Delahunty Catherine: Health and Safety Reform Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Health and Safety Reform Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 30 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5536. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa. First I would just like to acknowledge all the whānau and families who are here today and who have followed this bill. I really do apologise as an MP that this opportunity has been wasted that their call for justice has not been heard and that we have failed the commitment made by all those people who travelled down to the Coast to grieve with the families. They had a legitimate expectation that we would do something and do it right.I am not disputing that people in this House care about human life but I am saying that the Government has watered down this legislation and has failed to meet the expectations of the families who have lost people. Instead of a revolution in health and safety dedicated to the families of Pike River to the people in forestry and to all the lives lost what we have is a watering down of the opportunity. So it is a sad day. We are very very sorry some of us that people have to bear witness to this.There is a fundamental problem which is the Government’s belief system that this is about participation rather than power. In a small workplace or a large workplace without good law power will determine who is safe and who is not safe. Can anyone in this House with their hand on their heart tell me that Peter Whittall would have chosen a worker to represent workers who would have been able to shut down the mine? Would he have done that? Read the book and you will find out what he would have done. Can anyone tell me with their hand on their heart that in every hairdressing salon where toxic dyes are used in every dental surgery where toxic substances are present that every employer—and there are some great ones whom we herald—is fit to do the job without proper empowered worker representation not participation?Participation means being there. Representation means standing for something and having a voice. That is what this bill has failed to do. We had high hopes of supporting it. We are really really sorry that at this stage we cannot and that it is failing the needs of people. It is very very disappointing.I did spend time on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and I was shocked—and I thought I was beyond being shocked—when I realised how much this bill was being watered down. I really did believe that we were going to learn the lesson of history and really make a difference. Ever since the Employment Contracts Act we have had a neo-liberal undermining of the power of working people and we have seen the cost of that. The people who pay the price have a right to expect us to do better—not to create some kind of mythical balance but to do better and to set up the structures that the independent task force as well as the royal commission asked us to.There is no shortage of advice and there is no shortage of history on these issues. There are very clear recommendations from both those bodies about what this legislation needed to do but the Government is not doing it because it has lost its guts in the face of lobbying by people who are protecting their vested interests rather than the needs of everybody in the workplace. It is not going to work to improve safety in the workplace.It is very very disappointing. We do need to test it against the current situation. For example a young man Mr Charanpreet Dhaliwal was killed 3 days ago with no training on anything let alone on health and safety in the workplace. He was working for a small business. He had no panic button and he had no power. What was he going to do? If there was nobody in the workplace—he was someone whose life was lost. What are we going to do for the next person in that situation?Actually this Parliament could do better. I believe that a lot of people out there are waiting for us to do better but please do not tell the people that this cannot happen again or say that through these thousands of jargon-filled words in this bill we have actually done the job that the families have asked us to do. We have not done the job. We have sold them out. We have ignored history and we have failed to recognise that whether they are small or large businesses the way in which we get safety is through having a proper inspectorate and through having worker representation. That is the only way we can guarantee that the tragedies such as the ones we have seen in this country in recent years—ever since the delightful Rogernomics revolution which failed this country—and that sort of stuff will stop happening and will stop happening better.So at the risk of repeating myself it is not participation that is the problem and it is not individual responsibility; it is structural power and we have failed to address it. Kia ora tātou katoa.