John MacDonald: The dangers of tinkering with Health and Safety - Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

If there’s anyone who shouldn't be told they can wind things back on the health and safety front, it’s a New Zealander.  

Because generally, we are absolute shockers when it comes to this sort of thing and our health and safety laws are the only thing standing between our “she’ll be right” attitude and misery and tragedy.  

Especially when you consider that —even with the health and safety laws we have at the moment— our workplace fatality rate is 60% higher than Australia’s and more than 500% higher than the UK’s.  

So a perfect time, isn’t it, for us to be getting rid of what the Government says is WorkSafe's “safety-at-all costs mentality”?  

Just in case you think I’m a health and safety freak, I’m not.   

But I’m also enough of a realist to know that, without these laws, more people would be going home at the end of the day injured or not going home at all.  

Another reason why us New Zealanders are the last people to be told we can go a bit easy on the old health and safety is that we have very short memories.  

I haven’t forgotten the 19th of November 2010, when the first Pike River explosion happened. I remember distinctly getting home from work that afternoon and all of us watching the live coverage.   

That was what set-in-train a huge overhaul of health and safety laws because, as we eventually discovered, the guy who ran the mine wasn’t the hero we all initially thought he was.  

Pike River was where it all started. And the government is setting out today to walk all over the progress that we’ve made since then – apparently because we’ve gone too far with it.    

But even though I’m just as capable as the next person of shaking my head at some of the things businesses and employers are required to do in the name of keeping people safe, I’m not happy about the screws being loosened.  

But what the Government has in its favour is that most people haven’t experienced the consequences of things going pear-shaped at work.  

That’s why it’s so easy to dismiss health and safety as an overreaction. But I bet if you have known someone who has lost their life at work or if you know someone who has been seriously injured at work, then you’ll have a much more realistic view of things.  

The irony is we’ve got the Government on one hand saying today that its crackdown on badly-behaved state housing tenants has worked  

But, on the other hand, it’s saying that it wants to be less heavy-handed on employers who don’t do everything they can to keep their people safe.  

Which is why the Minister of Workplace Relations and Safety, Brooke van Velden, wants WorkSafe to ditch what she’s calling its “adversarial nature” and to move from managing risk generally to critical risk.  

But what on earth does that mean?  

Do you know the difference between “general” risk and “critical” risk?   

Example: is an extension cord running across the floor somewhere at work a “general risk” or a “critical risk”? The answer to that depends on the consequence.  

If the consequence of a power cable running across the floor in the office is just a bit of a nuisance and nothing else, then you could probably categorise it as a “general risk”.  

But if that cable lying across the floor means someone trips on it and they bang their head pretty hard on a wall and get some sort of brain bleed, then that becomes a “critical risk”, doesn’t it?  

See what I mean?  

The idea of taking the pedal off the metal and only taking “critical risks” seriously probably sounds great to many of us. But dig a bit deeper or even think about it for a few minutes and you’ll realise that it’s a huge mistake.  

It’s a bit like Trump coming in and saying that all this Paris climate change st