Hague Kevin: Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill — Second ReadingText is subject to correctionHague Kevin: Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 22 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:14093. Text is subject to correction.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): Can I begin by expressing my gratitude for the hard work of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee officials and officials from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment who supported the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee in our work. I thank all those who made submissions. I thank David Bennett the chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and I thank other committee members especially for the trip the committee made to Greymouth to hear submissions. It was an arduous trip because of the circumstances on the day but it was one that I know my community particularly appreciated.The Green Party will be supporting the Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill at its second reading but we are doing so disturbed by the failure of the Government to grasp in a wholehearted way the opportunity that existed to meet this challenge. As members know I live close to the site of the Pike River mine and I have been closely involved in the aftermath of the tragedy. I have had three main objectives: firstly to recover the bodies of the 29 men who were killed in the disaster if that is at all possible; secondly to investigate and get to the bottom of what occurred or what caused that tragedy; and thirdly to improve the systems that we use in order that such tragedies can be avoided in the future in so far as we are able to do that.As Damien O’Connor said as we sit here in the House today debating this bill a helicopter clatters over the mine site on the coast doing the preparatory work to begin a recovery operation finally 3 long agonising years after the disaster occurred. We hope that it may be possible to recover at least some of the men. We hope also that it may be possible to recover some evidence to fill some of the gaps that still exist in our understanding of what exactly happened what went wrong and how that might be prevented in the future. I call on the House to consider what we owe those men and their families and to live up to those responsibilities.The royal commission of inquiry met its responsibilities and it can be well satisfied with a truly excellent job. But what of us in this House? With the honourable exception of the brief period when the Hon Chris Finlayson acted as the Minister of Labour the Government has dragged the chain and I believe shamed the House at every point.First of all John Key tried to defend the Government’s performance on mine safety saying that our standards were no less than those in Australia and that our safety record was very good. All of the subsequent facts that have emerged have illustrated just how contemptibly wide of the mark those claims were but typical of a Government whose first reaction to anything that goes wrong is the Bart Simpson - like “It wasn’t me. It’s not my fault. You can’t prove a thing.” Then to restore the mines inspectorate to morethan a pathetic capacity with a High Hazards Unit took literally months and months of determined pressure on the former Minister of Labour even though that was a measure that had near unanimous endorsement from everyone except the Government.The Government’s next stall was on the review of legislation and regulation something else that should have been an absolute no-brainer. But to give Kate Wilkinson some credit she did set up a genuine process and she did seek to inform and involve Opposition parties. I wonder now whether that is the reason for her demotion by John Key. She was too open to a genuine review of legislation and regulations in this area. I was certainly astonished when the Prime Minister in response to my questions in the House indicated that contrary to the conclusions of the royal commission and the Hon Chris Finlayson he did not accept that deregulation had played a crucial role in creating the environment where the Pike River disaster could occur. In fact the Prime Minister demonstrates his adherence to the same discredited neo-liberal agenda that caused the problem in the first place.Experienced miners and mine safety experts warned—they were extremely clear at the time—that the Bill Birch and Max Bradford theory that the State should just leave private companies to get on with health and safety would lead to deaths in mine disasters and they were right. The problem that the Government now has is that with 29 men lying dead in Pike River mine it is hard for it to wriggle out of implementing the recommendations of either the royal commission or the health and safety task force so instead we hear grand words about honour but implementation falls short of what is really needed.This is a Government that is still committed to the neo-liberal agenda. It is viscerally opposed to greater State control over the operation of private businesses and it despises the idea of greater regulation or greater say for unions on behalf of working people. Working people are supposed to be just a labour input into the firm. That is what lies at the heart of the shortcomings of this bill. It does many good things but falls well short of what is required and I have addressed some of the main points in my minority view in the select committee report.For example officials struggled to explain why a representative tripartite structure was not adopted for the board ofWorkSafe New Zealand. I do not recall a single submission opposing it and there were certainly plenty strongly endorsing it from both unions and business leaders. It was recommended very strongly by the task force. Actually the reason it is not in this bill has nothing to do with rational analysis of the submissions and everything to do with a Government that is strongly opposed to tripartism with its implications of shared power and shared accountability with business and especially with working people.This central flaw is compounded by giving the board powers that fall short of those recommended by the task force and fall short of givingWorkSafe adequate teeth to deal with employers who are not persuaded to meet their legal health and safety duties. Indeed as I said in my minority view the functions in this bill are a pretty good description of the way the Department of Labour mines inspectors went about their job at the time of the Pike River disaster which resulted of course in catastrophic failure to detect and correct the many and glaring faults in the systems of Pike River Coal Ltd.I am also deeply disturbed that the Government has caved in response to pressure from quarrying companies and narrowed the scope of operations covered by the reinstatement of the triangle of safety set out in Part 2 of the bill. For anyone who sat through the evidence heard by the royal commission or who has read the royal commission’s report one of the clearest conclusions was that the disaster was not the result of a single risk factor; rather the disaster occurred because multiple failings lined up on the day. Defences against harm in legislation regulation enforcement companypolicy company operating procedures training worker behaviour equipment and many other areas all contain the potential for error and the disaster was the result of some combination of these. So to now take one single risk factor the risk of explosion and say that where this risk exists we will bolster safety systems with check inspectors but in other analogous situations where that particular risk does not exist we are going to do nothing is a total failure to understand even the most basic conclusion from the royal commission.In my first reading speech I quoted Bill Brazil a mining safety expert who said in 1995: “Furthermore the [Health and Safety in Employment] Act is being used as a manipulative device to eliminate management structures and many historically formed mining codes of practice that were firmly established in the heart of previous legislation much of which has proved successful over 100 years. Should this situation be allowed to continue without intervention the end result can only be the escalation of potential for further disaster.” I would say that in the failures by this Government to wholeheartedly implement the recommendations of the royal commission and the task force the Government instead aligns itself with those responsible for that fatal manipulation of health and safety law in the first place. The 29 men deserve better.