In 2020, New Zealand recorded 362,685 serious non-fatal injuries through ACC. It was the lowest number in two decades of data. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

Four years later, that number is 400,836.

That's an increase of 38,151 serious injuries in four years. An extra 10% of Kiwis ending up with injuries severe enough to require ACC support beyond basic treatment. And here's the part that should concern everyone: we're now back to the same injury levels we saw in 2014, erasing a decade of progress.

The contrast is stark. From 2000 to 2020, New Zealand was on a clear downward trajectory. Serious injuries peaked at 433,401 in 2000, then steadily declined. Workplaces got safer. Roads improved. Public health campaigns worked. By 2020, we'd reduced serious injuries by 70,716.

Then COVID hit. And when the country reopened, something changed.

2021 saw injuries climb to 369,654. Not alarming yet. Perhaps people were returning to work after lockdowns, getting back into routines. But 2022 brought a jump to 391,428. Then 393,678 in 2023. Now 400,836 in 2024.

That's three consecutive years of increases, each one larger than the last. The 2024 jump alone represents 7,158 more serious injuries than the previous year.

What counts as a serious injury? These aren't minor workplace incidents or scraped knees. ACC classifies them as injuries requiring ongoing treatment, rehabilitation, or income support. They're the broken bones, the severe burns, the injuries that take people out of work for weeks or months. Each number represents someone whose life was disrupted significantly enough to need government support to recover.

The troubling question isn't just why injuries are rising. It's why they're rising so sharply after decades of improvement. Was 2020 an anomaly, artificially low because of lockdowns? Or have we genuinely reversed course on workplace safety, road safety, and injury prevention?

Consider what 400,836 serious injuries means in practical terms. That's roughly one in every twelve New Zealanders experiencing a serious injury each year. It's more than the entire population of Wellington getting hurt badly enough to need ACC's help.

We know how to make things safer. We proved it between 2000 and 2020. We built better systems, enforced better standards, changed behaviours. The data showed it working.

Now we're watching those gains disappear. And unlike many statistics where the story is complex or unclear, this one is brutally simple: we had fewer people getting seriously hurt. Now we have more. A lot more.