WOF failings are outrageous

So it turns out wretchedly substandard WOF certifiers don’t reliably sort themselves out under a trust-based system. To quote the Road Commander in the Mad Max-styled TV ad, ‘‘That’s disappointing’’. The young woman checking over his battlewagon was willing to hold him to account. The real-world problem appears to rest with the smaller outliers such as Northland’s Dargaville Diesel Specialists, which had been the source of longstanding – if ineffectual – New Zealand Transport Agency concerns about its operations.

Until a passenger died in January when a seatbelt failed in a recently warranted car. Even then, this operation was able to keep handing out warrants for another eight months before shutdown. That’s way beyond disappointing. That’s outrageous.

Here is a case where the NZTA, and the previous government, have been guilty of much the same failings as those easily reviled, quietly busy, dangerously underperforming certifiers. They have each been calibrating their own standards on the basis of what they seemed to have been able to get away with.

Just last year the NZTA was assuring MPs about its regime of ‘‘rigorous performance monitoring’’. A claim that was at worst deceptive, or at very best a case of rationalising to the point of self-delusion. As the Dargaville case has shown, and the agency has only lately acknowledged, the testing regime had become an education-based model enforced by nothing particularly pointy. The agency was neither vigilant nor diligent. Where it mattered, it was missing in action.

The agency is hardly entitled to express surprise at how this somehow came to pass. Multiple restructurings had led to a loss of technical expertise on its part. On top of which it seems to have been resolutely deaf to attempts from wider industry sources to alert it to the risks being run.

The result has been a failure of regulatory responsibility, and it happened under the watch of the previous government. A review now under way must be decisive and corrective.

It’s not only the powers-that-be that need to sort themselves out. The defence, or plea in mitigation, from Dargaville is essentially that motorists play the system, borrowing good tyres and serviceable seatbelts from mates, passing inspection, then swapping back to the inadequate ones afterwards.

As you do? Only if you’re so focused on money and convenience that it makes you easy-osey about the prospects of people ending up dead. It’s a good way for mates to kill one another, and other travellers besides.

It’s not easy to get a handle on the scale of this problem. Particularly given the sheer number of warrants being issued by even just a handful of problematic, customer-pleasing, public imperilling certifiers.

When re-inspections were invited in the Dargaville case, of 741 vehicles re-checked to date, nearly two-thirds failed their first re-inspection and in all but a handful of those cases, faults were found in the seatbelts.

The testing regimes simply must be enforced. And be able to pick up problems a tad less easy to spot than when a Battle Commander pulls up for a warrant.

Here is a case where the NZTA, and the previous government, have been guilty of much the same failings as those easily reviled, quietly busy, dangerously underperforming certifiers.