When Fatigue Becomes a Business Model: The Onkar Group Conviction
On 22 Sep 25, Onkar Group Pty Ltd, trading as Bakeology, and its sole director were convicted and fined a combined $1.43 million in the Wangaratta County Court after the fatigue-related death of a 27-year-old delivery driver. WorkSafe Victoria reported that the driver was 12 hours into an overnight shift when his van drifted into the path of an oncoming truck at Kialla West, south of Shepparton, in August 2022.
The facts are brutal because they are simple. Before the crash, the driver had completed the same 796 kilometre delivery run for 17 consecutive nights, with WorkSafe stating that most of those shifts exceeded 12 hours and were worked without adequate breaks for rest and recovery.
That is not a paperwork failure. That is a business operating model that placed delivery output ahead of human limits.
WorkSafe reported that Onkar Group was convicted and fined $1.1 million for recklessly placing a person at a workplace in danger of serious injury, and a further aggregate $250,000 for failing to provide a safe workplace and failing to ensure people other than employees were not exposed to health and safety risks. The director was personally convicted and fined $80,000 for officer-related contraventions attributable to his failure to take reasonable care.
The company has since entered liquidation, with ASIC’s published notices recording Onkar Group Pty Ltd as being in liquidation from 27 Jan 26. Skodel has reported that creditors were left more than $2 million out of pocket, meaning the failure did not end with the fatal crash, the conviction, or the fine.
The root cause was not fatigue, it was the system that created it
Fatigue was the hazard, but the deeper issue was organisational control. WorkSafe identified that it was reasonably practicable to manage the risk by preventing the driver from working more than 10 hours in any 11 hour period without rest breaks, more than 12 hours in any 24 hour period without seven continuous hours stationary rest, more than 72 hours in any seven day period without 24 continuous hours stationary rest, and more than 144 hours in any 14 day period without two consecutive nights off between 2200h and 0800h.
That matters because the regulator did not invent some exotic control measure after the event. The controls identified were basic scheduling, rest, training, information, workload design, and supervision. This is not NASA, this is transport fatigue control without the laminated fantasy map.
The failure was not that a driver became tired. The failure was that the organisation allowed fatigue exposure to be repeated, normalised, and relied upon until the road became the final risk assessment.
The failures were foreseeable
The operational failures are obvious from the prosecution summary. The company did not have a safe system that prevented excessive consecutive overnight shifts, did not ensure adequate rest and recovery, and did not provide adequate fatigue information, instruction, and training.
The public risk is also central. This was not a fatigue risk contained inside a warehouse or depot. The driver was on a public road, and WorkSafe expressly noted the risk of slower reaction times, lapses in attention, and falling asleep while driving.
That is where transport safety becomes community safety. A fatigued driver is not only a risk to themselves, they are a risk to the truck driver coming the other way, the family heading home, the house beside the road, and anyone unlucky enough to be inside the consequences.
I have my own memory of a courier driver from this company causing me to leave the road and nearly crash. I cannot speak to that driver’s roster, medical state, or sleep history, but from my view at the time he looked absolutely cooked, eyes hanging out of his head, and the driving behaviour was bad enough that I still remember it.
That personal experience is not evidence in the court matter. It is, however, consistent with the broader point that road transport risk does not remain politely inside the boundaries of a company org chart.
The business outcome matters
The $1.43 million penalty is serious, but liquidation changes the practical lesson. If a company collapses after a major safety conviction, the fine may never be fully recovered, creditors may be left holding the bag, workers lose income security, suppliers wear the debt, and the public still lives with the harm already caused.
Skodel reported that creditors were left more than $2 million out of pocket. That is a hard reminder that unsafe operations do not only create injury risk, they create commercial risk, legal risk, reputational risk, creditor risk, and director risk.
There is a lazy view in some corners of industry that safety is a cost centre. This case points the other way. A business that depends on unsafe work to remain viable is not viable, it is just borrowing from workers, creditors, and the public until the bill arrives.
The lessons for transport operators
The first lesson is that fatigue must be designed out of the schedule, not managed by hoping drivers will speak up once they are already cooked. Rosters, delivery windows, customer demands, route planning, vehicle allocation, and relief arrangements need to be built around safe work limits and recovery, not retrofitted after someone dies.
The second lesson is that training alone is not a control. A driver knowing the signs of fatigue is useful, but it does not fix a roster that repeatedly pushes them beyond safe limits. Telling a fatigued driver to self-manage fatigue while the business keeps allocating the same run is not control, it is outsourcing failure to the person least able to absorb it.
The third lesson is that officers are exposed when they know, or should know, how the work is being done and fail to intervene. The director in this matter was personally convicted and fined, which should get the attention of anyone who thinks fatigue management can be delegated to a spreadsheet and a vague toolbox talk.
The fourth lesson is that the public road is part of the risk environment. Once the task involves driving, the workplace risk extends beyond the depot gate, and the community becomes part of the foreseeable harm profile.
The Safety Jon view
This case is not complicated. A young worker died after repeated long overnight delivery runs, the company and director were convicted, the penalties were severe, and the company later entered liquidation.
The final lesson is blunt because it needs to be. If your business model requires exhausted people to keep driving through the night, your business model is broken.
If you cannot do business safely, do not do it at all.
Red pill or blue pill.
Stay safe!
Comments