Is short award compliance training a rort?

If its unit standards based, then probably. The Government’s review of workplace health and safety compliance is long overdue - but if it’s to mean anything, we must look beyond cost and red tape. The deeper issue is credibility - specifically, the widespread fraudulent awarding of unit standards in short-form training and the complete absence of meaningful supervision in competency sign-off.

Far too often, workers attend a training school and walk away from half-day courses with unit standards that imply comprehensive skill or knowledge - despite not receiving job and machine specific training. In reality, these courses are about issuing paperwork, not building competence. A four-credit unit standard delivered in two hours simply doesn’t add up. This is not just misleading - it’s dangerous.

Worse still, proper supervision in the workplace is lacking - despite supervision being a critical part of safety performance. Under the Australian WHS model (which the New Zealand HSWA 2015 is largely based on), supervisors are expected to be trained and qualified in how to lead, monitor, and manage health and safety performance on site. In New Zealand, we have largely ignored this. We certify workers as competent on paper and then leave their actual performance to chance - or to an under-supported, often unqualified line manager.

The result is a compliance system that commodifies safety training. It reduces real risk management to a box-ticking exercise, outsourced to training providers who have no long-term accountability for workplace outcomes.

We need a reset. That means:

• Phasing out over-reliance on NZQA unit standards as a proxy for competence. These were never meant to replace on-the-job assessment.

• Investing in internal capability - training and qualifying in-house supervisors and trainers who know the actual work, the hazards, and the context.

• Reinstating the role of supervision as a core element of workplace safety, not an afterthought.

Competency must be earned, observed, and maintained - not just issued on a certificate. Real safety is site and job specific, people-specific, and culture-specific. The sooner we move away from commodified compliance and back toward embedded, accountable training, the safer our workplaces will become.