A dog attack in Timaru sent one person to hospital this week. It made the news because it's unusual, frightening, visible. Meanwhile, 312 New Zealanders died from workplace injuries in 2024. You didn't see those headlines because we've stopped counting them the way we used to.

Here's the tension: On the same day New Zealand claimed to care about workplace safety, the data that could tell us if work is getting safer or deadlier effectively vanished. For two decades, Stats NZ and ACC tracked fatal and serious injuries together, giving us a clear picture of workplace harm. In 2021, the system recorded 61,194 serious injuries alongside fatal ones. Then in 2022, something changed. The serious injury count collapsed to just 357. Not because work suddenly became safer, but because someone changed what gets counted.

The 2024 figure of 312 fatal injuries sits in a statistical void. Is it higher than 2021? Lower? We have no idea, because the 2021 data included a completely different definition of "serious." It's like switching from kilometres to miles mid-journey and pretending you can still track your speed.

This matters because fatal injuries are the tip of the iceberg. For every worker who dies on the job, hundreds more are seriously hurt: backs wrecked, limbs crushed, lungs damaged. Those injuries reshape families, drain ACC, cost the economy billions. But we've lost the thread. The data that tracked 61,194 serious injuries in 2021 now tracks just 312 fatalities in 2024, with no bridge between them.

Look at the timeline. From 2000 to 2021, the numbers moved predictably: 59,148 in 2020, 61,194 in 2021. Then the floor dropped out. 2022: 357. 2023: 315. 2024: 312. Those aren't comparable figures. They're different datasets wearing the same name.

Meanwhile, we obsess over individual incidents. One dog attack, one food recall, one tragic case. Each deserves attention. But 312 fatal workplace injuries in a single year should be a national emergency, not a footnote in a statistical report nobody reads. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

The real scandal isn't the number. It's that we broke our ability to understand it. We can't tell if construction sites are getting safer, if forestry deaths are climbing, if manufacturing injuries are falling. The data exists somewhere, but the public view went dark in 2022.

Every one of those 312 deaths represents a family that got a knock on the door, a workplace that went silent, a chair that stayed empty. They deserve better than a statistical black hole. They deserve a country that can at least count them properly.