Beaumont Carol: Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill — Second ReadingText is subject to correctionBeaumont Carol: Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 22 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:14097. Text is subject to correction.]CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour): I am joining with the others in speaking on the Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill in its second reading and saying that of course Labour supports this bill but we do so with some reservations. As my colleague Andrew Little has said in the Committee stage we will be looking at a number of Supplementary Order Papers. Obviously the purpose of this bill is absolutely to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy and to a large extent that is what is happening. That is appropriate and important. The main elements are the setting up of the new workplace health and safety agencyWorkSafe New Zealand; amending the Health and Safety in Employment Act to better manage hazards in the mining industry; and creating a new Mines Rescue Act which will update the regime for how mine rescues are carried out.I want to start by acknowledging the extent of the tragedy of 19 November 2010 when 29 workers lost their lives and the ongoing suffering of their families. But also as colleagues from the West Coast have noted we are debating this bill at a time when work is now going on to try to re-enter the mine and to retrieve the bodies of those workers. I am sure that we all hope that that is a successful operation. This tragedy was huge It was one of the worst health and safety tragedies we have had in this country. It is worth noting as we debate this bill that when people go to work they should expect to return home safely and their families should expect that they will return home safely even if they are working in dangerous industries like mining or quarrying. Legislation like this is important. Particularly in the legislation the focus around worker participation in ensuring health and safety is absolutely fundamental. To that extent it is really pleasing to see the emphasis on that because in many ways this tragedy was the result of deregulation of failing to ensure that workers had strong voices around health and safety and of failing to ensure that people who were contractors or subcontractors were involved in health and safety decisions.By way of preliminary comments I want to say that we should acknowledge those who have fought so hard to stand up for workers’ health and safety rights and there are many people. Two I want to acknowledge in this contribution have both been presidents of the Council of Trade Unions: former president Ross Wilson who devoted much of his working life to trying to progress health and safety rights and the current presidentHelen Kelly who I think is doing an amazing job in drawing to this country’s attention the tragedy of what is going on in the forestry industry and how unsafe that industry is.I was not on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee which considered this bill but in reading the report from the select committee I think I was particularly interested in the comments around the contributions that the Pike River families made to the select committee. They expressed to the committee the inexperience and lack of training of the workers operating and monitoring sophisticated machinery the use of unproven technology—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.CAROL BEAUMONT: Before the dinner break I was acknowledging the work of the select committee and talking particularly about how its members spoke in Greymouth with the Pike River families. I was noting that the key concerns expressed to the select committee by the families included the inexperience and lack of training of workers operating and monitoring sophisticated machinery the use of unproven technology a lack of communication and coordination high staff turnover and the adverse incentives and pressures engendered by remuneration arrangements in which bonuses featured predominantly.I have to say that I think that is a very important part of the report because actually health and safety happen in a context. They happen in a context of how work is organised. They happen in a context of whether or not there are workers who feel empowered to have their say. They happen in a context of the arrangements around people’s working time. I thought that that was a very important comment made by the Pike River families and I want to acknowledge them for contributing that to the report. We can only hope that in particular the part of this bill that amends the Health and Safety in Employment Act and provides for greater worker participation will assist with some of the matters referred to by the Pike River families. I also would like to thank all of the people who submitted to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee on this very important piece of legislation. There were 41 submissions made and there was oral evidence from 11 as well as as I have just mentioned from the representatives of the families of the 29 men who died in the Pike River disaster.Essentially we do support the bill as I have said which does implement some of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy but we do have some reservations. This bill is a good start but it also represents a missed opportunity to create a world-class health and safety regime for the most hazardous of work. In particular we were concerned about the provisions in Part 1 of the bill that talk about setting up the board ofWorkSafe New Zealand in that the board does not necessarily capture the empowered tripartite arrangements that we would have liked to see and that is actually what world-class health and safety requires. It does require people who represent the voice of Government and Government agencies of employees and of employers.As it stands at the moment the board is selected by the Minister of Labour and clause 7 talks about selecting people with the “(d) perspectives of workers:” and “(da) perspectives of employers:” but we are concerned that there is a weakness there. With health and safety the change of culture that is required is fundamentally important and in many ways—and I think even members opposite would acknowledge this—this requires a strong voice for the workers in any workplace to first get their buy-in but secondly have their say on how the work is organised on the things that put pressure on them and on the things that would make a difference to their working lives and theirability to focus on health and safety issues. The functions ofWorkSafe New Zealand are set out in clause 10 and are similar to but are not the recommended functions from the royal commission. There does not seem to be any good reason for departing from those recommendations so we also just raise that as one of our concerns.Part 2 of the bill is a very important part around worker representation and what we are concerned about is why there has been a narrowing of this part. Why is it that instead of all of the original industries that were covered it has been narrowed specifically to underground mining? We are concerned about that. It seems inappropriate and misses the point about what happened at Pike River and we certainly do not think that that should have been narrowed in that way. But there are good things in this part of the legislation. Providing for both the workplace health and safety representatives and also the industry health and safety representatives or the check inspectors is important and we are glad about that. One of the specific features in this part is that where there is not an agreed process around health and safety representatives there is a default process that is to be determined. So at the moment that is unknown and we are certainly concerned that that is a useful and meaningful process.There has been a sense that this has not happened quickly enough and that there was a real urgency to fast tracking the implementation of the commission. Finally can I say again that we support this bill with reservations and we will look at Supplementary Order Papers in the Committee stage. Thank you.