A bill that would overhaul New Zealand’s workplace health and safety laws has been back in the headlines this week, with protesters rallying against its second reading in Parliament.
The Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill, introduced by the right-libertarian ACT Party’s Brooke van Velden earlier this year, marks the largest reset of the country’s regime in a decade.
The government says the reforms will reduce compliance costs, increase certainty, and refocus health and safety requirements for businesses. For smaller operations, they would limit the core duty of actively identifying and managing hazards specifically to those deemed “critical risks”.
The bill has already drawn fierce opposition from unions, workplace safety advocates and families affected by the Pike River disaster in 2010, which resulted in the deaths of 29 miners.
Critics are concerned that, rather than reducing workplace harm, the law change will only raise the risk – something that could also result in higher workplace death, illness and injury rates.
But more broadly, the changes reflect a political shift in how workplace safety is framed in New Zealand.
Where the focus once centred on identifying and managing risk, attention has increasingly turned to the costs and burdens of regulation. What hasn’t changed, however, is that vital question of who should bear responsibility for keeping workers safe.
From prevention to prioritisation
New Zealand’s current health and safety regime emerged from the Pike River Royal Commission’s conclusion in 2012 that the previous system was effectively failing to keep workers safe.
Deeper structural weaknesses emerged from the commission’s inquiry, including fragmented regulation, limited inspectorate capacity, and a weak enforcement model that lacked the “teeth” to prevent serious harm.
The reforms that followed created a broad, prevention-focused model informed by international evidence and comparative jurisdictions.
At its core was the principle that workers are entitled to the highest level of protection that is reasonably practicable, placing a clear duty on employers and regulators to identify and manage risks.
A decade on, however, this framework has been increasingly being portrayed as overly complex and compliance-heavy. The government argues businesses face unnecessary paperwork and uncertainty and should not need specialist advice to understand basic obligations.
Yet workplace risk is complex – meaning efforts to simplify regulation can involve trade-offs that create winners and losers.
Just who those losers might be is at the heart of the debate surrounding the latest reforms. The answer may lie in the bill’s focus on “critical risks” most likely to cause death or serious harm.
For organisations with fewer than 20 employees, which make up around 97% of New Zealand businesses, managing these high-consequence hazards becomes the primary boundary of their risk-management obligations.
This appears to run counter to the original intent of the 2015 Health and Safety at Work Act, under which all employers must identify and manage all reasonably foreseeable risks. It also seems to ignore the reality that, as even supportive commentary has noted, small does not necessarily mean low-risk.
Ultimately, the reforms could create a two-tier system of protection, in which some workers are afforded fewer regulatory safeguards than others.
When compliance becomes interchangeable
An important but much less scrutinised aspect of the bill would allow compliance with other legislation to count towards health and safety duties.
Under the government’s proposed approach, actions taken to meet obligations under one law could also be treated as meeting obligations under health and safety legislation. While intended to reduce duplication, it risks creating what is called systemic incoherence.
Different laws exist for different reasons. Building legislation, environmental regulation and workplace safety law pursue distinct objectives and are enforced through different standards, regulators and penalties. Compliance with one does not necessarily guarantee compliance with another.
Importantly, the bill does not require that an alternative regime provide an equivalent level of worker protection. It only requires that the external law involves actions that help manage a risk. This raises the possibility that health and safety duties could be displaced without maintaining the same level of protection.
The 2015 Act was deliberately designed after Pike River to create a clear and unified duty of care. Arguably, allowing obligations to be substituted across different regulatory regimes risks fragmenting that approach and weakening the consistency it was intended to provide.
Who bears the risk?
There is no doubt that New Zealand’s health and safety system must be workable. But “workability” is not a neutral concept. It reflects trade-offs between cost, clarity, and protection.
As well, legislative reform alone does not necessarily improve safety outcomes. What is most important is that regulatory systems maintain a strong and consistent baseline of protection across workplaces.
Critics point out the key risk with this bill is that, under a guise of simplification, it reassigns responsibility for managing harm without ensuring equivalent protections are maintained.
In this sense, the bill becomes much more than a technical reform. It recalibrates the balance between state oversight and organisational autonomy.
The effects of that shift are also unlikely to be experienced equally. There are real concerns the consequences may fall most heavily on workers in smaller, less regulated and more precarious forms of employment.
They are often the workers with the least influence over the conditions of their work and the fewest resources to deal with the consequences when protections fail.
The authors acknowledge the contribution of Dr Felicity Lamm, adjunct professor with Victoria University of Wellington.
