A five-year run-around, ended by a coroner
WorkSafe spent five years not investigating the death of a Bay of Plenty orchard manager. A coroner’s ruling published in June 2026 finally forced the regulator into an embarrassing reversal, agreeing to reassess the business only after Coroner Ian Telford referred the matter in the public interest. The family had asked WorkSafe to reconsider twice. It declined twice. It took a coroner to make it move.
The death itself, in June 2021, was not in dispute. The manager arrived early, left the property on an unregistered all-terrain vehicle, swerved erratically across a public road and collided with an oncoming tractor. A co-worker said he looked like he was being silly with his vehicle. He wore no helmet or seatbelt, and toxicology found cannabis in his blood. Police found no faults in either vehicle, concluded the death came down to driver behaviour, and filed no charges. The coroner ruled it accidental.
The referral was never about the crash. It was about what WorkSafe did next.
Impressed, or deficient
Under its memorandum of understanding with police, road crashes are police-led even where a work vehicle is involved, so WorkSafe stood back initially. Fair enough. But after police stood down, it ran an assessment rather than a full investigation, and issued a formal directive telling the employer to strengthen its risk management. That assessment found the business lacked an effective, systematic process to identify, assess, document and communicate controls to workers.
Then a second WorkSafe inspector visited the same site and wrote to the same employer saying they were impressed with the overall approach to managing risk. One regulator, one site, two verdicts. Telford said it was not clear from the material how WorkSafe reached its conflicting conclusions.
His sharper concern was that it seemed to have been widely known, including by the employer, that the manager routinely chose not to wear a helmet at work. The two had an explicit agreement not to require one because it restricted peripheral vision in the orchard. Police noted a helmet may have meant the injuries were not fatal. WorkSafe has now accepted the referral and will reassess the business under the Health and Safety at Work Act.
The deadliest sector, the softest touch
This is not a one-off in an obscure corner of the economy. Agriculture is New Zealand’s most dangerous workplace sector. WorkSafe’s data recorded 16 work-related agricultural deaths in 2024, averaging more than one a month, with five in July alone. Its fatalities summary table updated in June 2026 lists three more agricultural deaths this year, including a 51-year-old killed in a Canterbury motorbike rollover in May and a 43-year-old fatally injured during tractor wheel maintenance in January.
Vehicles and machinery keep doing the killing. WorkSafe’s own March 2026 report on its 2025 horticulture campaign, covering 659 businesses, found 15% had issues with working in and around vehicles, usually around helmet use. The exact failing that killed the orchard manager in 2021 was still widespread four years later.
And the regulator’s response to that widespread non-compliance? It issued no fines during the campaign, with 69% of businesses given guidance and practical support instead of enforcement. Roughly 40% had chemical management failures and 18% had machinery safety problems. WorkSafe’s default setting is the gentle nudge, not the consequence. A separate report flagged that farmers continue to be exposed to chemicals and machinery risks despite some orchard improvements.
You cannot comply with a moving target
For any business running vehicles or machinery on site, which is most of horticulture, agriculture, transport and contracting, this matters well beyond one tragedy. The argument over whether the rules are too tough or too soft misses the point. The point is that the same regulator produced two contradictory verdicts on the same employer, sat on its hands twice when a grieving family pushed, and needed a coroner to act.
The genuine legal knot here, an employee who actively chose not to wear protective gear and an employer who accommodated it, deserves a careful, consistent answer. Instead employers who do invest in risk registers, toolbox meetings and hazard communication are left benchmarking against a regulator whose inspectors disagree with each other. That is a planning problem, not a sympathy problem. With Parliament debating a two-tier Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill that lightens duties for firms under 20 staff, the orchard case is a pointed reminder that the deeper issue is not the volume of rules. It is whether the body enforcing them can be relied on to mean what it says.
Sources
- Workplace watchdog forced into a U-turn over orchard worker’s fatal collision (2026-06-26)
- Coroner calls on WorkSafe to investigate orchard worker’s death in all-terrain vehicle collision
- WorkSafe drives horticulture safety improvements (2026-03-02)
- Fatalities – Agriculture | WorkSafe (2024-06-06)
- Fatalities summary table | WorkSafe (2026-06-11)
- Farmers continue to be exposed to chemicals and machinery risks despite some improvements in orchards (2026-03-05)