The Health and Safety at Work Amendment Act 2026 will force ALL organisations in NZ to focus on their critical risks with effective workplace risk assessment across Auckland and NZ businesses.
This means ALL New Zealand business will need to answer two simple questions:
What are our critical risks, and
Are we managing our critical risk so far as reasonably practicable?
What is a critical risk?
A critical risk is any hazard with the credible potential to cause:
- Death
- Life-altering injury
- Serious chronic illness
The Health and Safety at Work Act will also list specific regulated risks in what will be known as Schedule 1A. These are existing high-risk activities already covered by regulations, so in itself this schedule should not introduce new requirements.
Recording & assessing risks and controls
The Winsland Health and Safety App is purposed designed to provide all that is needed to complete risk management – click link for details of the Winsland App.
An example of the way the App presents risk data for one specific risk is below
Examples of critical risks
Physical Hazards
- Work at Height: Any work which has the potential for workers to fall with a consequence of fatality or life changing injury. Falls remain a leading cause of death in NZ. However, consequence determines “criticality” so clearly the consequence of falling on the same level is different than 2 metres. Falling on to moving machinery is different to falling on to a fall net. Thus a proper risk assessment is required to identify critical risks.
- Vehicle & Mobile Plant: Includes operating forklifts, scissor lifts or other mobile plant, or being hit by delivery trucks. It includes vehicle use on roads – thus a significant number of businesses have and must therefore control this risk.
- Moving Machinery: Entanglement in unguarded belts or machinery. As a workplace health and safety consultant, our experience is this is an often overlooked risk.
- Electricity: Energy isolation relating to servicing or operating machinery. Faulty wiring, contact with buried services – are all elements of this risk.
- Fire – is another common risk.
Health & Chronic Risks
Critical risks don’t always have an immediate injury as a consequence; they can be slow-acting but equally life-altering.
- Hazardous Substances: Exposure to chemicals, silica dust or asbestos without proper ventilation or PPE can lead to chronic respiratory diseases or cancers.
- Psychosocial Harm: In small businesses, high pressure and “always-on” cultures can lead to severe mental health crises. This it is now classified by Worksafe as a critical risk if it leads to self-harm or total breakdown – this SME will likely need need to address this as a critical risk.
- Fatigue: Particularly for owner-operators or small teams pulling double shifts. Fatigue acts like alcohol on the brain, significantly increasing the likelihood of a fatal error during a high-risk task like machine operation or driving.
What is changing with critical risk in the new law?
The concept itself isn’t new. Based on our experience as a health and safety consultant NZ, most organisations already focus on high-consequence risks.
What is changing is the expectation to clearly prioritise them—and to be able to demonstrate that you are doing so.
This means:
- Focusing resources on the risks that can cause the most harm – which requires a workplace risk assessment
- Monitoring those risks more closely
- Reviewing controls more frequently
Importantly, this does not mean ignoring lower-level risks. It’s about proportionality, not exclusion.