More focus on health and safety is good, but false simplicity is not

Wednesday, 15 April 2026

Brett Murray is chief executive of Site Safe New Zealand.

OPINION: Rob Stock’s article for The Post last week poses a question we should all be considering: will the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill make the system sharper and more practical, or simply create new uncertainty about which risks still need to be managed properly?

In construction, nobody is arguing for paperwork for paperwork’s sake. If changes to the Health and Safety at Work Act can make the system more practical and better targeted, the sector will welcome that.

But as this Bill moves through Parliament, there is a real risk that a good idea gets applied too bluntly.

Site Safe New Zealand is a not-for-profit organisation established by the construction sector to improve health and safety on site. We work with nearly 6,000 firms across the country and train more than 70,000 workers each year. That gives us a clear view of how law and regulation lands in the real world: on live worksites where conditions shift, duties overlap, and one contractor’s decisions can affect everyone else nearby.

Small businesses are not low-risk businesses

Reducing compliance burden where work is genuinely low risk makes sense. But in construction, business size is in no way, a reliable measure of risk.

A sole trader can still be working at height. A two-person contractor can still be operating around excavations, electrical hazards, vehicles, or heavy materials. Much of the sectors highest risk work is carried out by small businesses.

That matters, because construction sites do not operate in neat little boxes. Businesses of all sizes work side by side, often under shared site arrangements and common safety systems. One business taking a narrower view of its responsibilities does not just affect its own workers. It can adversely change the risk profile for everyone else on site.

The current Bill leaves room for some businesses to think health and safety obligations apply differently to them, purely because they are smaller. On a construction site, that inconsistency can easily become a safety issue.

That is why the law should make one point unmistakably clear: if you are doing high-risk work, you still need to identify, assess, and manage all of the risks arising from that work. Any relief for smaller businesses should be tied to genuinely low-risk work, not an arbitrary business staffing number.

Critical risk should be the priority, not the limit

Rob Stock also puts his finger on a genuine issue with the Bill’s drafting: the risk of defining “critical risk” too narrowly through the word “likely”. In construction, some of the worst harms are not the ones that happen most often - they are the ones with catastrophic consequences when controls fail.

Work at height, excavations, electrical risks, and vehicle movements all deserve sustained attention not just because they are serious, but because they are foreseeable and can be fatal or life-changing.

But that is not the full picture of how harm occurs on a building site.

A great deal of injury in construction comes from the everyday realities of the job: manual and repetitive work, cumulative strain, slips, trips, respiratory exposures and other routine hazards that still cause real harm over time. These may not always sit neatly inside a narrow interpretation of “critical risk”, but they still injure people, take workers off the job, and affect whānau, teams, and businesses.

If the Amendment Bill creates the impression that these risks matter less, or that businesses can step back from managing them properly, then the reforms will not have simplified the system. They will have weakened it.

A stronger focus on critical risk should sharpen attention where the consequences are greatest. It should not narrow risk management so much that other well-known causes of harm are treated as optional.

The law should reflect how construction actually works

The best legislative reform is reform that makes expectations clearer and practice more consistent.

For this Bill, that means keeping the focus on critical risk while also making clear that broader risk management still matters. It means recognising that construction is a high-risk sector made up of businesses of different sizes working together in fast-moving environments. And it means giving businesses practical guidance on how the changes apply in the real world.

Practicality is the answer here, not more bureaucracy. Legislation that reflects how construction actually works.

Because if this Bill creates a two-tier understanding of health and safety, one for larger firms and another for smaller ones, it will do the opposite of what was intended. It will blur responsibilities where the law should be making them clearer.

Better focus is good. False simplicity is not.

Recent debate around the Bill bolsters the case for why getting the balance right is critical. Construction remains one of New Zealand’s highest-risk sectors. We should absolutely focus on the risks most likely to cause the worst harm. But we should not do that in a way that creates ambiguity about wider risk management, shared responsibilities, or the obligations of businesses working on the same site.

Get the balance right, and the Amendment Bill could make the system clearer, more practical, and more effective.

Get it wrong, and we will just have created more risk for our workers and those around them.