Moroney Sue: Health and Safety Reform Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Health and Safety Reform Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 30 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5527. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): Not that long ago just over a year ago I stood in this House and I implored this House to never ever forget the lessons that were learnt from the Pike River mine as we had previously forgotten the lessons that we learnt from Cave Creek just some decades earlier. I implored the House to never ever forget the lesson that we learnt from both of those instances—that deregulation kills. Deregulation does not work in terms of the health and safety of working people. I thought then that maybe I was giving a warning to the House that we might forget those lessons in a decade or so. I did not expect to be standing in this House just over a year later telling that Government it has already forgotten those lessons. I did not expect to be standing up this quickly and telling that Government to get its amnesia in order. It has already forgotten those lessons. The bill that it has brought back to this House demonstrates that. Less than 12 months after I implored this House to never forget that it has already done it and the Government members are grinning about it. Well I am sorry but I find that reprehensible actually.We have some of the families in this Chamber today who have been deeply affected by previous Governments forgetting about how deregulation kills people. We have some of the families of the victims here listening to this debate today and I want to pay my respects to the wāhine toa—the strong women—Deborah Sonya and Anna who are here because they are fighting for other families. They are fighting for other families to never ever have to experience what they have had to experience and that is the experience of seeing a loved one off to work in the morning—the thing that they do every day the thing that they should do every day and come back from safely—and having them never return.Make no mistake that is what we are here to debate. That is what we are charged with preventing from ever happening to any family. Yet we have a Government that has gone out of its way to ignore the findings of the royal commission to ignore the findings and recommendations of its own independent task force and to ignore the international evidence that tells us that one of the best protections one of the best ways to ensure that workers come home safely from their everyday working lives is to make sure that workers have a voice in health and safety—to make sure that they are represented in that by having the right to elect one of their own to be the voice of health and safety.I just do not get what is so controversial and so hard about that. What is so hard about that? But that Government that National Government quivered in its boots when it heard some of the employers with the worst track records in this country in health and safety come to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and argue how onerous it would be for small business to have elected health and safety representatives if workers ask for it. I want people who are listening to this debate to understand exactly what is so onerous because we are not talking about employers having to employ anyone additional. There is no additional cost involved in this exercise. This is a person whom they already employ in their business who is simply going to be on the request of their workmates elected to be the person who speaks on behalf of those other workers because they have asked to have an elected representative.That does not impose any cost on business. It should not be something that good employers find at all alarming. In fact I have lost count of the employers who have come up to me in the course of the last 10 days who are embarrassed by this approach that has been taken by this Government. They are embarrassed that that has been taken in their good name because the vast majority of employers do not support the watering down of the recommendations that came from the royal commission. They do not support that. And employers large numbers of employers feel that their names have been sullied in this exercise because of what that Government has done.I want to acknowledge and support the speech of my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway earlier. We did have large employers with very bad health and safety track records come before the committee and tell the committee that workers were going to run rampant and that they were going to use the ability to elect a health and safety representative for some other agenda for some other secret unnamed agenda.I have read a very good book about the tragedy at the Pike River mine and I know that some of those same arguments—some of those very same arguments—were used in that environment. They were some of the same arguments that Jonathan Young just used: “Don’t talk to the union. Don’t have a representative. Come and talk directly with us.” That was the same culture that existed in the Pike River mine. It is exactly the same culture that existed there. And here is the National Government picking up that rhetoric and running with it and using that as an excuse to water down what is internationally accepted as being best practice when it comes to protecting workers in dangerous workplaces.Today we had watched the debacle in question time of the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety—Hon Ruth Dyson: Hapless Minister.SUE MORONEY: —the hapless Minister—being unable to answer the question about what high-risk industries would be required to have these health and safety representatives in place. Knowing the answer to that question the definitive answer to that question is incredibly important when we are debating this bill. I said before that some of the main proponents of this idea that workers cannot possibly have one of their own represent them in health and safety in small business were in fact large businesses. I confidently predict that if this bill goes through in its current form here is what is going to happen next: those large employers with very bad reputations and absolutely no respect for their workers or their lives will start to restructure their businesses so that they fit within the category of having fewer than 20 employees. We have seen it before. I can confidently predict it because we have seen it before. When it comes to legislation that has been in front of this House that has been designed to protect vulnerable workers in contracting-out situations and there have been similar provisions we have seen the ratbag employers use those provisions to restructure their businesses so that they can escape giving their workers the best protection possible.I apologise to the House if I sound a little angry; I am angry. I am absolutely furious about this. One of the things I did immediately before I came to this House as an MP was I trained health and safety representatives in their workplaces. So I have heard firsthand the stories of the devastation when it goes wrong. I have heard about the sorts of things that happen in workplaces the sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle pressures put on workers to go and do unsafe things in their workplace in the interests of increasing the profits of those companies. Make no mistake about it when we are debating this bill we are in the business of ensuring that people come before profits and that requires a backbone. It requires strong regulation. It requires understanding the dynamics at work in the workplace and how workers are vulnerable to having that pressure placed on them.This Government is failing those families. The Government is failing the 290 families who have lost loved ones since the Pike River mine disaster. It is failing every worker who walks out the door and goes to work in a workplace with fewer than 20 employees—and by the way that is a significant majority of workers in this country. We are opposed to this bill and I am proud of that.