Agriculture branded 'high risk' industry

CHANGE NEEDED: Chair of Wairarapa Labour Kieran McAnulty (left) and Labour caucus members Iain Lees-Galloway, David Cunliffe and Chris Hipkins visited Taratahi last week. PHOTO/FILE

Parliament is being urged to include agriculture as a "high-risk work industry" under the new Health and Safety Bill which is hoped to cut fatality and serious injury rates around New Zealand.

In the past eight months, there was a death and five serious injuries within Wairarapa's agricultural industry, twice as many as last year, according to WorkSafe NZ.

Labour MP Iain Lees-Galloway came to Wairarapa last week and visited Taratahi with other Labour representatives to speak to Taratahi senior management and with future workers of the agricultural industry.

"Agriculture is our most dangerous industry if you look at it purely from the statistics," Mr Lees-Galloway said.

"We kill and injure twice as many people at work per capita as they do in the UK or France, Australia's rate is only two-thirds what ours is, and a lot of that is coming from agriculture."

He said the best way to improve workplace health and safety is to give workers the right to access a trained health and safety representative, and that the Bill in its current form is denying that right to more than 300,000 workers throughout New Zealand.

The proposed Bill states that businesses that employ less than 20 people will be exempt from the requirement to have a health and safety representative, unless they operate in a high-risk industry.

According to Labour representatives, agriculture and forestry are unlikely to be included as "high-risk industries" as the Bill currently stands in Parliament.

"We're debating reform to the health and safety laws, and it's good that we're doing that - we clearly, from that data, desperately need to do that and when the Bill first came before Parliament, we were really enthusiastic about it," Mr Lees-Galloway said.

"Unfortunately, it went to a select committee and it has been watered down quite a lot.

"And it's been watered down because there's been a lot of fear mongering and misinformation out there about what the impact would be on businesses, and in particular what the impact would be on farmers."

Mr Lees-Galloway said that a negative culture had been built up around Health and Safety in the agricultural industry.

"An interesting point that came up at Taratahi was that they said we train our guys, we teach them good practice, then they go out on farm and they come up against this culture that already exists, which has a slightly more cavalier approach to health and safety.

"They're new, they often feel like they can't challenge the way things are being done on farm[s] right now and so they slip into these habits and then some of the students are ending up being injured in accidents that would never have happened."

Wairarapa Labour Party chairman Kieran McAnulty said Labour's main point in including agriculture as a high-risk industry is as much about keeping farmers safe as it is about those who work with farmers.

"Introducing Health and Safety reps is not an onerous or expensive undertaking," he said.

WorkSafe agriculture programme manager Al McCone said they are keen to work with farmers to prevent workplace injuries and fatalities.

"Together with ACC, WorkSafe has committed to the six-year Safer Farms programme, designed to help sector leadership implement a change in culture across New Zealand pastoral farming," he said.

"Providing education and support to farmers is a main tenet of Safer Farms. In this way, the sector can start dealing with the issue of 600 people per day not turning up to work because of workplace injuries, and the 1 in 5 dairy workers who visit a doctor each year with a workplace injury.

"There is a real production cost to this.

"Each time someone on a farm is injured, it creates more stress, reducing the number of workers for tasks, increasing the work each worker is required to do, and decreasing the amount that actually gets done."