Over the past six years Worksafe Australia in conjunction with all the state Licencing Authorities began a rollout of expiring the ‘old’ high risk work licences.
It could be argued that this was done somewhat by stealth – because the majority of licence holders only found out through the grapevine that this was happening.
Workplace Health and Safety Qld sent a letter to the last known address of all licence holders they had on record notifying of the expiry – but given many licences were 30+ years old, the letters would rarely get to the licence holders if there was a record at all.
During this notification period, a licence holder could present to Australia Post, complete an application, pay a fee and have the old licence renewed into the new photographic format.
We move forward to 2015 and all those old licences are now expired and any person operating on them is technically unlicenced and it is no longer possible to just ‘renew’.
Every week we field calls from people – both employers and employees who are only now finding out about the changes.
There are still options for experienced operators such as RPL (Recognition of Prior Learning)
