The maritime industry has come out swinging at the country's transport accident investigator saying it's not serving its purpose and vital safety lessons are being missed.
File photo. Photo: 123rf
The Marine Transport Association has written to the Transport Minister accusing the Transport Accident Investigation Commission of doing too little and sanitising the reports it does produce.
Marine Transport Association executive director Margaret Wind said for the past five years TAIC had been virtually non-existent.
"There have been a number of instances within our industry where we were hoping to see TAIC come to the party and we were thinking 'great ... they're going to thoroughly investigate this and we're all going to learn something from it and prevent further accidents', but they've just been invisible."
She said on the other hand Maritime New Zealand had been flat out.
"Between 2017 and 2019, 183 investigations by Maritime New Zealand, of which 63 were associated with accidents and 32 were incidents - so if TAIC were involved in even half of those we would have had some recommendations and safety outcomes."
Since July 1 2016, TAIC had opened 24 maritime-related investigations, 17 of which have been finalised.
Wind questioned why so few investigations took so long to complete.
Professional Skipper magazine editor and Association member Keith Ingram said it was because TAIC was too risk-averse.
"There's too many lawyers who are trying to cover each others' arse as opposed to trying to get to the problem."
He said this compromised the quality of the reports.
"They sanitise them ... and it takes so long, we're waiting three years for reports that, when they finally come out, they're so vanilla, they're not worth the paper they're written on and the memories of the incident have long gone."
Wind said both organisations had different purposes, with Maritime New Zealand acting as a regulator and prosecutor, while TAIC should be investigating solely with a safety education mandate.
She said, with TAIC out of the picture, lessons about how to avoid future accidents were not being learned.
"In the last five years, with an invisible TAIC, nothing has changed with regard to accidents and incidents, there's been no reduction.
"So what will happen is accidents, incidents, deaths and things like that will increase because nobody's learning anything."
TAIC chief executive Martin Sawyers said it was not its job to look at every single accident, but rather to put its resources into getting the most out of a few select cases.
"We get over 1000 notifications a year but expect to, on average, investigate 15 out of that and what we're looking for is if there's a really big important safety issue involved in it, that could actually improve safety for the public."
"Our resources are very much targeted toward identifying systemic issues ... rather than focusing on individual incidents and picking out one or two things."
He rejected the idea that TAIC was "missing in action" and that the reports were whitewashed.
"People are going to be greatly affected by what we put in our reports, so we take great care to ensure that we only put things in our reports that are backed by evidence.
"If we were to speculate that would leave us open to challenge and it also wouldn't be fair on the parties that are affected by those reports."
"You wouldn't expect an organisation that's basically a commission of inquiry to to be anything other than rigorous."
Sawyers said there were lawyers involved in the process, but said it was "patently false" that they whitewashed the final version of accident reports.
Transport Minister Michael Wood has received the letter and said he would consider meeting with the Association.
"I will raise the sector's concerns with TAIC at our next meeting. My expectation is that TAIC will continue to improve overall timeliness of the number of inquiries completed per year, while ensuring the quality of investigations are not compromised."