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. 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 among the worst-performing sectors with 14 deaths, 13 in road transport.

This simply isn’t good enough.

While initiatives like the new Road Cone Digital Hotline make for catchy headlines, they risk distracting from the real work needed to turn these statistics around. Road cones have become a 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 placement and spacing – reveals a deeper problem: a focus on prescriptive rules over practical, risk-based solutions.

The issue isn’t the Health and Safety at Work Act itself, but how it’s applied. Instead of managing hazards practically, we’ve seen a rise in box-ticking exercises and defensive behaviour, driven by fear of liability, not a commitment to safety.

This is especially evident in the freight sector. Individual site inductions, endless pre-quals, inconsistent rules and a lack of meaningful consultation with operators have created confusion and inefficiency, while doing little to address real dangers on worksites and roads. The overapplication of the former Code of Practice for Temporary Traffic Management (COPTTM) is a case in point. It led to a blanket approach for every site, regardless 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 to be accepted. That two-year delay says everything about our resistance to change, even when clearly needed.

National Road Carriers (NRC) believes there is a better way forward. We’re 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 wider 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 We’re pushing for regulation that reflects modern technology, industry realities and actual risks – not outdated rules written for a different time.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 rigid frameworks like vehicle mass and dimension limits or prescriptive work time rules, which often fail to deliver the safety outcomes they’re supposed to and harm productivity. If regulation is going to protect lives, it must evolve with technology and how people work today.

The safety conversation in New Zealand needs to grow up. It’s not about ticking boxes or placing cones at the right intervals. It’s not about outsourcing risk; it’s about working together to save lives. That means focusing on outcomes, supporting businesses with clear guidance, and empowering WorkSafe and other agencies with the capability, confidence and mandate to drive change where it’s needed most.

Until we stop confusing bureaucracy with safety, we’ll continue to see preventable deaths and injuries. 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.