Fenton Darien: Urgent Debates — Pike River Mine Disaster—Release of Report Government Response and Ministerial Resignation 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Fenton Darien: Urgent Debates — Pike River Mine Disaster—Release of Report Government Response and Ministerial Resignation 
[Sitting date: 06 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6273. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance 
. [ 
Interruption 
] 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Order! I want to hear Darien Fenton. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: Firstly I note with sadness again the needless deaths of 29 men on that awful day nearly 2 years ago at the Pike River mine. My thoughts and the thoughts of the Labour Party go out to the families whose lives have been broken by this tragedy. Their heartbreak is inconsolable. Their courage is immense. 
After they were told yesterday the findings of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy they said that they hoped that good would come from this tragedy that the legacy of the loss of the men will be that we do something about our appalling health and safety record not only in mines but across the country. That is the job of the Government and the Government needs to adopt all of the recommendations of the Pike River mine commission without delay and extend them to all workplaces. 
The ex - Minister of Labour and John Key can blame the Department of Labour—and there has been a lot of that going around in the last 24 hours—they can try to shift responsibility on to the overworked and under-resourced staff but that is not good enough. It is good that the Minister has stepped down over this. She should. John Key says it is the honourable thing to do. Kate Wilkinson says it is about her integrity. But this is not about the Minister. It is not about her. She stood on the stage with the Prime Minister at the memorial for the Pike River mine deaths next to Peter Whittall. She wanted to be part of that. But she has wanted no part in making the real change that is needed. It has been almost 2 years—2 years—since this tragedy happened. 
I do believe that eventually Kate Wilkinson became very concerned about health and safety. She was laissez-faire about it to start with and as John Armstrong has described she was the ultimate deregulator. She was a born-again deregulator. But she eventually came round to it and set up the task force to look into health and safety in New Zealand because of our alarming record of deaths and injuries in this country. So the deaths of 29 men in the Pike River mine are just part of this picture. 
Something changed her mind. She was telling the Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) in a letter back on 12 November 2009 in response to the consultation around underground mining that my colleague Trevor Mallard the former Minister of Labour had set up—around underground mining not small mines; she narrowed it to apply to only small mines—that she “considers that an educational rather than regulatory approach is appropriate to support small mine operators …” and that she “considers that the existing legislative framework under the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992 already provides a good basis for effective employee participation.” and that she “does not agree to a regulatory change to introduce ‘check’ inspectors nor for an approved code of practice for employee participation … in the mining sector.” So she had a chance back in 2009 to respond to some work that had been done to respond to some work that had been initiated by Labour—consultation. She had a chance to do something and she told the miners union that she did not agree to it. That was 3 years ago—before the Pike River mine tragedy. 
That Minister Gerry Brownlee stood in this House and mocked that consultation document. He held it up with its picture of Damien O’Connor—who is from the West Coast and has had to live through this tragedy and work with the families—Trevor Mallard and an EPMU delegate. He held it up and he mocked it. 
Hon Gerry Brownlee 
: No I didn’t. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: Shame on that Minister! He mocked it. He mocked it. He mocked it and that shows you the attitude of this Government to health and safety and to mine safety. It all very well 3 years and 29 deaths later to be saying it is going to do something about it. 
At the same time going back the Government was busy making cuts to the Department of Labour to health and safety and employee representative training. I remember asking the former ACC Minister who was responsible for prevention why the Government was cutting worker participation why it was making millions of dollars worth of cuts to the training of health and safety reps on the job—those workers on the job who are entitled to have a voice who are entitled to have a say and who are entitled to stand up for their safety on the job. Do you know what he said? “Oh that is a touchy-feely notion.” He said it was a touchy-feely notion. That is disgraceful. I do not believe that that Minister has changed as well. 
In June 2010 5 months before the first explosion Kate Wilkinson wrote to my colleague Damien O’Connor who had raised his genuine and serious concern about mine safety on the West Coast that she did not see a need for any review of the current mines inspection regime. You know she kept saying it time after time after time. 
Let us look at the cuts that the Government made to workplace health and safety. Let us look at the cuts that it made. It cut the ACC-funded training for workplace health and safety by $1.5 million. It ran the Department of Labour down. It ran the Department of Labour down to the point where there was only one inspector one mines inspector for the whole of the country—for the whole of the country. The department had a vacancy but could not find a replacement because it did not pay enough. That inspector was also responsible for checking the thousand or so quarries throughout New Zealand. He said they had not been inspected for ages—so goodness knows what has been going on there—and he said that safety issues at Pike River were difficult to address because inspectors visited the mine only occasionally. What we found out through questioning is that those inspectors could not even get the money—the travel allowance the travel costs—to travel to mines to carry out an inspection so stingy had this Government become. It was so mean and so focused on cost cutting that it denied a travel allowance for the mine inspector to go and inspect the mines. 
At that time when that evidence was given to the Pike River royal commission the Minister of Labour was called on to resign. She was called on to resign because she had discounted the proposals that had been put forward arising from the consultation document and review by my colleague Trevor Mallard. She discounted them. She wrote to the EPMU saying that they were not necessary she narrowed the inquiry to small mines and she did nothing. So there were calls on her then to resign. Do you know what she said? “I have no intention of resigning.”—she had no intention of resigning. She was confident back then that she had done everything for this mine. Now she is not of course because we all know the terrible terrible story that has come out of this Pike River mine commission. 
We have gone from having something like 9735 workplace health and safety reps trained in the workplace in 2008 to half that in 2010-11 and it has continued to drop. And yet what did the Pike River commission of inquiry say? It said that one of the most important things about workplace health and safety is employee participation—employee participation. The Government also scrapped industry training funding for health and safety courses. So more money—$9.5 million—was taken out of that. That cost people’s lives. And the Employment Relations Education Contestable Fund was cut by 40 percent in Budget 2010 and much of it was being used for health and safety training. The families want something good to come from this inquiry. The first thing the Government could do is reinstate that funding to get things moving while it mucks around thinking and considering implementing the recommendations of the inquiry. 
New Zealand has a terrible terrible death and injury record. Over 100 people a year die from workplace accidents between 700 and 1000 people die as a result of gradual work-related diseases over 6000 people notify the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment—including what used to be called the Department of Labour—of a serious harm incident in their workplace around 190000 people claim medical costs from ACC as a result of being harmed at work around 23000 people are injured seriously enough to be off work for more than a week and around 370 people are injured seriously enough to require hospital care and be diagnosed with a life-threatening condition. Our injury rates are almost twice those of Australia and almost six times those of the UK. 
This is a cultural issue but it is also an attitude issue. I thank the Acting Minister of Labour today for making it very clear in answers to my questions that he does not understand the link between workers’ rights—look at those members pulling faces. Minister Finlayson does not understand the link between workers’ rights the way they are treated on the job and the confidence they have to raise health and safety issues. She has never understood that. So all of these proposals can be implemented and at the same time the Government is proposing changes to employment law that will take away rights of low-paid cleaners. That will have an impact on the health and safety of every school where there are contracted workers. I bet the Government has not told parents that the schools are about to have their toilets cleaned by franchise companies that are understaffed. The Government is also about to weaken collective bargaining making it harder for workers to get pay increases and so on. I have said this to the former Minister of Labour time and time again: until you get the understanding that you can have all of these things—you can have if you want a mountain of labour inspectors because that is what the Government is going to need—but if you never get the picture that until workers feel safe enough on the job to raise safety issues until they are confident enough to be able to do that until they can join their union and collectively bargain without fear and until we have laws that actually promote that in the good tradition of other countries in the ILO our health and safety record is going to continue to be a disaster. 
Again I want to record our condolences to the families. We know that it was a terrible day for them yesterday. I do thank them for their courage and their determination. There is a lot of work to do on this issue. Labour will support of course the recommendations being implemented but we say they need to be done quickly and they need to be done soon and the Government needs to get real about other things that affect workers in the workplace. It needs to get real about it in memory of the 29 men who died at the Pike River mine.