A traveling ride operator unloads equipment off a truck, assembles a ride over the course of an afternoon, and opens it to the public that evening at a country event in rural Western Australia. The next weekend, the same operator will perform the same task in front of a different audience at a separate event in a different town using the same equipment. The regulatory oversight that has been in place for the majority of the recent history of amusement rides in Western Australia has been patchwork, consisting of a combination of manufacturer guidelines, overlapping standards, and general workplace safety obligations that left it unclear who was in charge of what and when.
With its first statewide Amusement Ride Code, Western Australia is addressing this issue by establishing a single set of legally binding guidelines that cover ride design, assembly, operation, and maintenance in all situations where rides are used, from Perth’s major parks to the makeshift setups at local celebrations and agricultural shows. The code’s stated goal is to replace the prior fragmented approach with a single authoritative reference that regulators can enforce and operators may adhere to.
The Dreamworld event in Queensland in 2016 served as the catalyst for this, as it does for the majority of significant safety regulations in the Australian amusement industry. Systemic flaws that were not exclusive to that park or that ride were revealed by the Thunder River Rapids tragedy, which claimed four lives and led to one of the most thorough coronial inquests in Australian theme park history. States and territories were expected to take the inquest’s recommendations seriously. Partly in reaction to that assumption, Western Australia’s code is in line with national perspectives on what amusement ride safety necessitates in reality as opposed to merely in theory.
The amended Work Health and Safety Act in Washington gave the code its statutory foundation. Compared to the prior arrangements, the revised WHS framework, which WA implemented later than the majority of other Australian jurisdictions, imposes more specific and practical risk management duties on operators. These responsibilities are translated into useful, detailed guidelines by the Amusement Ride Code, which specifies what paperwork is needed, how frequently inspections must take place, and who must sign off at each point of a ride’s operational lifecycle.
One of the more important aspects of the code is that lifecycle coverage. Operational safety, or what happened when a ride was operating and who was in charge of stopping it if something seemed off, was the main focus of previous arrangements. Through major inspection schedules and continuous maintenance logs, the new code expands accountability both forward and backward to engineering design and manufacture. This implies that the engineer who certified the design has accountability that extends into how the ride is used in the field, and the operator who erected the ride at the county show has documented duties that continue after the weekend.
The scope purposefully include not just permanent theme parks but also transient and mobile businesses. This is significant since the regulatory gap has frequently been most noticeable at the smaller, more mobile end of the amusement business. There used to be actual confusion about which rules applied in each place for a traveling operator operating across many venues in various local government districts. By creating a single standard that is applicable throughout Washington, regardless of the location or duration of the ride, the statewide regulation eliminates that ambiguity.
Enforcement, which is dependent on WorkSafe’s resources and will, determines whether the code actually modifies behavior. The history of safety regulations in numerous industries indicates that operators who were previously using shortcuts are not much impacted by laws that are not consistently enforced. The code provides regulators with the unambiguous legal basis they were previously lacking. The following chapter is about what they do with it.
