Australia Heavy Vehicle National Law Safety Management System Standard 2026 4.1: Performance targets and indicators: identify relevant aspects of safety performance, define targets or reference points, link indicators to risk and control effectiveness, make them meaningful and usable, use leading and lagging information as appropriate, keep them timely, proportionate and practicable, and use them in practice

What does 4.1 require?

The operator sets safety performance objectives and indicators to track progress toward them, having regard to the nature and public risks of its work, so that it can see whether the SMS and the controls it depends on are doing their job and catch emerging problems before they turn into incidents; no particular metrics, benchmarks, thresholds or KPIs are mandated. Eight things are looked for. The aspects of safety performance that matter to the operation, and that reveal whether hazards and risks are under control, are identified. Targets, criteria or reference points let the operator tell whether performance is acceptable, improving or slipping. Indicators grow out of the operator's hazards, risks and critical controls and show whether controls are applied consistently and work. Indicators give information that is useful for oversight and decisions, not figures that say nothing about risk or control performance. Leading indicators, lagging indicators or both are used as the context warrants, without exclusive reliance on outcome measures. Indicators can be read early enough to act before harm occurs. Their scope, number and sophistication are scaled to how big, varied and complex the operation is and to how much public risk it carries and avoid needless administration. And the operator can show the targets and indicators are used in practice to understand performance, not kept as token or static measures.