Safety & Compliance
Addition of explosives to the SSDS Act
In June 2004, the Commonwealth Government and all States and Territories agreed to a set of National Principles for the Regulation and Control of Ammonium Nitrate. These principles are reflected in Tasmania in the Security-sensitive Dangerous Substances Act 2005.
The principles included a requirement that, in light of the measures introduced for security sensitive ammonium nitrate (SSAN), States and Territories should review their explosives regulations and in particular, States and Territories should implement security checking for all persons having unsupervised access to explosives.
For this reason the Government has recently passed legislation scheduling certain explosives as 'security- sensitive dangerous substances ' under the SSDS Act. All parts of industry using security-sensitive ammonium nitrate (SSAN) and security-sensitive explosives (SSE) will therefore be managed under the one security framework. Under the proposed arrangements, any person who has unrestricted access to explosives will either require a SSDS Permit, or be a 'responsible worker' under a SSDS Permit. This will include anyone who uses, stores, transports, manufactures, imports or exports explosives.
The new laws take effect from 30 March 2009. It should be noted that from this date shot-firer permits alone will no longer provide an authority to purchase, possess or use explosives.
More detail can be found in the following information sheet.
