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? Papua New Guinea answers that through the law of negligence, not the criminal law — a civil claim for damages that turns on duty, breach and causation, not on intent.

An inquest opens the record

Under section 7(1) of the Coroners Act (Chapter 32), a Coroner has jurisdiction — and, by subsection (2), a duty to act without delay — over a death that was itself a killing (paragraph (a)) or that occurred within a year and a day of an accident to which it is directly attributable (paragraph (g)). Both apply here. Anyone aware of a sudden or unusual death must notify the nearest Coroner or a police officer under section 9. At the inquest the Coroner must find, so far as the evidence allows, the identity of the deceased and how, when and where he came by his death. That finding does not itself decide anyone's civil liability, but it creates the first official record of what happened — the facts a later negligence claim would need to prove.

The duty of care Adventure Park owed

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 exactly the kind of managed danger that duty was built for: whoever had charge of the enclosure's feeding protocol, staffing and rescue equipment was required to take reasonable care and precautions against the animal doing what saltwater crocodiles do.

Breach, causation and a claim for the family

The Supreme Court in Woolcott confirmed the elements a claimant must prove: a duty of care existed, it was breached, and the breach caused a death that was a reasonably foreseeable kind of injury. Reports that no firearm was available to security staff during the hour bystanders spent trying to free the keeper go directly to breach — whether reasonable precautions existed at all, not only whether the keeper himself was careful that afternoon.

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, “notwithstanding that the death has been caused under such circumstances as amount in law to an offence.” 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. In Woolcott the Supreme Court entered judgment on liability for the deceased's widow and children on exactly this combination — negligence proved, damages payable under sections 25 and 26 — and remitted only the assessment of the amount.

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 choice weighs

The dependants therefore face a real election, not a formality. The Workers' Compensation Act pays a modest, capped sum without needing to prove anything about how the attack happened. A claim under the Wrongs Act can recover substantially more, calculated on the family's actual loss, but only if they can show — as the family did in Woolcott — that whoever controlled the crocodile owed and broke a duty of reasonable care, and that the breach caused the death.