While Wairarapa communities remain cut off from their livelihoods after last week's destructive storm, there's a less visible crisis unfolding: New Zealand workplaces are becoming steadily more dangerous, and more workers are ending up on ACC.

Serious non-fatal workplace injuries hit 400,836 in 2024 — a record high and the seventh consecutive year of increases. That's 38,151 more injuries than in 2020, when COVID lockdowns briefly made our workplaces safer by keeping people home. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

Here's the tension: ACC is about to gain new powers to claw back welfare payments from injured workers, as reported by RNZ. At the exact moment the government wants to recover more money from people on ACC, the number of people needing ACC support is climbing faster than ever.

The growth isn't slowing. From 2023 to 2024 alone, injuries jumped by 7,158 — nearly 20 people seriously injured at work every single day. That's roughly the population of Ōtaki added to ACC's books in one year.

Go back to 2015, when serious injuries sat at 339,294, and the scale becomes clear: we've added 61,542 serious workplace injuries in less than a decade. That's an 18% increase during years when New Zealand was supposedly getting better at workplace safety.

The cost implications are staggering. ACC pays for medical treatment, rehabilitation, and wage replacement. More injuries mean higher levies for employers and workers. They also mean thousands of Kiwis dealing with long-term consequences — back injuries that never quite heal, mental trauma that lingers, reduced earning capacity.

Some of this growth reflects population increase and an ageing workforce. But the trajectory is unmistakable: serious injuries rose 5.5% from 2020 to 2021, another 5.9% in 2022, stayed relatively flat in 2023, then jumped 1.8% last year. We're not plateauing. We're accelerating again.

So while disaster tourists block contractors in Rangitikei, think about this: every day, across the country, construction workers fall from heights, warehouse staff get crushed by machinery, healthcare workers suffer assault injuries, drivers crash trucks. Most of these injuries happen away from cameras and headlines.

The government's about to make it easier to recover money from people on ACC. But nobody's asking why we need to support 400,836 seriously injured workers in the first place — or why that number keeps climbing.