The Pike River movie launches today.
I haven’t seen any previews and have no current plans to go and see it yet, but it got me thinking a little about how (if at all) we have progressed in our approach to health and safety here in New Zealand since the disaster.
Short answer – in some areas we have, quite a lot. I honestly believe that some of the work being done here is as good as anywhere in the world. But, in many others we haven’t. We still have high levels of fatalities. We still have a regulator that has churned through senior leadership teams at a worrying rate. And we still, some seven years into a 10-year national safety strategy, don’t even yet have a group established to oversee it.
I’m not going to bang on about it though. But, for reflection purposes, I just thought I’d share some of the introduction to Challenging the Safety Quo where I had thought about these very things without the benefit of hindsight. But with the benefit of many years’ experience, and a healthy tendency towards cynicism.
An independent task force was established to review industry performance across all sectors. A Royal Commission investigated the Pike River tragedy. The regulator was shaken up, given more independence and more resources. Legislation was changed. Targets were set and promises made. It took five and a half years for new legislation to be enacted and come into force.
Will it work?
Who knows? Perhaps (and hopefully) it will, but history suggests otherwise.
Based on the rhetoric after each tragedy, these issues should be sorted out by now:
“We must do better; bad practices will be weeded out and poor performers prosecuted under the new laws…”
“ We’ll look further and delve deeper to root out the bad apples…”
“We will hold up, reward and recognise good performers; identify best practices and share them.”
But, do we actually know what best practices look like? What if our current view of what is good is completely wrong? What if we’re looking in all the wrong places?
Food for thought