Work Health and Safety Laws and Professional Sport : New Zealand and Australia Compared

This article examines the application of New Zealand and Australian work health and safety (‘WHS’) laws to professional sport. After briefly discussing the origins and structure of both countries’ WHS laws, the article explains how statutory WHS duties operate for the benefit of workers and the public and, in the professional sporting context, sportspersons and spectators. The article then focuses on a number of areas of complexity in the application of the laws to professional sport. These include: applying the duties to situations where multiple people owe concurrent and overlapping duties; what constitutes work and a workplace; and the extent to which risks inherent in many sports moderate WHS duties. The article concludes by distilling a number of lessons for those involved with professional sports, and those who advise them