Sixty-five Southern Lakes operators, including 45 from the Queenstown area, attended closed-session workshops held by the TIA and Outdoors New Zealand (ONZ), in Wanaka and Queenstown, on Wednesday, and Te Anau, on Thursday.
TIA advocacy manager Geoff Ensor, speaking after the workshop in Invercargill yesterday, said the workshops updated operators on the recommendations, which flowed out of the Department of Labour's "review of risk management and safety in the adventure and outdoor commercial sectors in New Zealand 2009-10", and answered questions.
"The Department of Labour is responsible for putting in a registration scheme for those in adventure and outdoor sectors not currently audited by Maritime New Zealand, or the Civil Aviation Authority," Mr Ensor said.
"If you're not audited by Maritime or Civil Aviation and you are likely to be in a higher risk outdoor adventure environment, then it's very likely you will need to be registered, which is essentially auditing, hand-in-hand."
The Department of Labour will also accredit the existing and incoming auditing bodies. A new regulation to be attached to the Health and Safety in Employment Act would make it as clear as possible to operators whether they did, or did not, need to register.
The proposed regulation would go out for public consultation in late July, or early August, Mr Ensor said.
The TIA and ONZ were contracted to deliver five recommendations over three-years to pull together a cohesive industry-led entity. The entity was likely to be a compilation of existing organisations to work closer together to strengthen sector safety management.
A generic guidance tool would advise adventure and outdoor operators on how to incorporate the best safety practices from within the industry. Adventure aviation activities, commercial jet-boating and rafting were already covered by Maritime and Civil Aviation.
Activity-specific guidance was being "reviewed and strengthened" with industry groups, such as horse trekking operators, Mr Ensor said.
Work was necessary to assess the degree of applicability for qualifications for staff in the adventure and outdoor sector.
The degree of demand for and use of a non-compulsory national incident database was being assessed.
"There will be working groups that help drive these recommendations and those have yet to be firmed up in the near future," Mr Ensor said.
"All the operators really appreciated being kept up to date and they all gave really valuable feedback and absolutely got hold of the idea of this generic guidance tool and want to see it come to pass.
"As organisations trying to deliver this tool, we greatly appreciated the efforts they made on behalf of the sector."
TIA and ONZ workshops will continue to be held around the country until late June, including Dunedin on June 22.
The notification period will start on October 1, when regulations under the Health and Safety in Employment Act will make it an offence to provide activities involving significant hazards and some level of instruction or leadership without a current safety audit certificate.
About 1500 operators nationwide will need to be registered and audited.
Over the next three years, operators who need to be registered, will be contacted in order of priority and be scheduled to be audited, Mr Ensor said.
"The public and private sector, Government and operators and organisations, are saying we support the outcomes of the review, we now want to deliver those in a really effective way," he said.
