Quad safety must go corporate

01-10-2008 | Richard Rennie

John James is not some born-again hand wringer keen to talk farmers off their quad bikes and back on to either two-wheelers or foot.

The tall, enthusiastic ATV tutor is a realist, and with a passion for engines and a background in beef farming.

He knows Kiwi farmers will not be separated from their quad bikes - no more so than their grandfathers would have abandoned their horses.

However he is passionate about doing something to cut back the hundreds of injuries and regular fatalities farmers inflict on themselves every day of the year when they head out to work on their quad bikes.

ACC data shows 800 injuries and 300 serious injuries or fatalities result from ATV use every year.

Combining his rural background and passion for vehicles, he has created a training business high in the hills behind Tauranga, Drivezone. One of the aims of the business is to better educate farmers, corporates and public authorities on handling their quads, four-wheel drives and tractors more safely.

The wall of his on-site classroom is adorned with photos of workmates out enjoying team exercises, getting horrendously stuck and covered in mud as they retrieve their bogged vehicles.

The not-so-clean fun has a serious safety side to it however. It is one that companies and government bodies embrace as part of their culture, yet one often lacking from many farming enterprises.

Drivezone provides unit lessons on ATV riding and safety, either on site or in the farm gate. However over recent years, despite strong rhetoric from industry bodies like Federated Farmers on quad safety, and an approved ATV safety programme, he remains unconvinced there is much heart in it all at any level.

"To be honest I see too much box ticking going on, as opposed to a genuine attempt to create a safer work environment.

"Corporates are monitored and aware of the need for a safety programme, but that often is not the case for farm operations."

James says those who need training the most are often not attending courses like his. All too frequently he will arrive at a property, be waved in by the manager who points him towards the staff he wants trained under the safety programme.

"Rarely though will I get that manager on the course as well, with his guys coming to the course, despite staff being his responsibility."

He says managers and owners need to know what is covered in the training to ensure they and their staff are sharing the same knowledge.

Even today there remains a perception of "who needs instruction?" among farmers. At one course he took on nearby steep country, the neighbour roared up on his ATV with three young children on board wanting to know what was wrong with the host farmer, that "everyone knows how to ride one of these".

He was astounded at the response from some in the rural community when the father of a young girl killed in an ATV accident appeared in court.

"I could understand the support they offered for his grief, but not for the fact he put his young daughter on a bike reportedly in a neglected, unsafe condition."

The attitude appears to remain that because a farm is private property, what happens there is not anyone else's concern, end of story. There is a resentful, anti-establishment view held that safety implies rules, and rules imply intrusion.

"But that all changed with the Occupational Health and Safety Act in 1992 - your business is accountable, just as any corporate business is now."

Dairying is increasingly corporate, but also the biggest culprit in failing to get younger staff embedded into a safety culture, says James. Increasingly they are employing migrant workers or youngsters from cities and have not had the exposure to the machines before.

"If ACC funding for training through education providers stopped, demand would dry up just as quickly.

"Plenty want to do it, but they do not want to have to pay for it."

Part of the box-ticking exercise is because completion of a safety awareness and planning course, all classroom-based, results in a reduction in ACC premiums. This is despite there being no required practical session to prove the worker's competence upon any specific machine.

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