In 2021, 74,934 Māori workers were seriously injured on the job. Three years later, that number sits at 32,916. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

That's not a small shift. That's a 56% reduction in three years. That's 42,000 fewer families getting a phone call from a hospital, fewer workers spending months in recovery, fewer people watching their income vanish while they heal.

Go back to 2000, and the picture was different. That year, 37,272 Māori workers were seriously injured. The number climbed steadily through the 2000s, peaking around 2010 at over 70,000. It stayed high for a decade. Then 2022 hit, and the numbers fell off a cliff.

Between 2021 and 2022, serious injuries among Māori workers dropped from 74,934 to 34,086. That's a 40,848 drop in a single year. It stayed low in 2023 (33,675) and again in 2024 (32,916).

What happened? The data doesn't tell you. But the timing tells you where to look.

2022 was the year New Zealand came out of COVID restrictions. Offices reopened. Construction sites ramped back up. Hospitality roared back to life. If anything, you'd expect injury numbers to climb as more people returned to physical work. Instead, they halved.

Maybe the pandemic changed how workplaces operated. Maybe remote work kept people out of dangerous environments. Maybe health and safety protocols, sharpened by COVID, carried over into other areas. Maybe economic slowdowns meant fewer people working in high-risk industries like construction and agriculture.

Or maybe something else entirely. The point is: this is one of the biggest workplace safety improvements in two decades, and it happened almost overnight. Yet it's barely been discussed.

Compare this to the 2010s. From 2010 to 2019, serious injuries hovered between 68,000 and 75,000 every year. A decade of steady, grinding exposure to workplace harm. Then three years of dramatic improvement.

Here's what matters: whatever caused this drop, we need to understand it. Because if this is sustainable, if this represents a genuine shift in how Māori workers are protected on the job, then it's one of the most significant workplace safety stories of the decade.

And if it's not sustainable, if these numbers creep back up as the economy shifts, then we're about to lose something we didn't even realise we'd gained.

32,916 serious injuries is still 32,916 too many. But it's less than half what it was three years ago. That deserves more than a footnote.