By Jeanette Maxwell*
No one can possibly argue that New Zealand should not have a world class health and safety system.
In 2013, provisionally 18 people died in agricultural workplaces and if you add in forestry, that number grows to 28.
Not flash since New Zealand provisionally recorded a total of 51 workplace deaths last year.
Then again outside of the home, work will be the number two place most people will spend their time at.
Yet there is a will to reduce the work toll and this is why a Health and Safety and Reform Bill is now in the Parliament.
No one can argue against the wisdom of health and safety but experience from Britain warns us of the need to balance this with realism. If not it can take on a life of its own achieving the opposite of what is intended.
The last thing we want is to ape is Britain’s unloved Health & Safety Executive, which, in 2012, saw the British Prime Minister pen this stinging analysis: “Talk of health and safety can too often sound farcical or marginal. People think of children being given goggles to play conkers, or trainee hairdressers being banned from using scissors. But for British businesses - especially the smaller ones that are so vital to the future of our economy - this is a massively important issue.”
If that is scary, this stunning example one year later of Health & Safety gone nuts appeared in Britain’s Telegraph:
When coroner Michael Rose this week voiced his dismay at paramedics who refused to rescue a dying man from a water-filled ditch, we learnt, with heavy hearts, that this menacing New Labour-promoted hybrid of truculent jobsworthiness and self-righteous imbecility has not been stamped out.
“I will not say what I think of health and safety,” said Rose, speaking at the inquest of Somerset agricultural worker Michael Thornton, who died after his Land Rover Discovery, which was being driven by one of his friends, swerved off the road. “I was brought up in a country where men risked their own lives to save others. That was a period in our history which has almost ceased.”
The paramedics say that after carrying out “a risk assessment”, they decided against entering the water to treat Thornton, who was pulled free of the capsized car by his two friends and dragged on to the top of the vehicle, where they tried to resuscitate him. When a police officer arrived on the scene, he didn’t hesitate in wading into the 10ft-wide ditch and carried the dying man to dry land. But it was too late.
Is this, seriously, the culture we wish to introduce here?
Where you won’t intervene to save a life without conducting a risk assessment filed in triplicate?
Look, Federated Farmers generally supports the thrust of the Health and Safety Reform Bill.
We totally agree with the statement “…that workers and other persons should be given the highest level of protection against harm to their health, safety and welfare from hazards and risks arising from work.”
Yet this has to work in the real world. What may work in Australia, or the UK, may not work in New Zealand.
It is no surprise that agriculture is high risk because we work in isolated areas and often alone.
Our workplace has hills and mud and we’re out there rain, hail, sleet or snow. Every day, we encounter risks posed by nature, terrain to the equipment we use and the stock we farm.
Above all, our farms are also where we live and they are most unlike a controlled factory environment in Penrose.
Given what’s happened up in the UK, it is clear heavy handed compliance-based approaches are unlikely to reduce the numbers of injuries and fatalities on-farm.
Getting out the big stick and being petty minded takes away an individual’s ability to assess risk.
This is despite falling ACC Levies which shows us the farm culture is changing and for the better.
We’ve done a lot of work in this area, including a farm specific Occupational Health and Safety Manual and workshops.
We’ve also fronted up to farmers on the importance of occupational safety with the objective of identifying and controlling common on-farm hazards.
We firmly believe the best model is graduated and starts with changing culture and not going to war because health and safety is good business.
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Jeanette Maxwell is Federated Farmers Meat & Fibre chairperson.
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