Breach of statutory duty and risk management in occupational health and safety law: new wine in old wineskins?

The tort action for breach of statutory duty has been used for many years in cases of workplace injury, disease or death,and is still being relied on. But in the workplace safety area the old regime of prescriptive regulation was being replaced by a system of "general duty" laws, and in recent years there has been a further move to the model of "risk management". Can the old wineskin survive the impact of the new wine? This article considers how the action has fared recently under successive changes in the workplace safety legislative regime in the United Kingdom and in Australia.