Government plans to reform health and safety law and regulations amidst what it calls over-zealous use of ‘senseless’ road cones.
New Zealand has launched a nationwide consultation on health and safety as it attempts to bring change to its current laws and regulations.
CREDIT: Dark Horse/Alamy Stock Photo
In a press release announcing the consultation, the New Zealand government’s Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden said the country’s “safety culture can be summed up by the sea of orange road cones that have taken over the country.
“From Santa parades to property development, you can’t get a lot done without having to set up a barricade of cones.
“While they may improve health and safety in some places, in other situations their prevalence just doesn’t make any sense.”
The review aims to establish if ‘health and safety requirements are too strict, or too ambiguous to comply with‘, and to find out if ‘Difficulties caused by the overlap between work health and safety legislation and other requirements‘.
New Zealand’s legislative framework, the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, will be ten years old in September 2025 and according to the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) this anniversary should trigger a long-needed review.
“The current health and safety framework is not working as well as it should be,” says EMA’s Chief Executive Brett O’Riley. “We know that because there are still far too many New Zealanders being hurt at work and our rates of harm are far higher than other comparable countries.”
According to the latest safety figures from the International Labour Organization, New Zealand’s rate of occupational fatalities tally at 2.3 per 100,000 workers, higher then Australia (1.6) and the UK (0.8); while non-fatal occupational injuries are recorded at 1,200 per 100,000 workers.
The New Zealand Government will hope feedback from the four month consultation can feed into a significant reform of current health and safety regulations.
“New Zealanders expect and deserve to have their family members return home safe and healthy at the end of each and every workday,” van Velden said. “Where we have to follow rules to keep ourselves or others safe, those rules should be clear, sensible and proportionate to the risk.”
Ms van Velden would do well to look to the outcomes of previous attempts to dilute workplace H&S legislation in the UK.
Deregulatory minded Governments asking independent people to find ways of reducing so called “Red Tape” only to be told that there isn’t much scope to do so, e.g. in the Löfstedt report. Given that NZ H&S legislation is largely based on the UK model, the same can be expected.
It will be interesting to see what the findings of this consultation are and if there is any subsequent learning for other countries. While the process was different, in the UK, a somewhat similar review was undertaken and published in 2011. The review was overseen by Professor Ragnar Löfstedt’s. The review, titled ‘Reclaiming health and safety for all: An independent review of health and safety legislation’. To some extent, over a period of years there had been accumulating lobbying pressure to review the H&S regulatory framework as it was perceived to be a burden on business. Interestingly, while there was… Read more »