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How health and safety cripples us

While out walking yesterday, it became very apparent to me exactly why New Zealand's standard of living and productivity has fallen so much.

We're just incredibly inefficient.

The thing that prompted this revelation were some roadworks being performed not far from my house.

Several potholes were being filled in (yay!), something which probably used to be done "back in the day" by a couple of guys with a truck, some shovels, a bit of hot-mix and a vibrating compactor.

Yesterday's observations showed just how ridiculously poor we now are at doing things in an efficient, cost-effective manner.

The area being worked on was about 100m from a roundabout.

There was a small digger and a compactor working on the potholes themselves but immediately before the works there were cones closing one lane of the road and a man with a stop/go sign.

Apparently people can't be trusted not to crash into each other on the 30m or so of road which is now single-lane (but still wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other.

Even this was okay, from an efficiency and productivity perspective.

However, there were also men with stop/go signs at each exit of the roundabout a further 100m up the road.

Excuse me?

Are they saying that the roundabout was broken in some way?

Why did we need traffic control at a roundabout some 100m away from where a very short section of one lane of the road was closed?

What was the purpose of placing such traffic management on roads that were not even part of the works?

In addition to the four stop/go guys there was also someone watching the two guys who were filling in the potholes and a couple of others who appeared to be "assisting" the stop/go sign holders.

In total, it seems as if it now takes NINE people to fix a couple of potholes on the side of a suburban street when it used to take just two.

Seriously?

Is it any wonder that we have a major problem with potholes in this country when the cost to fix them is obviously so loaded with "health and safety" overhead and other inefficiencies? Is it also any wonder that council's budgets are blowing out left, right and centre, when the cost of doing the work is tiny compared to the cost of complying with massively OTT health and safety requirements?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that workers (or anone) should be exposed to unreasonable risks -- but at some point you have to draw a line and say that health and safety overheads themselves create a risk because they reduce the amount of essential remedial work that can be done for a given budget.

Finally, as if to prove my point that H&S is a performance/productivity killer we need look no further than the moon.

The recent private mission to the moon was crippled by... health and safety!

The Odysseus landing craft toppled onto its side because its laser range-finding system was inoperative. Why was it inoperative?

Well while on the ground there is a physical lock-out switch that prevents the lasers from being activiated (lest someone loses an eye in a nasty accident). Well it seems that someone forgot to remove the lockout pin before launch so there was no way they could actually activate those lasers as they approached the lunar surface.

Health and safety has a lot to answer for when over-used.

Perhaps people need to take a teaspoon of cemement and harden up. Living involves risks, get used to it.

Carpe Diem folks!

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