ACT's van Velden shifts Worksafe from 'enforcement' to 'advice'

Of course she did.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/562876/brooke-van-velden-shifts-worksafe-s-focus-from-enforcement-to-advice

This is same lady who said that during Covid that NZ had “placed too high a value on human life”. The one who supports a priority hotline for people to report — not road hazards or fatal accidents— but traffic cones. She’s a stated enemy of the crime of “overcompliance”.

Thank goodness.

Yup, that all lines up. These people are consistent at least.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

Nonetheless, there’s facts that even they can’t avoid.

Like the fact that New Zealand workers are at TWICE the risk of dying as Australian workers. New Zealand taxpayers lose $4,900,000,000 a year to preventable workplace injuries. What could we do with something like 4.9 billion a year? Here are some ideas:

We could provide:

Public dental care for every New Zealander: 1.7B

Living wage for every minimum wage worker: 0.75B

Pay to fix all public nurse and doctor shortages for 3 years: 3.9B

The thing to remember about all of these is that they are investments in our people. We know how much we lose to dental pain and emergency dental care, homelessness, preventability disability, and a lack of primary care. The idea that we “save money” by not ensuring our citizens are healthy and taken care of, is financially absurd.

For as much as National and ACT say they’re adults with financial literacy, their actual policies show they’re financial illiterates.

[Unless of course you’re honest and only look at corporate profits: by that metric, everything they touch turns to gold. For the powerful and the already rich.]

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Ironically, the same day at this story came out, another story surfaced, about a man losing 4 fingers off his right hand in a workplace incident. He worked at a big frozen pizza and Asian noodle-making company, Momma’s. He was asked by his supervisor to reach under a machine to get some dough out. Unbeknownst to him, the machine wasn’t up to scratch. The safety cover wasn’t in place. The transmission ripped his fingers off. He was left with a only a little finger on his right hand. Life changed instantly.

What smarts is that the company was able to argue that paying the financial fines would have caused financial difficulty. It couldn’t afford the fines. So they were dropped.

Reporters tried to find the worker, but he’d was unreachable.

Did anyone think to ask Brooke Van Velden for her comment?

I imagine her thoughts and prayers would go out to the poor company, for having been exposed to Worksafe’s “culture of fear”. Poor, vulnerable, frightened corporations. They’re the real victims here, wouldn’t you agree?

-Dr Gary Payinda