While one dog attack in Timaru makes headlines today, a much bigger injury story has been unfolding quietly across New Zealand for the past 24 years.

In 2000, 25,691 New Zealanders under 30 were seriously injured. That's the baseline. For the next twenty years, that number climbed. Not dramatically at first. By 2010, it had crept up to 30,453. By 2015: 33,742. The trajectory was clear and consistent: more young people getting hurt, year after year.

Then came the 2020s. In 2020, serious injuries to under-30s hit 39,297. In 2021, they peaked at 40,086. That's the highest number in the entire dataset. More young Kiwis were seriously injured in 2021 than in any year since records began in 2000.

Then the number fell off a cliff.

In 2022, serious injuries to under-30s dropped to 17,055. That's not a typo. The number didn't ease down gradually. It didn't decline by 10 or 15 percent. It halved in a single year (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries).

In 2023, it fell again, to 16,425. In 2024, the latest year available, it dropped further still: 15,957. That's lower than any year in the dataset except 2000 itself. Young New Zealanders are now getting seriously injured at rates not seen since the turn of the millennium.

What happened in 2022? The data doesn't tell us that part. But the timeline tells us this: whatever changed, it changed fast. After twenty years of steady increases, something reversed the trend completely. The injuries didn't plateau. They collapsed.

This isn't a small cohort. We're talking about everyone from newborns to 29-year-olds. That's students, apprentices, young parents, early-career workers. For two decades, their injury rates climbed. Then, abruptly, they didn't.

The numbers from 2022 onwards look like a completely different country. If you plotted this on a graph, you'd assume there was a reporting change or a data error. But the source is consistent: ACC claims processed through Stats NZ. The methodology didn't change. The injuries did.

Here's the question nobody's asking: if New Zealand figured out how to cut serious injuries to young people by 60 percent in two years, what did we do? And can we keep doing it?

Because the 2000 baseline. 25,691 injuries. was never treated as a success. It was just the starting point. Now we're back there, and still nobody's noticed.