O'Connor Damien: Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 12 November 2013. Volume:694;Page:14592. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): I apologise to my colleague Sue Moroney who was in full flight. I would like to carry on. The profound wisdom of having a worker involved in the active management of health and safety is so clear when we read through the objectives of WorkSafe New Zealand in the Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill. It is being set up to advise on the operation of the workplace make recommendations for changes to improve systems develop codes of practice and provide training. All of those things rely on—pardon the pun—the coalface wisdom of people going back into health and safety systems. And for the Government to ignore that is perhaps a continuation of the stupidity and the blind arrogance that led to the 1992 legislation. I use those blunt words because I can still recall a meeting with Bill Brazil a previous mine manager who said to me in 1994: “You will rue the day”—“you” being the Government; I was a member in Opposition at the time—“that you changed that legislation to discard the wisdom of 100 years of legislation.”My colleagues have spoken eloquently on that and I will go on to what I see as a rather ironic part of Part 1 and that is in Subpart 3“Transition to WorkSafe New Zealand and consequential amendments”. That is a part that protects the terms and conditions of employment of those people who transfer from what was the Department of Labour—I guess it is the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—through into WorkSafe New Zealand. I applaud the provisions in here. Many many—in fact thousands of—workers in New Zealand would love to have had these provisions when they were kicked from a job into another one or when the contractor or the name of the contract changed and they saw their terms and conditions disappearing in front of them. Well the Government in its wisdom—part wisdom short wisdom temporary wisdom; I do not know—has seen fit to ensure that the people who transfer into WorkSafe New Zealand will retain the terms and conditions of their previous employment. I applaud that. Then I have gone through to work out whom that might apply to and I guess it could be a number of people. WorkSafe New Zealand should be a big organisation.If I go back to the reason for this legislation in the first place it is the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy. There are a number of recommendations here and what we are doing tonight is progressing legislation that is part and parcel of these recommendations. As we know it was a thorough inquiry and it exposed a lot of flaws at almost every level of governance and management in the company oversight by the Government itself and a number of other areas. What it says here of course in the summary of the report is that things had got pretty bad in the mining inspectorate. It says that in fact at the time of the tragedy the Department of Labour had only two mining inspectors. It was under huge pressure. And then it goes on to say that in May 2012 the Minister of Labour announced extra funding of $37 million for health and safety administration including an increase in the number of health and safety inspectors.If we can go back to the mining industry what this Government has done in setting up the High Hazards Unit which sounds all well and good is that it now has three mining inspectors in place—three. That is up by 50 percent admittedly—from two at the time of the Pike River disaster to three now. Those individuals are under pressure now. It is maybe not quite the same as it was but none the less they are under pressure. The Government made the announcement and everyone thought that we would have a huge boost in the focus on health and safety in the mining industry but it has not occurred. It has not occurred and the families of those people who lost their lives at Pike River do not feel too good about that.One of the things that they had hoped to see was a substantive increase in the focus on mine safety. Admittedly we have had a couple of mines close unfortunately under the National Government—one of them because of the Government’s own mismanagement of Solid Energy. We have seen mines close. That is unfortunate. Maybe the workload is not quite as good as it was.