Roche Denise: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 25 August 2015. Volume:708;Page:6145. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a call on the title and commencement clauses of the Health and Safety Reform Bill. I have to say that I agree with previous speakers that the title potentially does not necessarily reflect what the bill does.I agree with the previous speaker Sue Moroney that where we started out on this bill was with a lot of goodwill right across the House and with an intention to make good health and safety law that kept people safe at work: people like the nurses who care for our sick and our fragile in our hospitals; people like the home-care assistants who may work in people’s homes caring for the elderly the frail and the disabled; people like those who brave the sea and collect fish that we buy to eat; and people who work on farms producing the meat that we export and that we also buy for ourselves. These are the people who invest their bodies on a daily basis in the work that they do providing for all of us and we as legislators—as people who are working on this legislation—have a duty of care to them to provide legislation that keeps them safe at work.I thought that reform as in the title of the Health and Safety Reform Bill meant it would make things better because that is what we intended to do. That is why we were picking up the recommendations from the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy and why we were picking up the recommendations from the Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety—to put them into legislation that would actually make things better. That is what I thought reform meant. I agree with Andrew Little I think it was who said that we had had a united front on this right from the start but the reform part has actually sort of fallen away and what we have got is something that is not reflected in the title. It is probably more like a “Broken Promises Bill” more than a Health and Safety Reform Bill.We have had families from the Pike River mine—we have had Bernie and Kath Monk come and speak to us last week. We had families who have lost their sons their husbands or the father of their children come to speak to us last week about what they considered to be the broken promises that are in this bill. That I think is a much more accurate reflection of the title of this bill. These were the people—these were the people—who were saying to us: “Our loved ones will not have died in vain if we can have legislation that actually does protect people at work.”What they were saying was that to exclude workplaces with fewer than 20 workers from being able to even ask for a health and safety rep let alone a health and safety committee—these were ways and they knew that these were ways that would keep people safe at work. Sons fathers husbands—it would have kept them safe at work and yet we have failed. We are getting to the end of this Committee of the whole House stage despite the fact that we have tried to put forward Supplementary Order Papers—Carmel Sepuloni: There are three more speeches to give on this.DENISE ROCHE: OK. Well we are not coming to the end of the Committee stage but we are getting through it—we have been through a lot of the schedules—and what we have seen is a constant rejection of Supplementary Order Papers that could have made it a little bit better.I do not understand why the bill has come back to the Committee of the whole House with a whole host of changes that we did not even think about in the select committee which strikes me as a very undemocratic process. To rock up to the Committee of the whole House with a whole bunch of stuff that nobody has actually discussed before and say: “This is what’s going to be in the bill.” just makes a mockery of the fact that we have been through a very full submission process. So maybe this is the “Anti-Democracy Bill”—