I kind of get where Yonny is coming from though Jon - and this is his experience with dealing with Totika.
Yes a lot of contractors will not be out of pocket (and in fact a lot will save money) with Totika, as they are likely to already be pre-qualified at the appropriate level with one of the participating schemes.
However in Yonny's case it seems like they would also have to switch pre-qual providers (and I am assuming they are a large company) so $1200-$1500, plus if they engage subcontractors themselves it is likely they would have been instructed to sign up as a "Suppliers with own Supply Chain" at a cost of $1000 for the "buyer" functionality of Totika - so all up they are looking at a cost of over $2000 (although only a portion would go to Totika).
As you say though, this is only the starting iteration of the process for improvement in this space, although to be honest there are much bigger issues with NZ's accepted procurement practices - just take NZTA Board Chairman's public statement of the extreme disappointment in the delays to opening Transmission Gulley despite NZTA making their expectations clear and pushing very hard for it to open, their is not even the slightest bit of consideration of the contractor's point of view from the NZTA Board - how can we get anywhere to improve all project outcomes if we still have leading organisations run by boards or management teams without a mindset of collaboration with all involved in projects to best manage the risks (not just safety) between those involved rather than lumping the risk onto the contractor and demanding that things don't change from the idealised concept that was first scribbled down 5+ years ago? To be honest a lot of this probably also goes back to how public money is allocated, spent and justified...in other words the Government can't be seen wasting money, so we just make out that it is just the contractor to blame (and is there anything we learn anything from the current hot topic that "you can either blame or learn, but you can't do both").
And that is my main point... contractor prequalification was never really the problem, how many convictions have there been of a Principle Contractor failing to Pre-Qualify their subcontractors? I am going to bet on 0 - there are plenty of cases where their failure was to consult, or co-ordinate, or co-operate with their subcontractors to manage risks, but there will be none in which a judge has effectively said "you are being convicted because you did not ask for your subcontractors safety information before you asked them to give you a quote" and definitely none where the defense of "but I prequalified them so I'm not responsible" actually worked.
"Blanket" Contractor Prequalification (as is the current norm either in house or by 3rd party) has effectively been a parasitic solution that never really had a problem to solve, except for providing a false sense of security to senior management and Boards that they were actually managing the "sub-contractor" safety risk. In other words - it was always implied as solving your "sub-contractor management" risks so you had your ass covered when a sub-contractor seriously hurt or killed someone. Evidence of this is how often in the tendering process it is accepted that a supplier's quote will be accepted on the prevision that they will achieve the requirements of any "safety pre-qualification" clause before the contract is signed (or even better, before work is to start on site). This is the point of the OP that started this discussion in the first place.
I do question though if an iterative response is best in this case - or do we simply accept that the current state of pre-qual is at least something, while working to provide better industry specific procurement guidelines and guidance (including safety) -
WorkSafe NZ and
NZ Government H&S Lead do provide some general guidelines, and interestingly neither of these advocate for "blanket" pre-qualification as we have now but rather a project specific pre-qualification process as part of the tendering process which is proportional to the size and complexity of the project (so vague but this is where industry specific guidelines can step in to fill the gap of what "proportional" actually looks like).
But even this doesn't get down into the crux of it... which is that "safety" isn't an independent or static variable in the contract management space. There are a lot of different influences on safety both from within a contractor's own company and from outside of it, and these change throughout the lifecycle of a contract - depending on the circumstances an excellent "pre-qualified" contractor may resort to "less safe" practices when up against it (i.e. there's not enough trench shields available in the region so we're only using them on "high-risk" excavations because none of our clients can accept a delay to their project"). The improvements needed required us to understand this and accept that risks are best managed in collaboration with all project stakeholders not just lumped onto one of them, and that simply things do and will change from what was planned at the start of a project.
I guess my philosophical question to you regarding Totika and the OP is; do you see Totika as a stop-gap (to be disbanded when the actual issues are resolved), or do you see a future iteration of Totika's Pre-qualification as the end goal?