National waste management company Cleanaway Operations Pty Ltd has been sentenced to the largest penalty ever imposed under Commonwealth workplace health and safety laws — a $1.1 million fine over a 2014 truck crash on Adelaide’s South-Eastern Freeway that killed two motorists.

The sentencing, handed down on 28 May 2026, relates to two Category 2 offences under the Commonwealth Work Health and Safety Act, each carrying a maximum penalty of $1.5 million. As a national employer operating under the Comcare scheme, Cleanaway is subject to Commonwealth WHS law rather than state regulation.

What happened

On 18 August 2014, a loaded Cleanaway vacuum truck descended the steep Adelaide Hills section of the South-Eastern Freeway and collided with three cars at the Cross Road intersection. Two motorists were killed. A third motorist suffered serious injuries including a fractured neck and back. The truck driver had a leg amputated and suffered a broken neck.

Inadequate driver training

Comcare’s investigation found that Cleanaway’s driver training program was fundamentally inadequate. The driver was in his first week on the job. He had been trained on relatively flat roads using a truck with an automatic transmission.

On the day of the crash, he was driving a manual heavy vehicle for the first time and was required to navigate the steep descents of the Adelaide Hills without supervision.

Comcare CEO Colin Radford described the failure plainly.

“This created a clear and significant risk of injury or death. The obvious safeguard was for Cleanaway to have enforced a system of work that ensured the driver was supervised until he was experienced in operating a manual heavy vehicle in these conditions.”

A decade of legal proceedings

The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions filed charges in 2016. The case involved multiple legal challenges over more than a decade before reaching sentencing.

“This penalty comes more than a decade after the incident,” Radford said. “We sincerely thank everyone involved for their patience and understanding — especially those injured and the loved ones of those lost.”

Implications for national employers

The $1.1 million record penalty serves as a reminder that national employers under the Comcare scheme face serious consequences for WHS failures — and that the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions will pursue cases through years of legal challenges to achieve outcomes for victims and their families.

The case also reinforces that competency assessments for high-risk tasks must reflect real-world conditions. A driver certified as competent on flat roads in an automatic vehicle is not competent to drive a loaded manual heavy vehicle down a steep freeway descent unsupervised.