When businesses are struggling to make ends meet, it’s easy for safety to take a back seat.
Easy but disastrous.
New Zealand has one of the poorest workplace health and safety records in the developed world. That’s not an opinion — it’s a fact, backed by years of sobering statistics. On average, five people die at work every month. In 2022–2023 alone, 62 people lost their lives in workplace incidents. Transport and warehousing were one of the worst-performing sectors, with 14 deaths. Of those, 13 occurred in road transport.
This simply isn’t good enough.
While initiatives like the new Road Cone Digital Hotline may make for catchy headlines, they risk distracting from the real and urgent work that’s needed to turn these statistics around. Road cones have become an easy symbol of overregulation — a physical representation of how we’ve lost sight of what truly keeps people safe.
Make no mistake: when used properly, cones are a vital tool. But their overuse — and the fixation on their correct placement and spacing — highlights a deeper problem in our workplace safety system: a focus on prescriptive rules over practical, risk-based solutions.
The issue doesn’t lie in the Health and Safety at Work Act itself, but in how it is applied. Instead of taking a practical, risk-based approach to managing hazards, we’ve seen a rise in box-ticking exercises and defensive behaviour from businesses and safety officers — often driven by fear of liability rather than a commitment to keeping people safe.
This is especially evident in the freight sector. Individual site inductions and endless pre-quals, inconsistent rules, and a lack of meaningful consultation with operators have created confusion and inefficiency — all while doing little to address the real dangers on worksites and roads. The over-application of the former Code of Practice for Temporary Traffic Management (COPTTM) is a case in point. It led to the same blanket approach being applied to every site, regardless of the actual level of risk.
In 2022, NZTA sought to shift to a risk-based model through the new Temporary Traffic Management Guide, but it took until late 2024 for it to be accepted. That two-year delay says everything about how resistant we are to change — even when it’s clearly needed.
National Road Carriers (NRC) believes there is a better way forward. We are actively working with Minister Brooke van Velden and WorkSafe to provide practical, real-world feedback on what is and isn’t working — not just in freight, but across the broader transport sector. We’re pushing for regulation that reflects modern technology, industry realities, and actual risks — not outdated rules written for a different time.
This also means challenging other rigid frameworks like vehicle mass and dimension limits or prescriptive work-time rules, which often fail to achieve the safety outcomes they’re supposed to deliver, and harm productivity. If regulation is going to protect lives, it must evolve with technology and the way people work today.
The safety conversation in New Zealand needs to grow up. It’s not about ticking boxes, meeting minimum standards, or placing cones at the right intervals. It’s not a game of outsourcing risk to the other guy – it’s about working together to save lives. That means focusing on outcomes — not just compliance. It means supporting businesses with clear, consistent guidance. And it means empowering WorkSafe and other agencies with the capability, confidence and mandate to drive change where it’s most needed.
Until we stop confusing bureaucracy with safety, we will continue to see preventable deaths and injuries in our workplaces. NRC will keep advocating for common-sense regulation and enforcement that puts real safety outcomes first. Because nothing short of a cultural shift will get New Zealand off the bottom of the workplace safety ladder — and where it belongs: leading from the front.
