WorkSafe New Zealand is renewing its call for businesses to act on machine safety, as a court case concludes over the preventable death of a Gisborne worker.
47-year-old Maurice Dooling became entangled in an industrial waste shredder while working at M E Jukes and Son Limited in April 2022. The company was found guilty in December 2025 and has now been sentenced by the Gisborne District Court.
The court found M E Jukes and Son should have installed a perimeter guard with an interlocked gate. This type of guard automatically shuts the machine down when the gate is opened. Installing it would have cost under $20,000. “The non-installation of the relatively low-cost engineering step… constituted a serious and elementary breach,” said Judge Warren Cathcart.
WorkSafe says the case represents a watershed for machine safety.
“Maurice Dooling was not found to have done anything wrong, but the court did find that the company failed him. The law places the primary duty of care on the business to manage risk. That means putting systems in place that protect people regardless of what is happening around them,” says WorkSafe’s central regional manager, Nigel Formosa.
“When workers are operating dangerous machinery, businesses cannot rely on training and procedures alone to keep them safe. In this case, the court found that automatically stopping the machine when a worker got too close was a straightforward, affordable fix. There was no good reason not to do it.”
Formosa says the incident should prompt every business operating industrial machinery to take a hard look at their own sites.
“If your machinery can still run while workers can reach dangerous parts, that needs to change.”
If you’re unsure where to start, take a few minutes to walk the floor and look at each machine from a worker’s point of view – then fix what you find as soon as possible:
- Check your guarding. If a worker can reach dangerous parts of a machine while it is running, that needs to change now.
- Get advice if you’re unsure. A qualified machinery safety expert can tell you whether your guarding is up to standard.
- Don’t rely on procedures alone. Rules and training matter, but they are not enough on their own. Physical guards that prevent access, or stop the machine automatically, must come first.
