IN ALL the chatter about health and safety, and about rules reduction, there seems to be a recurring theme and that is that there needs to be rules and laws to combat New Zealand's tragic record around workplace safety.
We seem to be better at hurting ourselves and others in the workplace than any other Western country. Pretending that good health and safety practice is not manly enough for real blokes is ridiculous. The biggest concern is the enforcement and the subsequent actions of agencies responsible for these issues.
What we see in a strict enforcement regime without any education is that most effort goes into not getting caught rather than changing practice. Managing the speed limit on our roads is an obvious indicator - motorists still speed, but knowing more about when they are likely to be caught by camera or patrol officer becomes part of the institutional knowledge of the Kiwi driver.
Helmet manufacturers sell heaps of helmets as employers mitigate their responsibility, but it doesn't always mean people are wearing helmets more of the time.
And education isn't just attending the same course to hear the same advice at regular intervals through a career. Achieving good results is about making the future practices safer and not looking backwards and relitigating what went wrong in order to get tough on past offenders.