Hague Kevin: Underground Coal Mining Safety Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Underground Coal Mining Safety Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 24 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4725. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): I attended most days of the hearings of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy. It was unusual for the commissioners themselves to ask many questions but one of the ones that really sticks in my mind was a question asked by Stewart Bell one of the commissioners. In his day job he is the Commissioner for Mine Safety and Health Queensland. He asked Doug White who is one of the managers from Pike River and an extremely experienced coalminer whether in his experience he had ever encountered a situation where the regulator had made no notices to the mining company for any changes or improvements in health and safety. Doug White answered no. Commissioner Bell was clearly aghast at the gulf that existed between Queensland mine safety regulations and those that pertained in New Zealand.That gulf came from decades of Governments that either had actively shrunk the State and the role of the State or had not done enough to pull that role back and reverse those changes. The two particular axe blows to mine-worker safety came in the 1990s at the hands particularly of Bill Birch and Max Bradford when they gutted mine safety regulations and then eliminated the role of check inspectors and largely dismantled the Government’s mine inspection service as well.I live close to the Pike River coalmine site. Many of those affected directly by the tragedy were my friends and neighbours. I am proud of the role I played in forcing the Government from its initial position of stonewalling and a Bart Simpson “Nothing to see here” attitude into instead first creating the High Hazards Unit and then Worksafe New Zealand and overhauling mine safety regulations and then overhauling workplace health and safety legislation. Those have all been good developments.The question is whether or not enough has been done. The picture I certainly have is of a Government that is very much in two minds. I think Iain Lees-Galloway is right that one of those minds was forced by the circumstances that immediately followed the Pike River disaster. I do not believe that any of those changes that the Government has made have gone as far as I would take them. On the next day after the publication of the royal commission’s report I asked the Prime Minister whether he accepted that deregulation had been a primary cause of the disaster. He did not. He did not accept it. When we considered the first of the Government’s health and safety bills we had the quarrying industry submitting that it should be exempted from some of the measures that pertained to mining and quarrying and it won. The Government allowed the industry to be exempted from those provisions with tragic consequences.I am certainly reminded of a question that I asked a former Minister Kate Wilkinson on a number of occasions. I asked her whether on the day before the Pike River disaster she would have said that the Government had done all it could to ensure the safety of miners going to work that day. It was a very difficult question for her to answer because there is always something we can do. So what I ask in relation to this bill is what can possibly be wrong with our allowing this bill to go forward to a select committee to enable members of the public mine workers and the companies themselves to tell us whether enough has been done? What can be more important for us in this House than to ensure that mine workers go to work each day and then come home?