Dyson Ruth: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDyson Ruth: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 25 August 2015. Volume:708;Page:6149. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): Can I just acknowledge my colleague Jan Logie from the Green Party who has just resumed her seat and say that her words really took me back to the initial announcement of the first explosion at Pike River mine. This whole Parliament was in agony not knowing what had happened and not understanding it but we all felt totally united in grief and support at such a tragedy.That grief and support turned to anger as people particularly Damien O’Connor and Kevin Hague brought to this House the issues that have driven this health and safety reform legislation. We learnt of the disregard for the well-being of the people who worked in that mine. It was a pretty terrible place to work anyway with the greatest respect to coalminers. It is a hard life actually but the employers there—or the people who operated the mine because some of them were contractors of course—seemed to have a total disregard for the well-being of their staff. So the anger in this Parliament grew.It is not often that every party in this House says that this is an issue we can address together. I think it gave us as members of Parliament confidence that when the health and safety reform legislation was introduced it had been driven by an understanding that things were wrong and needed to be made right and that this Parliament was the right place to do it. We had the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy which did a very rigorous investigation that uncovered yet more tragedies that we had to learn of. Those 29 Pike River mineworkers lost their lives not through any disregard by themselves—they lost their lives because they went to work and were killed on the job.We wanted the findings of the royal commission the commitment of the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety—and the Prime Minister’s commitment actually—and the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee’s work to bring back to this House a bit of legislation that meant we could all say that this was the best we could possibly do because that is what those dead workers and their families deserved from this Parliament. The title of this legislation the “Health and Safety Reform Bill” did reflect what this Parliament wanted to see in the legislation. We wanted to see reform of a system that failed for too many people a system that allowed people to turn up to work in the morning and to never come home again. This Parliament said we did not want that system to continue; we wanted reform.Then somehow along the line what happened? What happened Minister to your personal commitment which I heard in this House on more than one occasion? What happened to the Prime Minister’s commitment?Dr Megan Woods: Judith Collins.Hon RUTH DYSON: I think it sounded like Judith Collins led a bit of a rebellion and the lives of not just the Pike River mineworkers but the lives of other people in New Zealand who had died just doing their job seemed to count for less than National’s internal battle about what should be required of whom in this legislation.We started hearing that some groups of workers would not be entitled to the same level of protection—it was too onerous on the employers or the standard was not high enough. The title reflects reform; it does not reflect: “Well we think we’ll have a little tinker.” We wanted something that was the best-possible effort. We did not want a watered-down version of the best-possible effort. We did not want something that protected the National Party voting base or reflected individual misunderstandings that some National MPs have about what the best system is. I think the Minister knows what the best system is and I think the Minister knows that this is not it. This is not the true reform that this Parliament wanted and deserved. I am really disappointed that as a result Parliament is divided on a bill that we should be united on.I want to talk now on the commencement provision which is the other part of the debate that we are having. We have heard already several times—