Fenton Darien: Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFenton Darien: Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 12 November 2013. Volume:694;Page:14598. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DARIEN FENTON (Labour): As my colleague Andrew Little has said Part 2 is the guts of this bill the Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill. We havedebated a lot in Part 1 about the setting up of WorkSafe New Zealand which is of course a very very important part of the architecture of our health and safety system into the future. But Part 2 deals with changes to the Health and Safety in Employment Act and employee or worker participation in health and safety in the mining sector. There are some things that I think were improved during the process of considering the bill at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and I want to mention those before I get to the things that I am disappointed about and want the Minister of Labour to perhaps comment on.In the bill as it was originally presented in new section 19U(2) inserted by clause 27 a person could not be elected as a mine health and safety representative unless they met the competency requirements prescribed in regulations—sounds fair enough. But submitters told us that that would provide a barrier. It would limit potential candidates for the role to those who had already received the necessary training. So the select committee has recommended that we amend the provision so that a person could be elected without the prescribed competencies but would not be allowed to exercise the functions and powers for which training is required until they have completed their training. I thought that was a very practical and sensible response to submitters’ concerns about how we actually get this operation this change happening in mines.Another change came about because of the concerns of submitters. There was concern expressed by some submitters about the potential liability of health and safety representatives. The select committee members listened to that and heard that and are recommending that health and safety representatives should have immunity for liability for any acts or omissions in good faith when exercising their functions or powers. Again I think that was a positive change.However I think the big change that has happened in Part 2 that is most disappointing is the narrowing of the application of the health and safety requirements in Part 2 from applying to all mining operations including quarrying and some types of tunnelling. We believe that that scope was appropriate. We did have submissions of course from those with vested interests—owners of mines above ground. We also had submissions from workers or workers’ representatives who represent people in quarrying operations and tunnelling operations. They had a completely different view.The bill as originally presented gave us an opportunity to do something quite advanced that would make a big change rather than focusing on just the narrow issues arising out of Pike River mine and underground coalmines. I think it is a real pity that the recommendation—obviously from the Minister of Labour—was that the scope of the legislation be narrowed. I think that what we will see—it is inevitable—at some stage in the future is that there will be a process failure and there will be a problem arising in a quarrying operation and perhaps some type of tunnelling. There will be safety failure and we will have to come back and look at this legislation again and ask why we did not take the opportunity when we had it to make sure that we were covering off those people.I see that what the submitters were saying to the Government was that it would place an unreasonable regulatory burden on quarry operators. I have heard about regulatory burdens before. I mean was it not a regulatory burden to have health and safety in Pike River mine? Was that not one of the failures—that profit actually came before health and safety? Was that not one of the lessons that we should have learnt?The Government has gone on to acknowledge that it needs better regulation for health and safety yet it does not want it in this bill and it does not want it in the form of Part 2 of the bill which is mainly around industry health and safety representatives and site health and safety representatives. But what the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment is saying is that it intends to work with the quarry industry to develop a setof quarry-specific guidelines with a longer-term view to developing quarry-specific regulations.I hope we see that happening fairly quickly rather than in the longer term. I hope we are not in the situation of looking back at some stage and saying: “We had the opportunity while we were debating this bill as originally presented. Why did we not just leave it as it was? Why did we change it? Why did the Minister give in to the interests of some big business that was submitting to the committee at the time and cave in to their pleading that they should not be covered by this particular part of the bill?”.I want to comment too on Part 2B “Worker participation in health and safety in mining sector”. It is a very very important part of the bill and I think as other people have said that this is kind of the crux of the problem that we have had with our system in health and safety for a long time. Technically under the Health and Safety in Employment Act there is worker participation there are expectations that workplaces of a certain size have worker participation or employee participation systems. But the reality is that provided that an employer could show there was some sort of system on paper and it ticked a few boxes the test of employee participation was met. As we have heard from colleagues who have been arguing about the set-up of the board and the importance of a genuine worker voice that applies just as much to employee participation.I share Andrew Little’s concerns about the language around this a little bit. Rather than delivering the voice of workers to help protect their health and safety it is more about delivering the needs of business to protect health and safety. So we are still in this sort of tick-the-box regime. I think there are quite a lot of things there that could have been tightened up.I hope that when we see the health and safety legislation finally presented to Parliament—I think it is supposed to be later this year—we will see some learnings from this legislation from some of the contributions that have been made around this. But I do think we are missing an opportunity. One of the things we do support of course is the role of industry health and safety inspectors in underground coalmines. We have been calling for that. The Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union has been calling for that. We know—and colleague Damien O’Connor can attest to the fact—that these check inspectors as they are called were being called for way way back. A review was done into coalmining. There was a report recommending them. That was ditched by the then Minister Kate Wilkinson and that is a sorry part of the history of Pike River mine.However we are now in a situation where of course we are hoping that we have learnt the lessons of Pike River mine. I am hoping that we can persuade the Minister to adopt Andrew Little’s amendment to Part 2 set out on Supplementary Order Paper 388 which would expand the role of check inspectors to ensure that quarrying and tunnelling operations are included so that all mining activities that carry high health and safety risks are covered. I think this is a very sensible amendment and if the Minister of Labour will not consider it I would like to hear from him directly as to why he decided to change this bill—other than because of lobbying from big industries and big players outside the coalmining industry—when the bill as presented included quarrying and tunnelling operations.As I said Part 2 is a very very important part. There is a lot in it and I hope we get plenty of opportunities to comment. I hope my colleagues do as well. It does consider things like training of site health and safety representatives. Another good thing that I think was included by the select committee was an explicit requirement of duty on the employer to provide time off for health and safety training because that has also been aproblem. There is a specific requirement on an employer to do that. And the worker participation system under this bill must have a provision that increases or decreases the numbers of days of paid leave for health and safety training.