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Anyone who works in pretty much any type of business knows just how silly the Health and Safety plan requirements are becoming. Temporary fencing around a building site so trespassers don’t fall in a hole, site safety boxes, fall-proof nets and of course copious amounts of scaffolding all add up to a huge amount and of course, the costs are almost always passed on to the consumer. All in the name of mitigating possible risk, no matter how unlikely or minor.
But one of the most annoying aspects of the H and S for a business owner, because of the amount of time and effort involved, is the Health and Safety Plans.
I have recently done an H and S plan for my business. Fortunately, it is a reasonably basic one and I was able to copy and paste most of it from a friend’s similar business, but it still took hours of my time, and who really knows if it will stand up to scrutiny if the brown mucky stuff hits the rotating air mover. At least I can say I tried!
But one thing I never thought about including in my H&S plan for even a second, was the possibility of needing a plan in case of a mass shooting!
Well not my local A&P Society. They’re all over this major issue. A person I know attended their recent meeting in the lead-up to our annual A&P Show. Now there is a lot to organise with these shows and the H and S regulations make life far more difficult for them than in the past.
In the old days, you just made sure you had a first aid kit available and maybe a bottle of sunscreen. You made sure the horses weren’t parked next to the motocross bikes and if you were particularly diligent, you asked Mrs Bouquet to wash her hands after she judged the best pig competition and before she moved onto judging the cupcakes or biggest cabbage.
You certainly wouldn’t think to create a plan to deal with every possible scenario. How would you even think of the process of dealing with a punch-up during the lawnmower race?
But not now. At this meeting, someone had deemed the possibility of a mass shooting so likely that it was put on the agenda for discussion and for the formulation of an action plan! Who comes up with this tosh?
Apparently, there was much gnashing of teeth, furrowed brows and ‘What-ifs’. ‘What if the shooter is over by the Ferris wheel, then we should tell everyone to move across the field towards the horse arena’. ‘But what if it happens over by the horse arena, then we should tell everyone to move away down to the lake foreshore’. ‘But what if it happens in the middle?’ ‘What if there are two shooters?’
How on earth has it come to this? Because one pale Australian gym bunny with no friends decided to carry out his demented plan on our shores, we now have to factor this into all our Health and Safety Plans?
Are all our schools, hospitals, old folks homes and cafes now running around trying to figure out how to deal with demented Aussies with illegally modified weapons? Does the local construction company have to allocate extra time and resources to figure out how to deal with marauding gangs of Green Party Protesters armed with bamboo spikes intent of sabotaging their environmentally unfriendly builds?
Who knows in this environment. I hope not, and I for one certainly won’t be bothering. We don’t tend to have too many mass murders in little ole NZ, and kowtowing to all this idiocy just helps little poofs like wee Brenton justify their own actions and over-inflated egos.
But good news folks. It seems the good people of my local A&P Society still have that good old country style common sense. After much deliberating, the perfect plan was hatched and signed off.
“Tell everyone to run away, then call the police”.
