Moroney Sue: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 19 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5987. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): At the outset of Part 2 I would like to indicate to the Government and let the public know that it is our intention to vote for this part because we think that much of it makes sense. However I just do want to let the National Party know that it was our intention to vote for Part 1 but when a Government moves to shut down the debate on a bill as important as this on areas that we still want to debate then you will get a No vote from the Labour Party on that basis. We asked at the outset that there be no politics on this issue and I hope that that will be taken care of.I do though want to commend the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety for at least his part. If his party did not behave at least the Minister did because when we raised issues he did make a very good attempt at addressing those issues and I hope that that will continue in this debate.In Part 2 which spells out mainly the duties and the responsibilities of individuals when it comes to their responsibility towards health and safety in the workplace sadly much of this part even though its intention is really good will be undermined by the Government’s decision to ensure that a whole lot of smaller workplaces do not have elected health and safety reps in those environments. I say that because even though we are going to come on to debating that substantively in the next part it impacts on Part 2. Although these duties are well spelt out who on earth is ever going to police this? Who on earth is ever going to be in those smaller workplaces to know whether the person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) is doing what the PCBU ought to do if there is no elected trained health and safety rep in that workplace who knows what the PCBU ought to do?As we are about to debate this is quite complex. The obligations on each of the parties are quite complex and unless people have been trained as health and safety reps—and that is the reason why health and safety reps need to be trained—how on earth will anyone in those dangerous workplaces like farms which the Government has moved to exclude know whether these duties are being undertaken? That is our misgiving about this part. We do intend to vote for it. Sadly it is going to be let down by the decisions that the Government is going to make on other parts of this bill.I want to spend a little bit of time just talking about the PCBU. I think it is going to be really easy for us to slip into that language and perhaps people listening to the debate may not understand. I think this part really does attempt to come to grips with the changing nature of the workplace the way in which contracting out has affected health and safety and the way in which different people are employed affects health and safety at work. And this is I think an honest attempt to address these issues although I do have to say this: it worries me that we have spent all these volumes trying to describe everyone’s obligations in a very complicated and tricky type of workplace setting when in fact I wonder whether we would be better off having some good regulation in place that actually prevented these types of structures which do cause health and safety risks from developing in our workplaces.I am primarily referring to the contracting-out regime but there are other practices in our workplaces that I think have complicated this picture and instead of actually dealing with that we are now dealing with a very complex set of duties and obligations to try to deal with that.So a PCBU must ensure so far as it is reasonably practicable the health and safety of workers who work for them while those workers are at work in the business or undertaking and those workers whose activities in carrying out work are influenced or directed by the PCBU while the workers are carrying out the work.I think that last sentence is important because it is an attempt to address the issue that I have just raised. You know we used to call these people employers actually but sometimes they are not the direct employer but the decisions they make influence the workplace or the ability of other workers who are not in their employment specifically but are impacted on by the decisions that they make. I think that the Pike River mine sadly demonstrated this issue really well in a way that we do not ever want to have demonstrated to us ever again. The decisions being made by the Pike River Coal company were impacting on people who were contractors to that company and yet they had no ability to influence that.This part of the bill makes sure that the PCBUs have an obligation to be talking with each other and to be coordinating and I think that is a very very important part of it. However I will come back to my original point. Who on earth is going to police this in small workplaces? Who on earth is going to do that? Is it going to be people from WorkSafe? I do not think so. Are they going to be on every farm? No they are not.Jonathan Young: Well they nearly are. That’s the problem.SUE MORONEY: Ha ha! Jonathan Young is concerned—he thinks that they probably are. If that is a concern of the National Government then look the obvious solution is the one that the Labour Party is proposing and that is to stop this nonsense of denying access to proper health and safety representation for people who work on farms and in other places that are going to be excluded by this legislation and just do what the royal commission said at the outset. Let everyone be covered. Part of the role of an elected and trained health and safety rep is actually to police that Part 2 is happening and that the obligations set out there are happening on all those small workplaces up and down the land unless the Government really does think that it is going to have WorkSafe living in all these workplaces and seeing what is going on.So PCBUs have a range of functions. They have got to “ensure so far as is reasonably practicable”—and that is good and sound in terms of health and safety legislation—that the provision and maintenance of the work environment is done in a way that is without risk to health and safety. They have got to ensure the provision and maintenance of safe plant and structures the provision and maintenance of safe systems of work and the safe use handling and storage of plant substances and structures. There are a range of other things but this is all the learnings from Pike River mine.One of the questions that I would like the Minister in the chair to give us an answer to is whether this part of the bill will address the issue that we saw happening in Pike River mine where management was actually paying large bonuses to workers to take undue haste over some construction of parts of that mine when actually that money would have been better off being spent on making sure that there was another access way out of that mine. That instance of workers being offered a bonus by the PCBU in order to work faster in an unsafe way—would that undermine the duties under this part? I would really like an answer to that because I think this is where we are actually going to understand whether this bill is going to make a blind bit of difference to health and safety in our workplaces.The meatworks that sometimes speeds up the line and does that in a way that is unsafe—would that provision stop it from doing it? I am referring to clause 30(3) in Part 2. I really want to know whether that is going to stop those sorts of practices because that is really what we need to do. We need to make sure that those practices that are being undertaken at the moment—we know that they are being undertaken by people who once this bill becomes an Act will be PCBUs. Will they be able to continue those sorts of practices? Because those are the sorts of things that really do drive bad health and safety practices. They are the sorts of things that good trained elected health and safety reps can contest and can make sure that they do not continue happening. Unless this part actually makes sure that those things cannot continue to happen then it will not be worth the paper that it is written on.The PCBUs are the people who manage or control the workplace but they are also the people who manage or control fixtures fittings or plant at workplaces. This part of the bill also makes it clear that more than one person can carry out the same duty. So what we envisage in this part of the bill is that there will be multiple PCBUs involved in one workplace location and knowing that they are going to be able to coordinate with each other and that they are required to—