might be the mine owner or occupier who is responsible for maintaining those roads. If those roads haven’t been properly graded or repaired, particularly after heavy rain, there may be a viable common law claim against the occupier of the mine, separate and apart from any claim against the employer.
This is precisely why these situations need to be properly investigated rather than assumed. The party causing or contributing to your injury isn’t always the one signing your payslip.
A Warning Before You Settle
If you do have a workers’ compensation claim running alongside a potential common law claim, be careful when it comes to settlement. It’s not unusual for an insurer settling a statutory claim to also require you to release the principal contractor or mine owner from any future claim, as part of that settlement. If you’re not aware those rights exist, you can sign them away without ever knowing what you’ve given up, often your only realistic path to proper compensation.
What This Means for You
If you’ve been injured on a mine site, on a construction site, while embedded with a host company through a labour hire arrangement, or anywhere multiple parties influence the work you do, don’t assume your statutory claim is the end of the road. The insurer managing your workers’ compensation claim is not your advocate. Their obligation is to your employer, not to you, and they have no duty to tell you about rights you may have against other parties.
You don’t need to take our word for it, and you certainly don’t need to take theirs. Come in for a conversation about your circumstances, the initial consultation costs nothing, and there’s no obligation attached to it. You’ll walk out better informed, and the decision about what to do next will always be yours. be undone.
Disclaimer: Every claim is different and entitlement to compensation depends on individual circumstances. This article contains general information only and is not legal advice.
