Mitchell Clayton: Health and Safety Reform Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Clayton: Health and Safety Reform Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 30 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5532. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First and as a new member I would just like to say that to be on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee which has taken a big part in helping put this new legislation the Health and Safety Reform Bill together has been a great honour and I feel very privileged to stand here today on behalf of New Zealand First. We would also like to acknowledge the people who are here in the House today. We have got Sonya Rockhouse Anna Osborne and Deborah McMillan who themselves know the sadness of losing people in health and safety accidents and we have also got a representative here from the New Zealand Fire Service Mr McGarvey. It is great to have people here who care so much about their family members and fellow workers.I think this new bill of 247-odd pages is well and truly overdue. I would also like to acknowledge the patience of New Zealand workers and their families in waiting for the second reading of this bill to actually make it to the House today. There has been a considerable amount of work. A lot of time has been given with those people coming to put their submissions forward and I also commend Mr Jonathan Young our chair for actually enabling us new members to hear from those submitters again because joining this House only 10 months ago we were very much as new members on the back foot. So thank you for that. I think he has done a good job of chairing us.I have heard a lot of passion in the House today particularly from Mr Iain Lees-Galloway and Sue Moroney and it gives me great pleasure to speak to their passion which they hold so tightly. There was some good robust discussion at the select committee with regard to putting this bill into place. Conversely I would also like to commend the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety himself for his words. Somewhere in the middle between the passion and sincerity and what this Government is trying to put together is a very prescriptive piece of legislation to reduce the number of deaths in our workplaces by 25 percent by 2020. New Zealand First stands here to say that we 100 percent support the intent of this bill but we cannot be supportive of this bill as it sits here in front of us today. I would like to talk today about some of the unintended consequences of this bill which New Zealand First has some concerns about. I would also like to say that if we could get some of these changes which might be small in the number of words they take up and small in the number of pages that are required to eloquently put what we are trying to say they would be of very very large overall benefit for New Zealanders.When we talk about health and safety in our workplaces it really comes down to a three-pronged spear. We have workers or employees; employers; and of course governance that oversees health and safety and the enforcement of it. When you have those three things in good solid legislation you are actually going to have a massive reduction in deaths and severe incidents causing major harm to our workers. If I look at our current occupational health and safety legislation I see that two of those prongs have been missing. There has not been the support from enforcement and labour inspectors—they have not been adequately funded—and of course there was not anything in that legislation that enabled worker participation. Just for the people at home who are watching this today and for those members of the House who have not had the pleasure of reading this bill as some of us have I say that there are some new terms coming in now. Employees are no longer called employees. They are called workers—to keep it nice and simple. An employer has now become a PCBU a person conducting a business or undertaking. That in itself I think is a good thing.I want to talk about some of the good things in this bill so that we are not sitting here and throwing stones at the Government for the sake of throwing stones. The term “person conducting a business or undertaking” enables a multiple number of them so that a variety of people are taking ownership of looking after their fellow workers their employees etc. Having worker participation in that process helps build and change the culture of the “she’ll be right” attitude which Mr Scott spoke about earlier. I have to say that one of the concerns we brought to our select committee and one of the things that we would like to say is that for every action there is going to be an equal and opposite reaction. That is Newton’s third law. That goes through life in just about every single thing we have an effect on. If you change something something else will change. We have got an opportunity here today with this new legislation and we will certainly be putting some Supplementary Order Papers through when we get to the Committee of the whole House to try to take off some of those unintended consequences or as Newton said the inaction of those actions.The first thing I would like to talk about and bring to people’s attention is that 99 percent of New Zealand’s workforce is made up of small to medium sized enterprises. Quite a lot of the engagement that we are going to have and we are going to see brought into play will have a serious impact on some of those businesses particularly around compliance costs. When Sue Moroney mentioned the fact that having a health and safety representative does not put any financial cost whatsoever on to the person conducting a business or undertaking the employer that is not actually entirely correct because of course to have a health and safety representative you first need to have a trained health and safety representative. That comes at a considerable cost to all businesses but it has an impact particularly on those small to medium sized enterprises or SMEs—the acronym that everybody talks about in this House. What I would like to ask—certainly I will be putting through a Supplementary Order Paper to that order—is a question that was asked of the Minister in the House today. It is whether this Government will help to fund those course costs—the courses could be for up to a week; we do not how long they are going to take and we do not know the cost of those courses—to ensure that those small and medium sized businesses are not hamstrung by further costs.The concern of New Zealand First is that we seem to be having an abundant number of extra compliance costs in our day-to-day lives. Just let me bring some of those costs to your attention. The costs are already in place now and we can see further costs coming in. For example in the building industry where you have got a drill or an appliance that has got a cable attached to it every 3 months you have to get an electrician in to certify that cable tag it and pass it on. I know of a small business in Tauranga that employs a very small number of people. That business owner has spent $1200 in the last 6 months just on getting his certifications for his tools. It was not that long ago it was only a few weeks ago when I walked into PlaceMakers and looked at these people who were changing a lightbulb. It reminds me of the start of a bad joke: how many people does it take to change a lightbulb in New Zealand? Well the answer is one and 99 other people to turn the building round it. What we saw in the middle of PlaceMakers was a scissor lift with two people up the top two people down below and four cones out there. They all had hard hats and safety goggles on. It gets back to common sense. You know dead right—we are concerned about the common sense of this. That is taking things to the next level I have to say. We have got more to say on that.We need to be careful that the good legislation that we are trying to bring in to save the lives of people in our workplaces is not brought in to such an extent that it is hamstringing small businesses from moving forward. Small businesses do employ 99 percent of the people who work in New Zealand. That is a serious concern.There is another concern that we have around those costs and it is in clause 28 which states that no worker can be levied or charged for any PPE—which again sorry to use the acronym is personal protective equipment—by the employer or the person conducting a business or undertaking. We absolutely agree with that. It makes sense—it is common sense. If you have got somebody who needs to do a job then they should have that equipment supplied to them—whether it be a hard hat or safety goggles.Where I do not understand it is that we have got the opportunity to fix this problem up by simply putting in a codicil to clause 28 and make it clause 28A to make people your workers personally responsible—it is about personal responsibility—to ensure that they look after and maintain the equipment that has been given to them. There is nowhere in this legislation that enables a person conducting a business or undertaking to charge a worker who has no regard for their health and safety equipment whatsoever. The Minister mentioned earlier on today that it can get picked up in another bill somewhere else in some new legislation. But again that comes at a cost to those small businesses. The cost to get HR personnel in to reprimand a staff member who is not looking after their health and safety equipment or not showing up with it is a further cost that needs to be looked at and remediated and sorted out. We will be putting in some Supplementary Order Papers to that effect when we come to the Committee of the whole House. Thank you.