We’ve all heard it. We’ve all said it. “It’s fine, I’ve done it a hundred times before.” As National Farm Safety Week continues, Farmsafe Australia is turning its attention to one of the most stubborn, and underestimated, risks in agriculture: complacency.
Farmsafe Chair Felicity Richards says complacency often doesn’t look like a risk at all because it wears the mask of routine, experience, and efficiency.
“Complacency isn’t about being careless,” says Richards. “It’s about being too comfortable. Too familiar. Too confident that things will go as they always have. And that’s when the cracks start to show.”
This year’s Safer Farms Report shows the confronting truth: despite new tech, better gear and more awareness, serious injuries and near misses are not going down.
In 2024, 72 people lost their lives on Australian farms which is more than double the year before, and the highest fatality figure in over two decades.
Many of those incidents involved common, everyday jobs; moving vehicles and equipment, operating tractors, handling stock. “These aren’t extreme, one-in-a-million scenarios,” says Richards. “They’re ordinary jobs. The kind we do all the time. And that’s exactly what makes them dangerous.”