O'Connor Damien: Health and Safety Reform Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Health and Safety Reform Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 30 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5539. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): It is important to acknowledge why this bill is in this House and it was the loss of 29 men at Pike River that brought about this bill. But we need this legislation for more than that. We need health and safety legislation to protect us from ourselves. Whether you work at the coalface in the cowshed on the chain or you are sitting in the office or in the boardroom we are all Kiwis trying to get on with our lives. That Kiwi culture mentioned by the previous speaker Andrew Bayly is one of innovation. It is a hard-working culture a No. 8 fencing wire can-do attitude that ends up being a must-do attitude. The must-do attitude comes from the top and the bottom and that is the attitude we must protect ourselves from. I have worked on the chainsaws in the bush I have worked with animals in open yards and I have been on motorbikes without much care. I am lucky to be alive. I am lucky to be here. But Parliament cannot depend upon luck to protect workers in this country. We cannot depend upon human nature and Kiwi culture. We cannot depend upon common sense because it is not that common.The previous National Party speaker said that we need leadership and we need commitment. What he did not say is that we need good law. National voted down my legislation and this is its excuse for why it did so: because it had this bill coming. The rhetoric that we have heard in this House today would have been heard in 1992 when the mining industry was deregulated and when the occupational safety and health regime was put in place to share responsibility for health and safety in the workplace. But do you know who paid the price? It was only the workers. Hundreds and hundreds of workers paid a price for a regime where responsibility was shared by everyone. In 1994 Bill Brazil warned me of what would happen in mining. I warned officials and I warned Ministers but we did not make the changes that were needed to protect workers in the workplace and 29 men lost their lives at Pike River and hundreds and hundreds of other Kiwis have lost their lives as well. They have paid the ultimate price.What we need here is good law to protect us from ourselves. But this law is convenient; it is compromised. It may be comfortable and it may be balanced as Mr Williamson says but what we need is good effective law—law that protects workers in the workplace. There was a huge amount of work done by the royal commission and by officials in this country. I acknowledge that work. A bill was brought to this House and Labour supported that bill—it was not perfect—to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. I was not a member of the committee and I trust the wisdom of my colleagues to give me their advice. But now it is a bill that has been compromised by political posturing by some National Party MPs then by political pressure from some of the funders of the National Party to dumb it down and now it is political pragmatism that has delivered a bill that we believe does not provide the protection that is necessary.This bill dishonours the promises made to the families of the Pike River miners. The first promise was that everything that could be done would be done to bring the bodies out. That was a broken promise. The second one was that the huge price paid by those men and those families would result in real change would result in real progress and would result in real protection for New Zealand workers. We do not think that this bill does that. That is why we cannot support it.We say it every year; we say it on Anzac Day: lest we forget. We have had hundreds and hundreds of New Zealanders killed because of compromised legislation and because of convenient legislation. It is time we put in place effective legislation and honoured those—