Roche Denise: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 25 August 2015. Volume:708;Page:6092. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a call for the Greens on Part 4 of the Health and Safety Reform Bill. I too want to speak about Supplementary Order Paper 101 in the name of Ian Lees-Galloway and also Supplementary Order Paper 107 in the name of Marama Fox both of which are dealing with clause 167B in Part 4 of the bill. I just want to remind the Committee that last week it was frequently quite emotional being in the Chamber and I think that was actually a rational response to the grief that is still being felt by the forestry families and the Pike River families who were in the gallery. The fact is that we are discussing a bill that has a huge impact on the safety and lives of families of workers and these people were here wanting to see an improvement in the existing law. I think it was right that we gave them the due respect and treated it with the gravitas that it deserved. I am mentioning it now because it is this part of the bill clause 167 that deals with private prosecution.I just wanted to note that some of those families cannot be here today but it was Selina who is the mum of Eramiha Pairama—and is someone whom I spoke to last week—who I think had the most impact on me really when she spoke about wanting to see a bill that would keep people like her son safe at work. In her case or in the case of her son who was killed at work—a 19-year old boy who was killed at work—WorkSafe the regulator decided not to prosecute in that case as we have heard but the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions decided that it would. It has been supported by unions and actually by ordinary families across New Zealand so that it could take that case on.My understanding is that under the existing health and safety laws the regulator has a period of time—I think it is around about 6 months—in which it can decide whether to prosecute in these circumstances as was the case with Eramiha and it can apply for an extension. Then when it has decided that it will not prosecute there is only 1 month left for a private prosecution to be taken and invariably there is a call for an extension of time. The change in the bill can be seen in some ways as a more positive step in that it does say that WorkSafe now has up to 2 years to examine cases—severe cases especially—and to decide whether it will take a prosecution. But although it is giving extra time to WorkSafe that may make it harder for the families to be able to decide whether to take a prosecution.I do note that in the bill there is a clause that says you can go outside the time if there is fresh evidence so there are some mitigating factors there. But I believe and the Greens believe we need to amend this and we support Iain Lees-Galloway’s Supplementary Order Paper to give a 6-month period of time for families or other persons—in this case it could well be the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions again—to decide whether they should be taking a private prosecution. I think that is reasonable given the amount of investigation that has to happen and then also the work that needs to be done to get a private prosecution ready. My understanding is that 6 months is not an unreasonable expectation of the time required.Should Iain Lees-Galloway’s Supplementary Order Paper fail we would of course support Marama Fox’s Supplementary Order Paper which basically just reduces that time to 3 months. But I have to say in terms of it being a huge win for the Māori Party that no I do not see it as a massive step in the right direction. I mean it is a good effort but unless the Government actually agrees to it then I do not see that it is a huge win.I do note that the Minister has a Supplementary Order Paper on this part as well which I think is actually just around ensuring that people can receive notice of a prosecution or be notified that there is an action being taken and it says that they can receive it by mail or within 7 days and then it will be deemed that they have received it. Honestly do we need that kind of massive amount of effort put into such a simple little thing when there are huge gaps in this bill that really need to be addressed and that are not being addressed?We will be supporting these parts of the bill. I want to reiterate that we do continue to have concerns and we will not be supporting the bill in its entirety. We certainly do have concerns around the offences and the inequities in the sentencing of prosecutions from offences that may have occurred with the mishmash of criminal law and employment law. But I believe that if we as a Parliament can agree to support Iain Lees-Galloway’s Supplementary Order Paper then we will have got some movement. It would be really good to see that because I think as the Leader of the Opposition has said in the last couple of days this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get it right and so far we have not.