Lax NZTA approach ‘a crock’
We now know the WoF we rely on to ensure the New Zealand ‘‘fleet’’ is safe, might be not worth the paper it’s been ticked off on.
Perhaps there’s something to those rent-by-the-minute scooters after all. Pick it up somewhere random, put it down when you’re done; all care while you’re aboard, but no responsibility. And certainly no worrying about what’s ‘‘under the hood’’ or how to maintain it.
Once upon the 1970s, as I remember, it was quite common to have the skills to fix your own car. Heaps of people did it to keep costs down and the sturdy Ford Laser running well past 150,000 clicks. Somehow those skills have fallen out of favour and now we tend to leave it to experts – well, that’s what they’re supposed to be, aren’t they? A safe pair of hands?
A call for Twitter’s best mechanics stories threw up a few hair-raising tales – the brand new car that was dropped from the workshop hoist at its first service and never quite ran the same again, for example, and some classic misogynist stuff about women surely not understanding what an alternator is.
Less easy to dismiss with a frustrated eye-roll, is the latest episode in the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) certification fiasco. I really don’t know what else you’d call it without swearing.
The story’s been bubbling along, with ever more shocking revelations, since February. Radio New Zealand reporter Phil Pennington was the first to discover cracks were showing up in the towing gear of some of the biggest trucks on our roads – 1800 required urgent safety checks. By April a Nelson certifier was fingered for faulty work.
In August the work of another certifier was questioned and 800 trucks taken off the road with ‘‘serious safety concerns’’. Questions began to be asked of the NZTA. By October, the mournful news was that it was now ‘‘unclear how many unsafe vehicles are on the road’’, and forget the small beer individuals, the rot went right to the top.
The NZTA, it was reported, had not been properly checking vehicle certifiers for the past two years. Transport Minister Phil Twyford ordered lawyers to check hundreds more cases.
At the time, NZTA executives said they’d been relying on ‘‘encouragement’’ rather than enforcement to ensure the New Zealand fleet was safe, and promised it would be more ‘‘heavy handed’’ in future.
It’s become clear the transport body has been relying on a light touch regime for years, leading to a culture that’s allowed dangerous practices to flourish. Safety campaigner Clive Matthew Wilson points to the Ministry of Transport’s 2015 Vehicle Licensing Reform project, with its focus on ‘‘removing unnecessary red tape’’, as the trigger.
Three years on, this is no longer an issue just for trucks, truck drivers and trucking companies. Without wanting to panic, we now know that the WoF we rely on to ensure the New Zealand ‘‘fleet’’ (that’s all of us and our cars) is safe, might be not worth the paper it’s been ticked off on.
This is a crisis just now coming to a head. By Thursday this week the number of vehicles under suspicion had almost doubled, to 10,000. The individual examples are the most chilling. We already know that bad WoF checks could have played a part in at least one death after a Dargaville garage passed a car with a badly frayed seatbelt.
That car crashed in January, killing the man strapped into that seatbelt, but the garage was not stopped from issuing WoFs for another seven months. An Auckland garage has just been suspended after being warned five times over nine months for issuing dodgy WoFs and using broken equipment. Examples like these make the assurances given by NZTA chief executive Fergus Gammie in October, ring very hollow indeed.
NZTA board chair Michael Stiassny has refused to sack Gammie, despite having to grit his teeth and hand over control to lawyers from Meredith Connell.
As I said, I don’t want to cause unnecessary worry. The bulk of cars, checked by the bulk of certifiers, will be just fine. I do want to point out that the softly-softly approach the NZTA has taken for the past decade is a total crock. At least one person’s death could be connected, and someone needs to be held accountable for that.