HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF THE LAW HELD YOU RESPONSIBLE FOR A NUMBER THE EVIDENCE CAN'T SUPPORT?

Imagine you run a business, and from 1st December you are legally responsible for maintaining an invisible safety measurement set by government using 40-year-old data.

The data was collected for a differently defined substance, you have no practical way to measure the level, and nobody told you it was changing.

Now imagine you point out the problems and are met with a shrug by the politicians and government agencies who put this in place.

That is the position Australia’s grain growers are in.

New workplace exposure limits for around 700 airborne substances are due to take effect on 1st December 2026.

Safe Work Australia developed them and the nation’s workplace health and safety ministers accepted them in 2024. More than 200 limits changed, and 177 of them went down.

Grain dust is the clearest example.

The limit falls from 4.0 to 1.5 milligrams per cubic metre, averaged over an eight-hour shift.

That is a cut of more than 60 per cent, for a substance that cannot be kept out of the air during harvest, seeding or handling.

So where did 1.5 come from? A single 2011 report by a Dutch expert committee, drawing on research from 1946 to 2010.

The committee took the lowest level at which two North American studies of grain workers, published in 1982 and 1983, found effects on lung function, and divided it by three as a safety factor.

That builds in more caution than Safe Work Australia’s own definition of a limit: the level most, but not all, people can be exposed to without harm.

Forty-year-old data, one overseas report, and now an Australian law, with our farmers left to wear the consequences.

The Dutch report also defined grain dust far more widely, covering rye, sorghum, maize, rice, pulses and oilseeds as well as wheat, oats and barley.

The Australian limit applies only to oats, wheat and barley.

The evidence and the new regulation are not even based on the same thing.

Let us be clear: nobody is arguing that dust is harmless.

Grain growers want their families, staff and contractors to breathe safely.

But the Dutch report itself says most studies find clear effects on the lungs only above 4 to 5 milligrams, and the new limit sits far below that.

That is a limit set too low, built from decades-old data and a different definition, and it deserves scrutiny before it carries penalties.

The process behind the number is just as troubling.

The review began in 2018 under a red tape reduction principle, which meant leaning heavily on overseas standards.

There was one round of public consultation, in 2021, publicised mainly through Safe Work Australia’s own website. There was no media release, no paid advertising and no targeted outreach to an industry worth about $27 billion a year with some 19,000 growers.

Only nine chemicals received a full impact statement.

When ministers saw it, a majority declined to lower those limits and asked for more work.

The other 200-plus changes, including grain dust, never faced that test.

Any business that works with dust, fumes or chemicals should be asking whether anyone told them.

When we surveyed almost 500 growers in early October, 99 per cent did not know how they would measure grain dust and 97 per cent did not know how they would manage it.

Almost 80 per cent only found out about the change from our survey.

Under the model workplace laws, the person running a business must ensure no worker is exposed above the limit.

On a family farm, that person is often the farmer. Penalties can run to hundreds of thousands of dollars and, for reckless conduct, to jail.

Ministers signed this off on the advice they were given. While it may have been unwise to change 700 workplace standards at one time, they are responsible for making sure each one can be justified by their agencies, and for demanding a straight answer before a single grower faces prosecution or a WorkCover claim.

This is their chance to put the hard questions to their agency and ensure that when they set a standard, it actually means something.

We are asking for three things for grain dust: defer the new limit and prepare a full regulatory impact statement; commission an independent review of the evidence behind it; and require proper, sector-specific consultation before it takes effect.

Good laws and regulation earn compliance because people understand them, believe they are justified and can follow them.

This one asks farmers to meet a standard they cannot measure, built on evidence that does not match the rule, announced to almost no one.

Ask yourself again: how would you feel?

This article was first published by The Land on November 12, 2026 HERE