The Post: Rearranging the road cones while workers are dying weekly

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In New Zealand one person is killed at work every week. In the same period, 10 people die from work-related illnesses like asbestosis. A further 700 sustain an occupational injury so severe that they’re off work for at least seven days.

Thank god, then, that the minister for health and safety is maintaining a laser-like focus on road cones.

Brooke Van Velden, who doubles as ACT’s deputy leader, announced this week that the regulator, WorkSafe, would oversee a hotline where the public could report “overzealous” road cone use. This shift of resources, from preventing deaths to monitoring orange cones, feels like a grotesque joke, the sort of thing even satirists couldn’t invent.

Van Velden’s announcement cited no evidence of any damage caused by road cones. As outlined in a recent report for Auckland Council, there are problems with roading contractors taking up too much space – for too long – with their traffic management systems, of which road cones are one part. But to solve this problem, the Ernst and Young report argues, councils need the power to levy steeper fines on errant contractors – not some daft hotline.

Coming from a party that derides “virtue signalling” and proclaims its allegiance to “evidence-based” policies, the hotline plan is the worst kind of empty, performative, evidence-free politics. It plays well with the angry older voter for whom road cones are merely the locus of a wider hatred of cycleways and other forms of progressive change, but does absolutely nothing to save lives and keep people safe at work.

The road cone obsession doesn’t even make financial sense. While ditching a few cones might at best save millions of dollars, the annual cost of our appalling health and safety record – the lost productivity from bodies dead and mangled – is, according to business leaders, at least $4.9bn. When questioned in Parliament, Van Velden admitted she has no proof her reforms will reduce this cost in any shape or form.

More troubling still is the human toll embodied by all this misery and death. Maybe the minister should familiarise herself with WorkSafe’s Fatalities Summary Table, a rollcall of workplace deaths detailed in language both spartan and sad: ‘quad bike rollover’, ‘forklift incident’, ‘fall from aerial work platform’, ‘crushed by falling object’, ‘trapped/caught in machinery’.

If anyone thinks that this is just how things are, that some occupations are unavoidably fatal, they’re wrong. Adjusted for population, deaths at work here are three times those in the UK, twice those in Ireland and Norway, a third higher than in Australia. We sometimes laugh at the UK and its pedantic, rule-obsessed, ‘elf and safety gone mad’ culture. But maybe there’s something to be said for laws that – you know – stop people dying at work.

Even Van Velden’s decision that some small businesses can focus only on “critical” risks is a classic case of something that sounds like common sense but falls apart on closer examination. The minister has suggested that those small businesses won’t have to manage things like psychosocial or ergonomic risk.

But as the Institute of Safety Management has pointed out, mental health and musculoskeletal disorders are the two main causes of workplace harm, accounting for twice as much damage as acute injuries like broken limbs. And smaller firms have higher rates of injuries than larger ones. As compliance costs for businesses fall, so will the costs to the nation rise.

Not helping matters are the government’s cuts to WorkSafe, where around 170 jobs have gone. Among its notional workforce of 675, some 200 positions remain unfilled, the Public Services Association reports.

Staff turnover is immense, not least because of the vast workload each inspector bears and their relatively poor pay rates. Investing in this workforce – rather than asking them to monitor road cones – is what’s actually needed.

Not that this registers with a minister now fully detached from the political mainstream. When she started wondering aloud last year about a “first principles” review of the 2015 Health and Safety Act, everyone who matters – including Business New Zealand, the Employers and Manufacturers Association, and the Business Leaders’ Health and Safety Forum – wrote an open letter pointing out that this would, in fact, be a total waste of time. The act is fine: it’s just not being enforced.

The great irony is that it’s not as if the coalition is incapable of governing well. Finance minister Nicola Willis’ intensifying attacks on the supermarket duopoly, and her recent threats of real action, suggest a politician in tune with both evidence and public mood.

Van Velden and her ACT colleagues, though, could block any supermarket break-up. Nor should we be surprised. Taking pro-duopoly positions, just like emphasising road cones over workplace deaths, is standard procedure for a party that has always put corporate profits above the welfare of ordinary folk.