How the safety promises after Pike River evaporated
Sunday, 19 April 2026
ANALYSIS: In April 2022 a horrific tragedy unfolded in a scrapyard in Gisborne.
A man, working alone in the rain, fell into an industrial shredder. It amputated both his legs, and he died of blood loss at the scene, leaving loved ones bereaved, and a colleague and boss traumatised.
The District Court at Gisborne ruled on Christmas Eve 2025 that the company had failed in its duty to take all reasonably practicable steps to ensure the worker’s safety in a case taken by safety regulator WorkSafe.
That was because while there was a guardrail on the shredder with a gate that could be opened, it was not an interlocking system which switched the shredder off, if the gate was opened.
Fairly or not, the shredder death was seen as a damning indictment of New Zealand’s workplace safety culture, which has failed to improve as much as was hoped in the wake of reforms following the Pike River mine explosion that killed 29 people in late 2010.
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“That's 19th century health and safety risk,” says leading workplace safety professional Mike Cosman.
Machinery guards were one of the first safety mechanisms put in place during the Industrial Revolution in England’s cotton mills.
“The thing they were regulating in the early days was people getting caught up in mill machinery. Well, we're still killing and seriously injuring people in machinery,” Cosman says.
Cosman, and others in his industry, have been speaking up over their grave concerns about proposals for a workplace safety law overhaul through the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill, which is currently being debated by Parliament, which would relax some obligations on small businesses with fewer than 20 workers.
It would reduce safety duties for small businesses, which have the worst safety records.
That has drawn criticism from safety experts like Cosman, and large businesses including Woolworths, Downer NZ, Ports of Auckland, Auckland International Airport, and Oceana Gold.
Hazardous substance experts, workplace bullying professionals and occupation disease specialists have also protested the proposed law change could result in a rise in ACC claims and costs.
But the Government’s planned reforms are bringing up bitter thoughts of dismay at failures by successive governments to put into effect the Working Safer Blueprint promises made in the wake of the Pike River mine disaster in 2010.
It was hoped reforms after Pike River would drag New Zealand’s safety record up to the levels boasted by Australia and the United Kingdom.
How Pike River reform energy was lost
No amount of reforms could restore the 29 men to their families, but in the years immediately after their deaths, hopes were high that future tragedies could be averted after the ruling National Government accepted the recommendations from the 2012 Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety on which Cosman served.
However, initial efforts were not sustained.
New Zealand got a new Health and Safety at Work Act. It got a new regulator in WorkSafe. The mining sector was forced to accept higher standards.
But the country didn’t get the promised industry codes of practice for the highest risk industries.
“If you look at our four key industries which give rise to the greatest level of harm; agriculture, construction, forestry, and manufacturing - none of those industries has got regulations. And only forestry has got an approved code of practice, which was originally developed 15 years ago,” Cosman says.
It didn’t get a raft of promised regulations. WorkSafe came to be seen as ineffective. And the national strategy that was promised turned out to be a damp squib.
As Cosman puts it: “Nobody really knows about it. But most importantly, there's no governance mechanism, which is holding people to account for actually delivering on the strategy. So, as a result, we've all drifted apart doing our own thing. and have forgotten about, you know, actually what it was that we were trying to achieve and how we were going to try and achieve it.”
After Pike River, people cared. Then not so much.
“We don't have Pike Rivers very often,” says Cosman. “So the urgency and immediacy post a disaster tends to sort of wear off after a while. Policy people get dragged into other areas because of different ministerial priorities. And we just lost the focus.”
Paul Jarvie, employment relations and safety manager at the EMA, which represents employers, says industry codes cost a lot of money and need a lot of work to create, and keep updated.
“They are very expensive. They take a long time, and there’s a lot of consultation,” he says.
Pike River response made workers safer
The post Pike River national safety push was far from a complete loss, however. Employers, especially larger employers, did improve.
In 2013, the John Key Government set a 2020 target for a 25% reduction in work-related fatal and serious non-fatal injuries per 100,000 workers.
For fatalities, the baseline was 3.3 workers per 100,000. The target was 2.5 deaths per 100,000 workers. The rolling three year average for 2022 to 2024 was 1.4 workers.
However, a greater proportion of workers are being hurt at work.
The target for ACC claims for work-related injuries resulting in more than a week away from work were aiming for 8.2 per 100,000 workers. In 2024 it was 15.1 per 100,000 workers.
Politicial priorities shift to cost-cutting
The current ministerial priorities include cost-cutting, and economic growth.
The preamble to the Health and Safety at Work Amendment bill only puts worker safety in third place in the list of objectives, behind the objectives to “reduce unnecessary compliance costs” and “increase certainty for businesses and organisations about what they need to do”.
At its first reading of the bill in February, Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden, who is reviled on the political left for weakening worker protections, limiting minimum wage increases, and ending pay equity claims, reversed that order.
“New Zealand’s rates of work-related deaths, serious injuries, and illness remain unacceptably high,” she said. “At the same time, many businesses, particularly small businesses, have said they struggle to understand what is required of them and where they should focus their health and safety efforts.”
The focus of the bill would be on “critical risks” likely to result in death, notifiable injury or illness, notifiable incidents, or occupational diseases.
Van Velden presented the bill as coming in response to things business owners told her in a nationwide roadshow she held.
Simon Bridges was the minister who signed off on the 2013 government response to Pike River.
He wrote then: “The Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy was a serious wake-up call for us all. The legacy we leave to the Pike River 29 is to ensure such a tragedy never happens again. We also owe this to the families of the 75 New Zealanders who die each year in our workplaces.”
He hailed the “major package of reform” as a step-change for the country, providing “clear, consistent guidelines and information for business, additional funding to strengthen enforcement and education with a focus on high-risk areas, and better coordination between government agencies.”
But this week, when asked by the Sunday Star-Times about his reflections more than a decade later, Bridges, now chief executive of the Auckland Chamber business association, sent a statement.
It read: “In the aftermath of the Pike River tragedy the then government kept faith by, among other things, passing a strong suite of regulatory reforms to significantly lift standards and norms. Today, I do wonder whether the sweeping reforms went too far and were overly broad, bringing the strong approach required in mining, and other critical activities, to a wider range of workplace activities than was necessary and desirable.
“Health and safety needs to be proportionate to risk and foster an economically enabling environment,” he said.
Ghosts of Pike River haunt minister
Pike River was not far from MPs’ thoughts during the first reading of the bill.
Labour’s Camilla Belich told van Velden: “Twenty-nine New Zealanders lost - a very, very dark day for New Zealand. The National Government at that time, to its credit, put in place the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill. By and large, that bill, even at 10 years old, as it was last year, is seen as bringing in, essentially, an adequate and workable framework to addressing health and safety in New Zealand.
“People have said … that New Zealand has an absolutely abysmal record on health and safety, and there is more we need to do. But what we need to do is not what is in this bill.”
Perhaps those who are most qualified to speak on the proposed laws are the families of those killed in the Pike River mine.
And in late March, they told MPs at a select committee hearing exactly what they thought of the amendment bill, and the failure of Parliaments of both red and blue hue to carry through on the promises made after the preventable deaths of their loved ones.
Anna Osborne, whose husband Milton, was killed in the Pike River explosion, said: “In 2014, the law was changed and strengthened - not enough. That’s why we have been fighting for corporate manslaughter ever since, but enough that workplace deaths and injury rates were held at bay despite the population of the country growing larger, enough that people could be confident speaking up, and employers began to feel they needed to listen.”
She said: “I have always thought that among all the bad that came from Pike, he would have taken some heart that the fact of his death helped keep others safe, even just by a little bit. This bill takes that away.”
Sonya Rockhouse, whose son Ben was killed in the explosion, said: “It feels like the authors of this bill have failed to learn from history. They have wilfully ignored it, and it makes me sick and angry.
“To wind back health and safety, despite the price our men and us have paid, despite the fact that all of New Zealand has seen that cost, shameful does not even begin to describe it,” she said.
They were scathing about the plan for a two-tier safety system, in which small businesses had lesser duties. They saw it as corrosive of workplace safety culture.
They said they saw no way that exempting small employers from health and safety responsibilities would result in greater health and safety outcomes for Aotearoa New Zealand’s 2.9 million working people.
And they pointed out that of the 29 people killed at Pike River, 13 were contractors working for small companies.
Jarvie offers a frank assessment of how the current law change proposals sit with the promises made after Pike River.
“These amendments don’t do justice to what was said,” he says.