Deaths on Canberra construction work sites must be treated as criminal investigations immediately after the fatality to help improve prosecutions, the ACT's Director of Public Prosecutions has said.
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DPP director Jon White made the comment during an annual reports committee hearing at the ACT Legislative Assembly on Wednesday.
Greens MLA Caroline Le Couteur asked Mr White what could be done to increase the chances of success in industrial prosecutions.
Her question follows a number of recent high profile industrial cases, including the Star Aviation matter, which Chief Magistrate Lorraine Walker threw out of court, describing it as "abysmally run", before later saying her remarks were "intemperate".
Mr White said it was "difficult to answer" Ms Le Couteur's question concisely, it often came down to a need to investigate industrial deaths to the same standard of a criminal investigation.
"The essence of the issue is that these matters are very difficult to investigate and they need very professional investigators to investigate from a criminal point of view very early on in the cycle, of say industrial accidents," he said.
"If there is a death on a work site it needs to be treated as if it were a full criminal investigation right from the start, but often it isn't, for all the reasons that are present on a work site."
He said the most immediate issue for industrial accident prosecutions the immediacy and quality of the "investigative response" on the site, as well as a need for expert reports on accidents to be of "unimpeachably high quality".
Mr White also said the way construction work sites were organised, with multiple levels of contracting an subcontracting on any specific project, also made mounting prosecutions "very complex legally".
"The legal framework is set up to minimise liability, and diffuse liability, so that 's what we're hinting about when we talk about the technical nature of the prosecutions," he said.
"So we're operating in that environment, it's a commercial environment that is set up for a particular reason [and] it is a difficult environment for prosecutors."
Mr White said the existing work safety laws were also set up so there were "multiple duties" on a work site, as safety was everyone's duty, but that duty sometimes "slips down a crack" between the different levels or could be "difficult to prove".
Asked about recent proposals to reform criminal laws, after a case involving possible tampering with a crime scene, Mr White said that "tidying up" a construction work site could also "be an issue" for industrial cases.
He also reiterated his repeated calls for more resources for the DPP, describing the current staffing and resourcing situation in the DPP as a "looming storm cloud over the office", due to several factors including rising work loads, complexity of cases and a lack of senior prosecutors.
Mr White said the ACT DPP was also specifically losing good senior prosecutors across the border, where an ACT grade five prosecutor, earning $150,000 to $160,000 a year, could earn twice as much in the NSW prosecutor's office.
