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With ten years of the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HSWA), the coalition National and Act government has announced it is committed to reforming health and safety law and regulations and has started consultation on this.

The changes are a response to what MBIE described as “an outdated and incomplete regulatory framework”, where it has previously highlighted the need for reform in areas where workers operate machinery, use equipment, or work at heights which account for almost 80% of New Zealand’s work-related deaths (roughly double Australian rates).

Minister Brooke van Velden explained the “The health and safety system needs to be clear, sensible, proportionate, and effective. The steps businesses and workers take to protect health and safety should be considered appropriate and meaningful, rather than just another tick-box exercise”.

Proposed Changes to HSWA:

While specific changes to HSWA are yet to be proposed, the government has identified five key areas of interest:

• Ensuring businesses are in the best position to identify health and safety issues;
• Investigating whether the law strikes the right balance between flexibility and certainty;
• Improving worker engagement and participation in health and safety issues;
• Ensuring the effective operation of health and safety regulators; and
• Determining whether the holistic health and safety system is meeting its objectives.

If you’d like to make submissions on this through the consultation period, you can do that via MBIE, before the deadline of 31 October 2024.

Changes to WorkSafe

There are also changes being made within WorkSafe, including a large restructuring with 113 roles disestablished in November 2023.

On June 7 this year, WorkSafe launched a refreshed strategy.

The strategy puts three types of harm at the forefront of health and safety investigations:

• Acute harm – serious injury, illness, or death from a single event.
• Chronic harm – serious injury illness, or death from continuous work or repeated events; and
• Catastrophic harm – serious illness, injury or death affecting multiple people.

The refreshed strategy is the first of three publications expected to describe WorkSafe’s future direction. The second publication is an “operating plan”. The operating plan will set out priorities, initiatives, activities, describe how resources will be allocated and identify the outcomes WorkSafe aims to achieve. WorkSafe also intends to release a functional model to define the key functions required to deliver the strategy effectively.

What does this mean for business?

Contrary to overseas trends, the changed WorkSafe focus marks a shift away from investigating “psychosocial risks” and mental harm.  However, the requirement to support wellbeing is firmly embedded in employment law obligations, and rolling this back in the health and safety space won’t change employer duties in this respect.

Consultation on changes to HSWA is in the early stages, and we have yet to see what government policy will translate to law, so it is unclear what this will practically mean for business.

Stay tuned for more information as changes are introduced.

Disclaimer: We remind you that while this article provides commentary on employment law, health and safety and immigration topics, it should not be used as a substitute for legal or professional advice for specific situations. Please seek legal advice from your lawyer for any questions specific to your workplace.