SurteesDiver
Registered
Maybe. NZ has a lot of divers that do not pursue dive training beyond the open water cert (likely because that's all that is needed to get a cray). We also have pretty cold water, pretty marginal viz much of the time, exposed and rough seas, and a media that does not make any effort to differentiate between scuba and freediving. The poor viz makes the normal practice of one up one down freediving impossible and so many of our fatalities are freedivers (reported as divers) rather than scuba. Also re the media, I suspect that we have a lot of quiet news days so a dive fatality is big news where it may not be in a country that has a lot more "news". I suspect also that a much higher percentage of our 5m dive than would be case in Sydney... likely more than six times as many...I think it is a New Zealand thing. The total population of New Zealand is only 5.1 million, less than the population of Sydney. As far as I can see from these forums, there were at least six scuba diving deaths there in the past 8 months or so. In Sydney, there may have been one (someone heard it mentioned on the radio news but nothing in press at all) over this same period.
I think a lot is related to the hunter/gatherer culture that we do not have (it is not legal to use scuba to collect anything here). It also seems that many may not be trained and even if they are, they take extreme risks to collect as many creatures as possible. Maybe this also applies to other diving.