Gordon Anderson: Home safety comments alarmist

Gordon Anderson

The text message in a recent paper regarding health and safety in the home and the ramifications for the home owner is incorrect.

Like the 1992 HSE Act and now the new H&S legislation it is not applicable to the private home.

The writer sounds just like an empty vessel making a lot of, ill-informed, fearmongering noise.

The only exception to the home situation is when you employ someone in your home in an employment arrangement. The homeowner is not responsible for the safety of any other person who may be working in or on the family home

There has been a scaremongering comment and this has made a lot of people angry and confused, so let's set the record straight.

The title of the old 1992 Act was known as the Health and Safety IN Employment Act with the new act being titled the Health and Safety AT Work Act (HSWA).

It's all about employment relations and ensuring employees and all other persons in the workplace are not harmed.

The key changes are the clarification of who has the responsibility for safety in the workplace and the shift from the subjective non-prescriptive hazard management approach to a more defined risk management approach.

It's not about stopping kids from climbing trees or wrapping them up in cotton wool, it's about identifying the risk, evaluating the likelihood of harm as a result of the risk and them implementing sensible and practicable controls to manage the risk.

Many of us do this instinctively, so a lot of common sense and now a structure process for all businesses has been set in law.

There has been a lot said about fines, prosecutions and jail terms in the lead up to the new legislation and this is what could happen, and I stress the word "could".

Someone once said to educate before you legislate, this has been happening since 1992 and our national H&S record has not improved.

Hence the Government has stepped in and changed the law to a more prescriptive Australian based model in order to achieve its goal of reducing the number of workplace fatality and serious injuries by 25 per cent by 2020.

This can only be positive and good for all NZers.

In most homes health and safety is normally an instinctive and intuitive part of everyday life so for some to claim that the law will come down on the home owner with a heavy handed fist is nothing more than ill-informed scaremongering.

- Gordon Anderson is the managing director of Hasmate Ltd of Napier. Since 1993 he has worked extensively in the area of health and safety as an adviser, systems development, auditing and management training. He works with a wide range of industries in Hawke's Bay and in other centres.

- Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz