Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
The cost of workplace accidents rose to $4.9 billion in 2023, up from $4.4b the year before, a new report shows.
The State of a Thriving Nation report was released by the Business Leaders' Health and Safety Forum on Monday.
Written by economist Shamubeel Eaqub, the report tallied the cost of lost lives and earnings, serious injury costs to ACC, and health issues to reach the $4.9b figure.
"Catching up to Australia's performance would save New Zealand $1.4 billion each year, and if we were to match the UK's performance, we would save $3.4 billion per year," the forum's chief executive Francois Barton said.
The report also found that close to 50 percent of New Zealanders had been affected by a workplace accident involving either themselves, a colleague, their family or friends.
Fifty percent of those surveyed said they had a positive perception of New Zealand's performance on health and safety.
When asked how much they would pay personally to make work safer, 55 percent said they would pay an amount which, spread over the population, would equate to $730 million per year.
"It's telling that New Zealanders would opt to pay out of their own pocket for work not to hurt and that close to half of the population has been affected by poor workplace health and safety," Eaqub said.
New Zealand's workplace fatality rate was 60 percent higher than Australia's, and more than 500 percent higher than the United Kingdom's, he said.
"Australia and the UK have similar legislative settings as ours, but something is not working in New Zealand."
The report found that Aotearoa's regulatory interventions were more reactive than in Australia.
New Zealand's regulatory system also lacked a mechanism for oversight and coordination, or 'system stewardship', which Barton said was at the heart of the UK's successful regulatory approach.
"As our regulatory system matures, and in order to lift our performance towards that of Australia and the UK, we need to see more proactive activities from regulators and a clear and explicit commitment from government to improving oversight and accountability of the entire health and safety system," he said.
"With the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety Hon Brooke van Velden announcing a review into health and safety, we urge her to consider the findings in this report to enable a more responsive health and safety system where businesses and workers know where to improve, where the risks are created and how best to mitigate those risks."
Announcing the review in June, van Velden said the government was seeking feedback on areas such as whether health and safety requirements were too strict, or too ambiguous, to comply with, difficulties caused by the overlap between work health and safety legislation and other requirements and the actions that businesses undertook, the reasons behind these actions, and their effectiveness.
The government also wanted to know whether consequences for not complying with health and safety obligations were appropriately balanced and reasonable and whether the threshold for managing work-related risks was under- or over-cautious.