O'Connor Damien: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 20 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:6032. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): We come now to Part 3 of the bill which has to be the heart of the failure of the bill. It is the crucial area in which the Labour Party which had supported the bill to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee is now firmly separated from the Government. The Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety in earlier debates in the Committee has pointed to the fact that 75 percent of the people working in New Zealand will be covered by all parts of the bill but the 25 percent who will not be are the people whom we are considering here.I will focus on subpart 2 of Part 3. Clause 65(3)—no health and safety reps at businesses or undertakings with fewer than 20 workers. Well New Zealand has prided itself on being a country of small and medium enterprises with most of them in fact being on the small side—that is below 20 employees. In fact in the area of my interests and responsibility primary industries the vast majority of people are in this bracket. Indeed if you look at the statistics where most people who unfortunately lose their lives or are seriously injured are most of them would be working in small to medium enterprises in the primary sector and in the area where the Government is failing to implement proper recommendations and protections.There will be farmers out there who say: “This is wonderful. We’ve been exempted from this part of it and we can get on with our business.” until of course the occasion arises where we have a death or serious injury which all too often happens—on a weekly if not daily basis if we talk about injuries across the primary sectors. These are the people whom this bill must protect because as I said earlier in this Chamber most legislation we pass is actually to protect a minority of people who need protection for themselves or from others or whatever. The vast majority of people—and this runs right through business and right through society and communities—through good luck or good management can protect themselves or protect others from themselves or whatever. But we are dealing with legislation here that must be strong and must be focused to deal with the people who through human nature or commercial greed or just plain ignorance are not going to do the right thing.I could quote you hundreds of occasions in my experience as a contract fencer as a farmer as a sharemilker as a tourism operator and as someone who has worked personally in what I would consider to be all high-risk areas—although the Government and its officials do not consider them that. The dairy industry is apparently not high risk. Sheep farming is not high risk.Hon Ruth Dyson: Minigolf is.Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: But minigolf is. I know those areas are high risk and I say to farmers in order to provoke and promote honest conversation when it comes to things like insurance and our practices on the farm we are in a high-risk environment doing high-risk things with animals and with bikes far away from any point of contact.Good farms now might have radio systems. They might have cellphones. But there are huge numbers of people in the rural and primary sectors who often have no communications where they work or who are working with animals that are unpredictable. If people in here know and work with animals they will know that most of them are unpredictable. If you have got some experience you might be able to herd them and you might have some idea of where they go. But you can be guaranteed that in the end they are unpredictable and the chances are that unless you have put in place protections and have seen ahead or foreseen that unpredictability you are at risk. You are at high risk because when an incident occurs there are often not lots of other people around you particularly if you work in a small enterprise which is one with under 20 employees—the very classification that this Government is exempting from the same provisions that should be in place as for those with over 20 employees.Why should those employees have lesser standards of protection than those working in a workplace of over 20 employees? It is immoral unethical and unfair. Call it what you like but just because you work in an environment of less than 20 employees—Hon Ruth Dyson: Fewer.Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Fewer—sorry fewer. My English is not perfect. In an environment with fewer than 20 employees why should you have less protection?The issue for farmers is what this means in practice. Well it should mean that one of the employees on that farm—and there may be only one or two or three—should have some training and should have some advice on what is good and safe practice in a farming environment.Jonathan Young: And they will.Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Well no there is no guarantee of that at all. If you are working in an environment with over 20 employees someone would be appointed or elected and someone would have the responsibility of upskilling themselves—with the support of the company we hope—to go and learn.Jonathan Young: They all do. Read the bill.Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: Oh they all do! Yes well that member should go back and read the parliamentary debates of 1992.I have heard it said by members on the other side of the Chamber that we must improve the culture. They imply that the culture among employees is not up to standard. Well there should be a greater level of awareness. I accept that but awareness comes from education. If someone is employed and not given the opportunity to be educated—and there are some of them here. There was one particular visitor from the UK who came over was given a motorbike on an orchard without any education and was killed in the first day of work. That is the kind of situation that we are trying to keep ahead of.So the culture that the cynical MPs on that side sneer about implying that workers do not understand safety and have got to upskill themselves—the harsh reality is that there is commercial pressure from employers or from people who are employed as foremen or whatever to get more for less. And indeed that is a good business practice I guess—“efficiency” it is often called. But if it is done at the expense of the standards of health and safety then that is where we see accidents occurring and it happens too often.We are in fact implementing a piece of legislation to try to keep ahead of human nature. We are a very innovative nation—No. 8 wire we call it—and we pride ourselves on being able to do things that no one else has thought of. That is great but over the years we have cut corners to do that. And over the years hundreds of thousands of workers in this country have lost their lives. I had two cousins from one family who both lost their lives in the workplace for things about which you might sit back and say: “That was silly. That was stupid.” But without proper provisions indeed that cover every part of every workplace people in New Zealand taking their No. 8 wire mentality will cut corners. What we are doing in the passage of this legislation is we are trying to put in place protection for them and for others.Part 3 divides the workers of New Zealand into those who are perhaps lucky enough to work in a large workplace of over 20 employees and others particularly in the primary sector who will not have that same level of protection. The member over there said it was in the legislation. What we do not have is on-ground active management from an individual in that small workplace who has been both upskilled and trained and been given some responsibility to try to remind their fellow workers and themselves of what should be the best practice. If you do not do that then we as Kiwis will cut the corners and we as Kiwis have died in our hundreds because of that.