The Health and Safety Disease
Writing on this subject has been building up in me ever since I went to
a beach in Adelaide and saw a sign “Warning Soft Sand”. (Is there any other???)
In 2010 I visited Thailand, a place I had visited many times. Whilst Thailand has road accidents like many
other countries, there are not as many as in NZ. It’s hard to imagine really. In Thailand
there are crazy tourists on bikes everywhere who don’t really know the road
rules, there are Thai’s on bikes with 3 sometimes 4 people and a mattress or
dog, tuk tuk’s sometimes carrying awkward looking objects not to mention
overloaded trucks which would be banned in NZ.
Thailand’s electricity lines can only be described as a tangled
concoction of wires ready to blow, in fact as I was walking under some one day
they did start sparking above me. Of
course this sort of thing would be unheard of in safe little ol’ NZ. There were also more potholes on the roads in
Thailand, more untarsealed roads as well.
In comparison, NZ have very good roads on the whole and mostly
tarsealed. We have traffic lights on most corners and pedestrian lights as
well. Personally Ii like to still use my
awareness and if there is no traffic I cross the roads at will.
I noticed a striking difference between the Thai’s and the NZ’ers. Although Thailand is considered a much poorer
country than NZ, it’s richness comes from its people. They seem to be far more alive than the
drones I see walking the streets in Wellington during the day. You see there has been so much health and
safety in NZ, people don’t have to think anymore, They just read the signs,
follow the lights, because the roads are so good, they tend to drive faster
than they should. The more health and
safety that comes into people’s lives the less they have to be aware. The less
people are aware, the more accidents.
This is why the Thai’s are so much more vibrant, they are more
aware. The only time I have seen
Wellintonians with increased awareness was the day after the big quake here. What a difference that was, it really felt
alive, it was a buzz walking around the streets that afternoon and the day
after.
The thing is, health and safety people do all this health and safety
stuff to stop people dying. Well hellooo
- there is one fact of life for all of us, and that is that we ARE all going to die. Some of us sooner than others, there is
absolutely nothing they can do to stop it.
If they stop one thing and the figures go down, life will just use
another avenue and those figures will go up.
Some of us are meant to die early others are not. It’s not about accidents, that’s just life
doing what life does.
I don’t know about you but Health and Safety is a disease which has and
is still sucking the life out of New Zealand.
You can’t bake and sell things at a market anymore because it now has to
be done in a commercial kitchen (excuse me but how many people died in the old
days when we were allowed to test and sell our products at local markets!), we
can’t build houses how we want, there are all these regulations out there (they
didn’t stop the leaky house problem did they???), speaking of houses, we spend all this money
on professionals who are supposed to check places before we buy them. They don’t do their job properly, it’s just a
money making, feel good exercise. A
friend of mine recently went to sell his property and found out the local
council hadn’t done due diligence on his foundations – hadn’t signed them off –
costing my friend hundreds of dollars!
We tried to park in a huge car park outside Rotorua once. Just to give you an idea of how big this car
park was it could probably hold 300 cars.
That morning there would have been 10 to 5 cars parked. I parked in the middle and some old guy ran
out from the office and said that I couldn’t park where I parked. I looked around utterly confused. He said I had to park where the other vans
were parked. I won’t tell you where I
told him he could go...... It just goes on.... and on.... the fact of the
matter is Health and Safety people (people who pay double their taxes and live
by fear) suck the life out of everyone – they’re a DISEASE! Thankfully we know they will die J
