O'Connor Damien: Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 27 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11378. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman):It is with a sad heart that I stand to speak on the Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill but it is also with some relief. Bill Brazil who will be up there somewhere looking down spoke to me in 1994 and said profound words—post the deregulation of mining regulations and health and safety regulations in 1992—that we were destined to repeat the tragedies of the past because we had stepped back from prescriptive mine regulations developed over 100 years of tragedies internationally picking up thewisdom from each and every one of those tragedies into a set of regulations that took the best of international knowledge in an attempt to protect workers who were always and who are always working in a unique and usually quite risky environment. I say to Bill that we have finally made the progress that you spoke of. Tim Hix was another miners union delegate whom I worked with—not in a mine but prior to that—whose death was commemorated 10 years ago last weekend. He was someone who knew of the dangers and who was passionate about driving change but unfortunately whose life was taken from him before he could make real progress.This is a good bill. It is not perfect and I am sure the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee will deal with it appropriately. There are lessons for each and every one of us in the passage of this legislation. For politicians it is a lesson for us on all sides of the House that when we receive advice from officials we have a responsibility to ask the hard questions. It is not good enough to just accept that advice and move on. If we think there may be something wrong or some deficiency in that advice then we should pursue it. I say to the Ministers over on the other side of the House now that they should heed my words not because I am full of all wisdom but because of personal experience and because of watching this sad process since 1992 where Minister after Minister has refused to accept the wisdom of people literally at the coalface but has accepted the advice of people sitting on their arses in Wellington. Yes and I say it with a little bit of anger because that is exactly what they were doing: making judgments on what was right and what was not right for the safety of people working underground. It is time we brought check inspectors back in people at the coalface who know what is dangerous and what is not not people sitting on their butts in Wellington. That is what the deregulation brought to the coalmining industry.It is a lesson for officials. Officials work under pressure and they do not always have the resources so sometimes they make up advice on the best of hints or their preconceived notions. It is not good enough. If officials know that they do not have the proper resources to make and provide the proper advice then they too have to speak up because that is exactly what was happening here. Officials sought advice from the big coalminer Solid Energy over a number of years. The big coalminer wanted to get on change the culture in the mining industry get rid of all the old unionists all the old miners who had the knowledge and get a new breed of young keen energetic miners who were prepared to work for bonuses who were prepared to forgo some of the lessons of the past in order to get the coal out of the ground. The lessons for the officials are to ask more than just the mining companies for advice and to seek advice from everywhere you can.For company directors there is a lesson here. You may flit around from one company to another pollinating the advice from one sector to another. Being an independent corporate director is a great honour in this country. Well with it comes responsibility. The people who went to that company Pike River Coal looking to get a good return for the investors had a responsibility to make sure that the investment was sound not just for return to investors but for each and every person involved in that project. They did not. My colleague Andrew Little has taken initiative to try to address that. The lesson for company directors is to ask more than just the chief executive officer; ask the people at the coalface ask the people in the company what is going on and take responsibility for your investment and your job.There is a lesson for the miners. Their enthusiasm to work with one another in risky environments to get on and do the job to grow the project and to deliver incomes for their families incomes for their mates and income for the community is something we must respect but it should not be at the expense of safety. Safety should never be compromised. Some of those miners knew that things were not right. They wereconcerned about jobs for their mates. They were concerned about incomes for their own families. So sometimes as is human nature they overlooked the obvious. With best intents they ignored some of the lessons of the past and some of the wisdom that was surrounding them. I am sure there will be many miners—not just the ones at Pike River but in fact those at Spring Creek Mine where the mine was shut down effectively for 6 months after the Pike River disaster because it too was unsafe. We have to take the lessons from the past and not forget them.For the community for the people on the West Coast sometimes we place too great a weight on the individuals who go and do the jobs to earn the income to provide the secondary businesses and a nice healthy vibrant community. We place upon their shoulders a huge responsibility and the miners feel that. So perhaps we in the community expected too much of them knowing full well in the case of Pike River that it was a high-risk environment. Relying on an unregulated health and safety system was not good enough because human nature and commercial drivers will fail us time and time again. We know that. I do not think anyone in this House wants to bring in legislation or regulation unnecessarily. We do it for good reason most of the time. We do it to protect ourselves from others to protect ourselves from ourselves and to try to have a community and a working environment that are safe and that can allow people who go to work to go home at night and look after their families.The legislation that was changed in 1992 by a National Government that was determined to deregulate anything it could get its hands on was a failure. It was irresponsible. In fact we have seen over many years deregulation being called the panacea to all economic woes—the way forward. Well this was a sad and tragic experiment. I acknowledge the work and the commitment by this National Government to put back into place some prescriptive legislation for underground coalmining. It is necessary. Bill Brazil told me that in 1994. He was right. I take some responsibility. Should I have shouted and screamed from the rooftops? Should I have marched in the streets to get the legislation changed? Perhaps I should have but it is incumbent upon this House here each and every one of us to not buy into this ideology that says that less regulation a hands-off Government and hands-off regulation are going to protect each and every one of us. There are some people who work in risky environments and there are some people who are less able than others who need protection. It is the responsibility of this House and of any Government to put in place those necessary protections.Today we are introducing into the House the Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill. Can I acknowledge Bernie Monk Nick Davidson the families and the people who were determined to push ahead to have a proper inquiry in order to understand what went on here and then to ensure that change occurred. This is the start of that change and we commit to follow it through for better mining safety.