Lees-Galloway Iain: Health and Safety Reform Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Health and Safety Reform Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16715. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North):I have to say it is a little bit disappointing that National members are not prepared to engage a little bit more in this debate. I do not really think a 1-minute contribution is worthy of the level of debate and the level of seriousness that ought to be applied to this legislation. The reason that this Health and Safety Reform Bill has been introduced to Parliament the reason why we are having this debate today is the Pike River disaster. Had that disaster not occurred there is no way this Government would have been inspired to introduce legislation to improve health and safety regulations in the workplace. It is a shame that it took a tragedy like that to reverse the ideological adherence to deregulation and stepping back from a legislative role in health and safety. It is absolutely a fact that a blind unthinking adherence to deregulation is what led to the Pike River disaster and frankly it is what is causing the Government to fail to respond truly adequately to the appalling situation in the forestry industry right now.Mercifully as I think Darien Fenton pointed out earlier on in this debate the forestry industry itself is taking the situation seriously and is working with unions and others. But the system that has always worked—in terms of getting the regulatory environment correct the employment relations environment correct and the health and safety environment correct—has been the tripartite approach where the employer the workers and the Government work together and each take responsibility. Frankly for too long I think the Government has not been taking responsibility. The good aspect of this legislation is that there is recognition in here that the Government does have a considerable responsibility to ensure the health and safety of workers.It should be an absolute right of every single person living in this country that they are able to expect to go to work be safe and come home again at the end of the day. It should be the right of their families to expect that the breadwinner can go to work be safe and come back home to them at the end of the day and that they are not going to lose that person and go through the heartache and the trauma of not only losing a loved one but also losing the source of income for that family. Unfortunately in too many instances that right has not been something that people in New Zealand have been able to rely on.Although events like the Pike River disaster when in a single blow a large number of people were lost do focus the mind we do need to be aware that every year when Workers’ Memorial Day rolls round there is a list of names of people who have been lost in the previous 12 months. Those lists are not getting any shorter from one year to the next and that is a shame. I do acknowledge that this legislation is part of an effort to actually reduce the incidents of workplace fatalities and workplace injuries.However it does have to be part of a package and all the different aspects of the package have to be working together. There are areas where I think the Government does need to lift its game. One of those is certainly in employment relations. The appalling amendments to the Employment Relations Act which are being pushed through—although the pace seems to have gone off those lately and maybe those are being parked until after the election. That would be a good thing because that would mean that a Labour Government could just scrap that legislation before it is even enacted.What that legislation demonstrates is that perhaps in terms of workplace health and safety in the National Government the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. On the one hand it has introduced this very good legislation which although there are aspects we would like to see improved—and we will work hard at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee to ensure that those improvements are put in place—we broadly support. You then look at the open and blatant attacks on collectivism the attacks on unionism the attacks on workplace rights the efforts to make work more precarious and the efforts to keep wages down to encourage people to work longer hours and put their health and safety at risk which seem absolutely at odds with what this legislation is trying to achieve.Likewise decisions made in ACC appear to be absolutely at odds with it. The Minister for ACC Judith Collins described health and safety training carried out by both the Council of Trade Unions and Business New Zealand as nothing more than a rort. She ultimately had to go to Business New Zealand and I do not know the exact words she used but it was something along the lines of she did not mean to impugn its integrity. Heaven forbid that Judith Collins should apologise for something but she did not mean to impugn its integrity. There was no apology for or back-down from what she had to say about the Council of Trade Unions which I think again simply portrays the anti-union mood and ideology—Hon Trevor Mallard: Anti-worker.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: —and anti-worker—Hon Trevor Mallard: They just hate people who work.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: That is right actually. I think people who earn a salary or a wage are sort of public enemy No. 1 as far as the National Government is concerned. Certainly those who represent them and attempt to further the interests of people who rely on wages and salaries are treated with equal disdain by the National Government. They were certainly treated with that kind of disdain by Judith Collins. The interesting thing is that those programmes that were the result of recent announcements and the astroturfing with the Taxpayers’ Union which somehow magically managed to discover the expenditure on these programmes at around about the same time—Hon Trevor Mallard: What have they said about Judith’s trip to China?IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Well indeed what has the Taxpayers’ Union said about Judith’s trip to China? I am still waiting for that press release—waiting to see what Jordan Williams has to say about that. What that revealed was the fact that a number of programmes designed to prevent injuries both in the workplace and for other accounts of ACC have been cut over the last 5 years. In fact for the last 3 or 4 years of the last Labour Government the expenditure on programmes focused on preventing injury in the workplace and in other settings was around $40 million a year. In the last financial year that has been cut to $22 million. So in the time that National has been in Government it has halved the budget for injury prevention.That would be fine if there was really good evidence to say that those programmes were not doing anything but the evidence from ACC itself demonstrates that for every dollar invested in those programmes at least $1.12 in treatment was saved and in some cases it was as high as $1.23. So that is between a 12 percent and 23 percent return on that investment. It was stopping injuries. Most important people were safer. They could go to work and assume they were going to come home in one piece without any injury or heaven forbid suffering a fatality. It even saved ACC money. Surely the National Party should understand the value of saving money. But no it took the short-term approach and cut the programmes so that it could cut expenditure and improve the surplus that ACC could record to help get the Government books back into surplus because it had failed so demonstrably in actually improving economic growth in order to get the Government books back into surplus.We absolutely support this legislation but what we do demand of the Government is that it demonstrates a true focus on health and safety in the workplace by ensuring that in all its actions it improves the safety of workers. It is not that much to ask but we are still waiting.