The Adventure Park Crocodile Attack: Duty of Care, Negligence and Compensation Under Papua New Guinea Law

A death inside an animal enclosure raises a legal question before it raises anything else: whose job was it to prevent this? No court has been asked that question about the Adventure Park attack, and no claim has been reported. What follows is how Papua New Guinea's law of negligence would frame the question if one were brought.

The duty of care a claim would rest on

Papua New Guinea's courts recognise a general duty on an employer, or an operator in control of premises and the risks on them, to take reasonable care for the safety of workers and others lawfully present. In Woolcott v Nivani Ltd [2023] PGSC 1; SC2335, the Supreme Court set aside a National Court decision that had dismissed a wrongful-death claim by a barge worker's family, holding that the duty is “to take reasonable care for the safety of” those affected by the operation, and applies not only to employees but to others working on site with the operator's knowledge. Feeding and containing a saltwater crocodile in an enclosure open to staff and, indirectly, the public is the kind of managed danger that duty is built for. A claim would need to identify whoever had charge of the enclosure's feeding protocol, staffing and rescue equipment, and allege that they were required to take reasonable care and precautions against the animal doing what saltwater crocodiles do — and failed to.

What a negligence claim would need to prove

The Supreme Court in Woolcott set out the elements a claimant must prove: that a duty of care existed, that it was breached, and that the breach caused a death of a reasonably foreseeable kind. Reports that no firearm was available to security staff during the hour bystanders spent trying to free the keeper would go directly to the breach question — whether reasonable precautions were in place at all. That question has not been tested by any court, and nothing here should be read as concluding it either way; it is what an allegation of negligence would need to establish, not a finding that has been made.

At common law a claim for personal injury does not survive the injured person's death. The Wrongs (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act (Chapter 297) fixes that: section 25 gives an action for damages against whoever would have been liable had the deceased lived. Section 26 makes that action one for the benefit of the deceased's spouse, parents and children, brought in the name of the estate's executor or administrator, and section 28 lets the court award damages proportioned to their loss, plus medical and funeral expenses. This is the mechanism the keeper's family would use if they chose to allege negligence. In Woolcott a claim of this kind succeeded on its facts, with the Supreme Court entering judgment for the deceased's widow and children under sections 25 and 26 and remitting only the assessment of the amount — illustrating how such a claim runs, not a prediction of how this one would.

Compensation that does not wait for fault

Separately, the Workers' Compensation Act (Chapter 179) gives the keeper's dependants a claim that does not turn on proving negligence at all. Section 54(1) makes an employer liable for “personal injury arising out of or in the course of the employment” of a worker, and section 65 fixes the amount at eight times annual earnings, subject to a floor of K5,750 and a cap of K17,000, plus K6.40 a week per dependent child and funeral expenses — far less than an uncapped negligence award, but payable without proving fault.

The two routes do not stack. Section 84 preserves the right to sue independently of the Act, but a worker or dependant who has received or is entitled to compensation cannot also sue for damages unless that action is commenced within three years of the injury, and any sum recovered one way is deducted from what is recoverable the other way. Once a final compensation award is made, the door to a separate damages claim closes.

What the family would be weighing

If the keeper's dependants have a choice to make, it is a real one, not a formality. The Workers' Compensation Act would pay a modest, capped sum without needing to prove anything about how the attack happened. A claim under the Wrongs Act could recover substantially more, calculated on the family's actual loss, but only if it could be shown — as it was in Woolcott — that whoever controlled the crocodile owed and broke a duty of reasonable care, and that the breach caused the death. Whether that could be shown here depends on facts about staffing, equipment and feeding procedure that have not yet been made public.