People, Culture & Employment Governance · 30 March 2027
An association's work health and safety duty extends to volunteers on essentially the same footing as paid staff, connecting directly to the WHS due diligence discipline discussed earlier in this series. What fewer boards realise is that this protection does not automatically extend to workers' compensation insurance, creating a specific, practical gap worth understanding rather than assuming coverage exists.
The Genuine Insurance Gap Most Boards Do Not See
Volunteers are generally not considered workers for the specific purposes of workers' compensation legislation, even though the same organisation carries a WHS duty of care toward them as it does toward paid employees. This means an association can be doing everything right on the safety side, providing training, supervision, and safe equipment, while still leaving an injured volunteer without the automatic compensation pathway a paid staff member in the same situation would have. Protection for volunteers against this gap requires separate, deliberately arranged personal accident and public liability insurance, not an assumption that existing workers' compensation coverage extends to them. An association with excellent volunteer safety training and inadequate personal accident insurance has protected volunteers from harm while leaving them financially exposed if harm occurs anyway, precisely the gap a risk management approach should have closed.
The Dual-Hat Problem For Volunteer Board Members Specifically
A volunteer serving as a board member sits under a different protection than a volunteer performing hands-on operational work, and someone doing both simultaneously needs to understand the distinction precisely. Volunteer officers generally cannot be prosecuted for failing to meet their officer-level WHS duties, a deliberate protection intended to avoid discouraging volunteer governance participation. That same individual, however, can still be held to the WHS duties of a worker in whatever hands-on capacity they also volunteer in. Wearing both hats does not mean the more protective standard automatically applies to everything the person does for the organisation.
A Genuine, Structured Framework Worth Adopting
Sector guidance offers a practical structure for volunteer risk management worth adopting deliberately: screening volunteers to confirm they are qualified and trained for their actual duties, removing or substituting high-risk situations where reasonably practicable, training volunteers on an ongoing basis, supervising their activities adequately, insuring against the specific gaps this article has identified, planning clear policies and incident reporting procedures, and investigating any incident thoroughly when one occurs.
- Confirm your association carries dedicated personal accident and public liability insurance specifically covering volunteers, rather than assuming existing workers' compensation arrangements extend to them.
- Understand which protection applies to a volunteer wearing both a governance and an operational hat, since officer-level immunity does not automatically extend to worker-level WHS duties in their hands-on role.
- Apply the same screening, training, and supervision discipline to volunteers as to paid staff, connecting directly to the WHS due diligence framework discussed earlier in this series.
- Structure volunteer arrangements clearly as voluntary, avoiding any element that could be read as progressing toward a paid employment relationship, which volunteer arrangements under workplace relations law must not include.
- Investigate any volunteer injury or incident with the same rigour applied to a paid staff incident, treating this as a standing organisational discipline rather than an occasional response.
Volunteers are not a lower-stakes category of person an association's safety obligations apply to more loosely. The duty of care is equivalent, and the specific insurance and protection gaps this article has identified deserve exactly the deliberate governance attention this series has recommended for every other risk category.
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— Annie