Dr Oliver Hartwich: Health and safety on the rocks

Last week, at Wellington’s Koru Lounge, I discovered Air New Zealand’s latest contribution to aviation safety. My request was simple: a whisky, neat.

“We have to add at least one ice cube,” the bartender said, perfectly serious. “Otherwise, it is a shot. It is the new internal rule.”

Kerre Woodham: There's got to be a happy medium in health and safety

The war on road cones has ratcheted up, with the coalition government setting up a hotline for people to report the overzealous use of road cones and no, it's not an April Fool's joke. The hotline is part of a first tranche of measures introduced by Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden, designed to reform the country's health and safety laws so businesses can focus on the necessary and the essential - not on the “senseless and superfluous” as Brooke van Velden told Mike Hosking this morning.

David Farrar: Seatbelts for a 5 km/hr Santa parade

NewstalkZB report:

Santa and his elves must wear seatbelts for Christchurch’s Christmas parade following new health and safety advice – a move labelled by some city councillors as “woke nonsense” and “over the top”.

Christchurch’s Christmas Show Parade director Jason Reekers said an audit of the parade’s floats recommended installing seatbelts on some of them.

John MacDonald: Health and Safety is off the rails

You'll have your own way of describing this crazy situation where we’ve got KiwiRail telling the Christchurch City Council that it has to close a 1.5 kilometre stretch of cycleway for two years, because the cycleway needs some safety improvements.

KiwiRail reckons the Heathcote Express cycleway, which is near a railway crossing, is so dangerous that a death or serious injury could happen there once every 1,000 years. Yep, once every 1,000 years.

Sir Bob Jones: Government departments excesses coneland

There’s no better example of an overstaffed government Department with time on its hands and thus becoming “creative”, than the Health and Safety mob and their ludicrous road cones excesses. Nowhere else in the world does this occur, nor was it ever deemed necessary in New Zealand hitherto.

Sir Ian Taylor: Govt's 'we know best' approach strikes again

Sorry!

It's such a small word, but it appears that the Government has banned it from all the spin-doctoring that has now become the standard response to the ever-increasing array of information that is finally emerging from behind the locked doors of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) via the Official Information Act.

The latest examples include the emails they desperately tried to block that showed that, back in November last year, the Ministry of Health (MOH) advised the Government that it was time to start winding down managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ).

Frank Newman: Modular homes and mod' cons

One would think prefabricated home-building companies would be inundated with orders and have a bulging bottom line. That's why the collapse of Matrix Homes, one of New Zealand's largest modular home builders, has raised eyebrows.

The company's factory in Lower Hutt was opened in February 2015 by the then Finance Minister Bill English.  At the time Matrix said it would be different from other companies because, "we're turning fully finished houses with code compliance certificates".