Are you responsible for non-compliance by third parties - under the HVNL?

If you engage someone else to do something or if you aren’t primarily responsible for doing something which is done by another person, you expect them to be responsible if something goes wrong. 

However, when we are talking about safety, the critical importance of the matter overrides what might make sense when safety is not at stake.

The primary duty under the Heavy Vehicle National Law (HVNL) is a shared one. Each person in the Chain of Responsibility (CoR) has a non-delegable safety duty. Those duties are concurrent, meaning that they are overlayed and run together and one person is not absolved of responsibility just because someone else shares responsibility. 

There is a current line of thought circulating that if you engage a third party to perform a task, you are automatically absolved of or meet your safety duty under the HVNL. Unfortunately, it is not this simple.