O'Connor Damien: Health and Safety Reform Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Health and Safety Reform Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16710. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman):Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak on this bill the Health and Safety Reform Bill. To be fair I have not had the opportunity to study in detail what is a very substantive piece of legislation. I acknowledge the Minister of Labour because it is a very substantive area of Government responsibility that we are talking about here. I would like to acknowledge the families of the Pike River miners who have of course battled ever since that terrible tragedy to get some good to come from that terrible terrible set of circumstances and then got an outcome that to anyone who reads through the royal commission report was almost unbelievable. There will be many who say: “We told you so.” This piece of legislation has been needed since 1992 when the previous National Government brought in a philosophical laissez-faire idiotic piece of legislation that believed that market forces individual responsibility and commercial pressures would protect workers in the workplace. They have not and they do not and we do need to change that legislation.There are some very good provisions in this bill and I am sure that the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee will properly scrutinise each and every word of it as it should. It will be done with new enlightenment I guess particularly by members of the National Party and ACT who have for a long time thought that the market will deliver as I said protection for everyone nirvana for all and huge wealth for those who have the ability to get it.Too many people in New Zealand are killed every year when they go to work. From the situation of farmers who are their own boss out doing their own thing and making their own decisions to someone who is in a factory working at a machine where the protection has not been properly built in and whose job is somewhat monotonous but they are simply working in an unsafe situation the whole time—most of it is OK but one incident occurs or something happens and they might lose an arm or worse still lose their life. We have these situations occurring all too often across the country where the farmer makes the wrong decision and goes into a place that is too steep for the four-wheeler or you have got as I say other judgments on risk that simply end up being fatal and disastrous.There will always be judgments made by individuals in any activity so I do not think we can kid ourselves that everything can be regulated to be safe. But placing the right pressure on individuals to make the right decision is what we should be encouraging. Firstly ensuring that at a workplace they are allowed the time to stop and think and make the right decision is really important. The one thing occurring across all of industry today in New Zealand is that people are under more pressure. In spite of what the Government says about our rock star economy and about having this wonderful economic growth the reality is that many many people across our economy are under more pressure. The dairy farmers and the agricultural sector might be doing OK but dare I say it their poor workers are not under much less pressure even though the payout has gone up. So with pressure comes stress and sometimes with stress comes inappropriate decision making. That is what we are trying to prevent here.It does not matter how good WorkSafe New Zealand is and it does not matter what regulations we put in place. If we do not have a culture and an environment that encourage people to stop and think and make the right decision to be—Dr David Clark: The Cabinet Manual.Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Not the Cabinet Manual. I do not think they stop and think about that too much—perhaps they should. Can I say that risk management has not been part of the Cabinet Manual or of mainstream thinking in the workplace. If we have regulations that remove the individual’s responsibility and the opportunity that is not good either. So I do not think we in any way believe or think that we can regulate our way to safety but we must put in place provisions and we hope that this bill when passed—with no doubt the necessary amendments—will enable people to work in places where their input and their judgment are valued and they have the opportunity to stop and think and make the right decisions around health and safety.There are a number of things in the bill that my colleagues referred to and I say on behalf of Andrew Little who is not here that the absence of corporate manslaughter provisions from this legislation is probably a major omission. There are bigger fines on corporates and there are other responsibilities that—I am just trying to get the right words here. Directors and officers must exercise “due diligence” which is a bit better than “oversight” but no guarantee. Ultimately until people in every part of a business at every level of a business—be that vertical or lateral in terms of its operation—think about work safety and think about protecting the people who work in and around them then we will not have the culture that we are trying to create through this bill. I acknowledge that the Minister is trying to do the right thing but he is in a straitjacket of ideological right-wing thinking that the market forces will ultimately protect workers.I hope the select committee as I say extends and challenges some of the assumptions made in the bill. There is a definition of “worker” that might be better but may not be and there is an obligation on workers. I know that when the Minister first announced this legislation he clearly indicated that there would be responsibility on workers to uphold safe practices and that is fine to a point but the workers do not have the same level of negotiating power when it comes to raising a point in the workplace. There is a culture of fear in too many workplaces around this country where workers are afraid to raise issues.The Pike River tragedy identifies what human nature can do if allowed to. That is where bonuses or incentives are placed in the workplace people will cut corners ignore warnings do things that should never occur and create unsafe situations. We are not saying that we should remove bonuses but wherever they will exist there must be proper safeguards to ensure that those bonuses are not earned through the shortcuts that can and do occur every day up and down this country resulting in a workplace safety record that is absolutely outrageous.I go to another point here about definitions of notifiable injury or illnesses—“notifiable” being the point here. In the Government’s previous philosophical determination to privatise ACC—and I do not believe for a moment it has shifted off that. If it gets voted back in God help us at the next election; it will move down that path of privatisation. The notifiable part of this is really important because people will not notify if they think that their private insurance premiums are going to go up. There are all sorts of abhorrent behaviours that occur under a private system and that too will drive bad behaviour in the workplace.So although the bill is moving forward in some areas there are some dangers in here. I hope that the select committee has the time and the freedom to think laterally and that it does take input from all parties in order to indeed deliver the kind of health and safety legislation that this country desperately needs and that was thrown out the door in 1992. Now the National Government in guilt—and so it should be—is reintroducing finally legislation that goes in large part down the track to a better safer working environment for New Zealanders.