Rail Safety Urgency: Stay Off, Stay Safe Campaign Impact

Good afternoon.

First, thank you to our speakers: Peter Jackson, Megan Drayton, Peter Reidy, Her Worship Adrienne Wilcock, and Deklin Frew-Parks.

Welcome to Members of Parliament, community leaders, transport representatives, first responders, and especially those among you who have been affected by deaths and injuries on our rail corridor.

This is a serious occasion. We are talking about the real risk to life that occurs when people enter the rail corridor. This year there have been six deaths on the rail corridor.

Communities like those represented by Mayor Wilcock understand far too well what that means. Losing a member of your community is devastating for all involved.

It is why we must follow the 2025 Rail Safety campaign message: Stay Off, Stay Safe.

As the Minister for Rail, and the word for is deliberate, we have a positive vision for rail.

There are 3,800 kilometres of track across New Zealand, and in hundreds of communities.

We want to see more people catching trains. We want to see more of our goods moved by rail. But we have to respect the network and the rolling stock.

Locomotives weigh around 100 tonnes, while loaded freight trains weigh thousands of tonnes. These are heavy machines, often travelling at speed. They cannot stop on a dime.

So people need to stay out of the way. Stay Off, Stay Safe is a simple message.

Changing attitudes is not easy. We commend TrackSAFE for their work over the past 18 years to raise rail safety awareness. There has been a steady decline in the number of deaths in the rail corridor in recent years.

There are also practical steps being taken to improve safety. New fencing being installed, clear signs, and flashing lights and barrier arms. But it is not possible to fence all lines across the country. The most effective safety measure is an informed and alert public.

We commend KiwiRail’s teams for their visits to schools, as educating young people who live and study near rail lines is so important. It saves lives.

We commend Students Against Dangerous Driving, SADD, for working with TrackSAFE to develop new resources for secondary schools.

We commend everybody who understand the message: Stay Off, Stay Safe.

Now, many in this room will be health and safety professionals. You may have watched footage on Friday as we asked Patrick Brockie, Chief Executive of City Rail Link Limited, to explain why safety clothing was required at the City Rail Link. We were told: it’s about visibility, in case of evacuation, and for safety reasons.

After some time, it was later confirmed that the hard hats and safety glasses were not required. Presumably because everything above us was fixed in place and we were nowhere near flying debris.

While we were at a construction site, we were sectioned off from the real work, walking on finished stone tiles and concrete, under the constant supervision of managers, and stepping on a fully compliant train.

Safety is critically important, and we must never trivialise it. Dressing up as workers when the risk is so patently low risks turning safety into a joke. There should be no health and safety leader who wants their important work to be a joke.

And that brings us back to the serious nature of this event.

We have workers across all 3,800 kilometres of track. These people lift heavy lengths of steel, loads of sleepers, manage huge equipment. These people are protected by safety officers, teammates, leaders and train controllers.

The crews on our trains are often the first to respond when commuters have health incidents. The locomotive engineers experience real trauma in near misses and fatalities.

As New Zealand’s towns and cities grow along and across train tracks, it becomes more important that we look for trains driving on level crossings.

It becomes more important that KiwiRail, NZTA and councils plan how they provide places for people to cross railway tracks safely.

We must stay off the network unless we are in a train or legally passing through a level crossing.

So, Stay Off, Stay Safe – Tracks are for Trains.

Thank you very much.