Personal injury / Public liability
Public liability claims
Public liability covers injuries that happen because an occupier or organiser failed to take reasonable care, in a shopping centre, at a venue, in a park, on a footpath, at a rental property, or at an organised activity.
What has to be shown
Three things, and the middle one is where most claims are won or lost.
A duty of care.
Occupiers owe a duty to people who come onto their premises. This is rarely in dispute.
A breach of that duty.
That the occupier failed to do what a reasonable occupier would have done. This is the contested question in nearly every claim.
That the breach caused your injury.
A connection between the failure and the harm.
What “reasonable care” means in practice
An occupier is not an insurer of everyone who enters. The law does not require that nothing ever goes wrong. It requires a reasonable system for identifying and dealing with foreseeable risks.
For a spill in a supermarket, the question is usually not whether the spill existed but what system was in place to find it. How often were the aisles inspected? Was the inspection recorded? How long was the hazard there before anyone came past? A shop that inspects on a documented schedule and cleans promptly may not be liable for a spill that occurred two minutes before someone slipped. A shop that cannot show any system at all is in a different position.
This is why the disclosure stage matters so much in these claims. Cleaning logs, incident reports, maintenance records and CCTV usually decide them.
Obvious risks and dangerous recreational activities
Queensland legislation limits liability for harm arising from obvious risks, and further limits it for dangerous recreational activities. These provisions are raised routinely in defence of public liability claims and they are not always correctly applied. Whether a risk was genuinely obvious, and whether an activity meets the statutory description, are both arguable.
Where these claims arise
Common settings include supermarkets and shopping centres, licensed venues, gyms and recreational facilities, rental properties, footpaths and public land, schools, and organised sporting or community events.
Who the correct respondent is can be less obvious than it looks. A shopping centre may be owned by one entity, managed by another and cleaned under contract by a third. Identifying the right party, and doing it within statutory time frames, is part of the early work.
What helps a claim
Evidence disappears quickly in these matters. If you can:
- photograph the hazard and the surrounding area, before anything is cleaned up
- report it at the time and ask for an incident report number
- get the names and numbers of anyone who saw it
- keep the footwear you were wearing
- note whether there were signs, cones or barriers, and where
If you did none of these things, the claim is not lost. CCTV and internal records are obtainable through the claims process. But footage is often overwritten within weeks, which is another reason not to sit on it.
This page is general information about how the law works in Queensland. It is not legal advice, it does not take account of your circumstances, and it should not be relied on as a substitute for advice about your own claim.