Part Six of a CORANZ series on risk, competence, and access
By Andi Cockroft, Chair, CORANZ
New Zealand’s no-fault accident compensation scheme was created with humane intent. It removed the need to prove blame, replaced litigation with care, and ensured people were supported when things went wrong. Few would argue with that purpose. This article is not about intention. It is about effects - subtle, cumulative, and rarely examined.
What happens to our understanding of risk when fault is removed from the equation?
Before no-fault, risk carried a sharper edge. Consequences were personal, visible, and often contested. Judgement mattered because outcomes could follow. When that system disappeared, responsibility did not vanish - it shifted. The question is where it settled.
For individuals, no-fault compensation changed expectations. Injury no longer triggered blame or legal pursuit. That reduced fear and improved access to care - a clear gain. But did it also soften the relationship between action and consequence? If outcomes are cushioned, does judgement change? Or does it simply move elsewhere?
For organisations, the change was more pronounced. When individuals could no longer be sued, attention turned to those who could still be held accountable: land managers, councils, schools, event organisers. Risk did not disappear; it became institutional. Prevention became less about behaviour and more about process.
Is it any surprise that paperwork flourished?
In a no-fault environment, safety increasingly means being able to demonstrate that risk was considered, mitigated, and documented. Success is measured not by capable users, but by defensible decisions. The safest option becomes the one that is hardest to criticise after the fact.
What does that do to access?
It encourages a particular response to uncertainty. When conditions vary, when users differ, when environments resist control, the easiest way to avoid exposure is to narrow the activity. Close the route. Remove the facility. Erect a sign. The risk is no longer yours if the opportunity no longer exists.
This logic is not malicious. It is rational within the system.
No-fault compensation also blurs the line between accident and inevitability. If harm is compensated regardless of cause, does prevention focus on reducing injury - or on reducing opportunity? Is the goal safer participation, or fewer incidents to manage?
The difference matters.
When prevention is framed around behaviour, the response is education, skill-building, and engagement. When prevention is framed around exposure, the response is restriction. One builds competence. The other reduces access.
Which path has been easier to follow?
There is another effect worth considering. No-fault systems can unintentionally reinforce the idea that risk should be managed for people rather than by them. If injury is handled by the system, responsibility feels diffuse. Warnings replace instruction. Rules replace judgement. The individual becomes a risk to be managed, not a participant to be equipped.
Does this help explain the proliferation of “proceed at your own risk” signs? Or the expectation that hazards will be removed rather than navigated? Or the frustration when environments behave unpredictably?
None of this suggests people are careless. Most are not. But systems shape behaviour, and behaviour shapes expectations. When consequences are externalised, even partially, the incentives change. People may not take greater risks - but organisations certainly take fewer.
And when organisations retreat, access contracts.
It is also worth asking how no-fault intersects with the loss of early skill-building. If judgement is no longer formed in childhood, and consequences are managed institutionally in adulthood, where does risk literacy come from? How do people learn to weigh conditions, limits, and trade-offs?
Is it realistic to expect mature judgement to appear on demand?
From an outdoor perspective, the result is a culture that prefers certainty over capability. Environments are simplified. Choices are removed. Responsibility is redistributed upward. And when something goes wrong, the response is to redesign the system rather than deepen understanding.
This is not an argument against no-fault compensation. It is an argument for recognising what it has changed. Systems are not neutral. They shape how responsibility is perceived and how risk is addressed. Over time, those effects become embedded, normalised, and hard to see.
The outdoors exposes this more clearly than most settings because it resists standardisation. Rivers rise and fall. Weather shifts. Tracks degrade. Conditions vary. In such environments, competence matters more than compliance. Yet our systems increasingly reward the opposite.
Can a no-fault society still value personal judgement?
Can it promote competence without reverting to blame?
Can access be preserved without reverting to litigation?
These are not legal questions so much as cultural ones.
This series has traced how skills were removed, how risk was managed instead of taught, how judgement stopped being formed early, how responsibility shifted upward, and how access became physically constrained. No-fault compensation sits within that landscape - not as a cause, but as a multiplier.
It changed the incentives. It altered where responsibility lands. And it made risk something to be absorbed by systems rather than negotiated by people.
The unresolved question is whether balance can be restored. Can we keep the benefits of no-fault while rebuilding a culture that values judgement, competence, and shared responsibility? Or will access continue to narrow as the safest option remains the most restrictive one?
In the next article, we will look forward rather than back - at whether competence can be rebuilt, and what a more balanced approach to risk might look like without abandoning care, compassion, or access.
Because risk, like water, does not disappear when contained. It finds new paths.
The shape it takes depends on the choices we make.