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About Australian Standards and AS 4024.1-2006
In Australia, safety laws are made and enforced by the states and territories. Fortunately, their plant safety laws are in alignment and set out very similar requirements. Each state has an umbrella Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) Act, which sets out the obligations and “duty of care” of different types of people.

Beneath the states’ OH&S acts are the various Regulations and Codes of Practice that apply to different areas of safety. Regulations are legally binding.

Codes of Practice, on the other hand, are not usually mandatory, but they are often used by the legal system as a benchmark to determine whether reasonable steps have been taken to make the workplace safe. For this reason, failure to comply with a Code of Practice can have very serious consequences.

Like Codes of Practice, Australian Standards, developed by an independent organisation, are sometimes referenced in a Regulation, but are otherwise not legally binding (with some notable exceptions). They are often used by courts to test whether reasonable steps have been taken to mitigate risk “so far as reasonably practicable”.

The primary Machinery Safety Standard in Australia is AS4024.1. Compliance is not mandatory, but provides an excellent defence against claims of negligence, while failure to comply can be damning.

It is a fundamentally a design Standard and therefore becomes the principal DESIGN reference for compliance with Regulation.
AS 4024.1-2006
Australian Standard - Safety of machinery
This Australian Standard was prepared by Committee SF-041, General Principles for the Guarding of Machinery. It was approved on behalf of the Council of Standards Australia on April 28th, 2006.

AS 4024.1-2006, Safety of machinery series contains 26 Parts that are European (EN) and Internationally-based (ISO) safety and design Standards with some modifications to meet Australia's tough safety practices and regulations.  (Click here for cross reference listing of similar EN and ISO Standards)

The series provides designers, manufacturers, suppliers, employers and users of machinery with guidelines to help reduce the risks of working with, or near, machinery.
List of Parts:
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