Roche Denise: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 19 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5966. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I would like to take this call for the Greens in the Committee of the whole House on this the Health and Safety Reform Bill. In this House the biggest health and safety risk we probably face is a paper cut or maybe a burn on our ears from our cellphones—Hon Member: Headaches.DENISE ROCHE: Yes headaches—headaches from listening to bad speeches. We are in a privileged position where we are not facing danger every day like the people who work in our forests who work on our farms who work in our mines and who work in the manufacturing sector and the construction sector. It behoves us to remember that we live in a very privileged position and we have the power to make the world safer the workplace safer for so many workers—in fact all the workers of Aotearoa New Zealand. I am going to make a few general points and then I am going to get into a bit more detail and like others have said we will be debating this bill in detail.One of the points that I wanted to make and I was reminded of this before I came down to the Chamber to speak is that nearly every single New Zealander knows someone if they are not that someone who has had an injury at work or has been affected by somebody who has died at work. When you have nearly 300 people dying at work over the last 6 years and we are a small country it is inevitable that we need to face their loved ones and be able to say to them that we have done our best to make the world a safer place for them and their loved ones and that is your right that is your legacy.In my own family I remember when my dad came home when I was 10 years old. He was a shunter on the railways and he came home 10 hours late with half his hand missing. That was one of those situations where his workplace was a dangerous workplace. He knew the dangers and he took those risks every day but he was never able to play the banjo again he was off work for a year and we struggled during that time.Up in my office there is another worker an office worker who gives support to us and she told me that she is related to one of the 29 in the Pike River mine whose bodies still lie in the mines there. I wanted to say to her that I was going to do my best to make sure that after today we would have a law that would mean that those sorts of tragedies those sorts of accidents would not happen again. But as we come to debate the details of the bill I am not convinced that that is what we are going to end up with.Where the Health and Safety Reform Bill came from was the result of the Royal Commissionon the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy and the recommendations that it made. It also came from the Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety which made recommendations and they were good recommendations. I want to just refer initially to the comment from the chair of the independent taskforce Rob Jager who put it to Parliament really that “A key challenge in addressing workplace health and safety is that it requires balancing the interests and needs of a number of participants particularly employers and workers. We are starting with a 20-year-old system that did not find that balance yet the task has become more rather than less complex over time. … In our view we have found a good balance requiring compromise by all parties that will both improve outcomes substantially and respect all parties’ needs. Make substantial changes to the balance and we will lose the vital support of some participants and significantly weaken the potential benefits.”We supported the bill that came to the House too because we could see that although it was flawed in many parts it did have its basis in the recommended Australian Model Work Health and Safety Act—the model Act. But this Government has eviscerated it and even today we come back to this Parliament to debate the details of the bill to find that some of those details have changed. If we are looking at process—just looking at process not the detail at the moment; just looking at process—this is appalling. How on earth are we supposed to make good decisions when we have not had the discussion and the debate during the select committee nor have allowed others to actually submit on what the Government is basically cobbling together at the last minute? I acknowledge your efforts Minister Woodhouse to cobble the bill together at the last minute.Where this bill falls down in Part 1—and throughout the bill—is around participation. This is what the chair of the independent task force referred to when he said that there needs to be a balance. In our view and in the view of this side that balance has been lost because the ability for workers to participate in their own health and safety is frequently stifled throughout the bill. There are a few examples. One is around the rights of workers in small to medium enterprises with 20 or fewer workers who are deemed to be in a non - high-risk workplace. These workers do not get the same rights as other workers and I think as a previous speaker commented before that affects around about 300000 workers in New Zealand. I commend the Minister for circulating an outline of what might be deemed to be high risk but that is not in the bill at this stage and is yet to be consulted on. So we have to take it on trust. Many workers when they go to work would rather rely on their workmates for health and safety than the Government because many do not trust the Government.This bill is about who is in and who is out. There are some who are in because they are in a workplace that has over 20 workers or they are out. And actually the change that the Minister wants to make there is that the person conducting a business or undertaking just has to inform that workforce that they are out. There is no consultation there is no decision making by the workers and there is no balance to allow the workers to be able to say: “We actually want a health and safety rep and a health and safety committee in our workplace.”The others who are left out of the legislation are people who work in homes for home occupiers. We are entering a situation where more and more frail people and people with disabilities are being cared for in their own homes. In the past the Government has talked about offering voucher systems so that those people become employers of the home-care workers they wish to have care for them which you know is laudable actually. It empowers those clients. However those workers would be exempted from the health and safety legislation. They are not exempted from other employment laws. They are not exempted from the Minimum Wage Act but they would be exempted from health and safety legislation purely because the work occurs in the homeowner’s own home. I cannot see a justification for that. We are already in a situation where home-care workers are exploited through their wages and they are going into a situation where they now get exploited around health and safety.I guess the other people who are left out of this situation are the workers who want to have a health and safety committee who want to elect a health and safety committee—because they do not have the right to elect a health and safety committee. It is actually the employer’s right to decide whether there will be a health and safety committee and who will be on this health and safety committee. If workers are fortunate enough to have a health and safety rep that person does not necessarily have to be on the health and safety committee either. And of course the health and safety committee does not actually get to access training as a right either. There is also the question of whom health and safety reps—presuming actually that workers will get one—get to represent. I understand that there is a Supplementary Order Paper in front of the Committee suggesting that workers should actually bless them be able to—