Brownlee Gerry: Urgent Debates — Pike River Mine Disaster—Release of Report Government Response and Ministerial Resignation 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Brownlee Gerry: Urgent Debates — Pike River Mine Disaster—Release of Report Government Response and Ministerial Resignation 
[Sitting date: 06 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6286. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery) 
: 
 Everyone participates in this debate this afternoon filled with the wisdom of hindsight and I do not think that you serve the best interests of those who are most deeply affected by these losses by getting into the sort of finger pointing exercise that I fear we are heading for. Yesterday Mr Finlayson and I went to the West Coast to give the families the first opportunity to see the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy’s report and to hear firsthand the Government’s response to it. 
It is a report that does not pull any punches. It does not attempt to excuse anything. It is a report that tries its very best to understand exactly what happened without having had the ability to enter the mine and know for sure exactly what the causes of this tragedy have been. When we spoke to the families I think they showed all of the characteristics that they have been recognised for by the royal commission. Those quotes of the commission have been mentioned many times this afternoon. They are part of the public record in the commission’s documents. When we came to the question time we would normally expect a number of people asking for questions of clarification. There was I think an immediate sense or an understanding that the words in here—“preventable deaths”—were cutting pretty deeply into those family members’ hearts. One woman asked me very directly: “What do you think you’re going to do? All I want is my husband back. Why can’t I have that?”. You know everyone knows that is not something that you can deliver or something that you can do but it does show that for the 2 years since this event there has been no opportunity for the families to be at any way in peace with themselves or to come to terms with the deep grief that they have for the family members they have lost. All that we can do is ensure that every opportunity is taken every piece of legislation is used and every regulation is changed so that this does not occur again. 
It is easy for the finger pointing to happen. You can look in this document and see the dreadful account of so many lives lost in underground mining in New Zealand. You can recognise in this commission’s own words that we have failed to take full cognisance of what those losses meant in the past and then make a determination not to do that again. The commission’s report is damning on both the company and the regulatory system. The incidents that were reported which seemed never to get the light of day and never to be understood by people do make sober reading. There is one on page 105 of the report that very explicitly says from a deputy underground experienced in conditions: “Get the [damn] ventilation sorted out so we can cut coal. This ventilation issue has dragged on for 2½ bloody years!!!” That was in a period in the year 2010 indicating that for a very long time virtually from the start of the portal project and then the cutting of the various roadways into the resource it saw problems and apparently nothing was done. 
The commitment that the Government makes is to pick up all of the recommendations in this report to implement as many of them as possible as quickly as possible and in particular to give recommendation No. 1 the full consideration that the royal commission obviously wants the Government to make. That should be a consideration that produces a regime that will endure for a much longer period than the 1992 legislation the Health and Safety in Employment Act but also picks up many of the elements of things that have been mentioned here today. The decline of the regulatory environment did not happen overnight; it happened over a long period of time. In fact Andrew Little today I think indicated that very well. He talked about the extraordinary drop in the number of safety inspectors in the Department of Labour between the mid-1990s and up until the date he chose 2008. I think what that indicates is perhaps an overconfidence that there was a growing culture of safety in New Zealand and I do not think that that could be denied. More people are more safety conscious these days than certainly was the case when I worked on building sites 30 or 35 years ago. But none the less we can do a lot better and we do need to avoid the sort of incidents that occurred so tragically at Pike River. 
I want to make a comment about the company directors’ response to the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy. They have today said that they are going to dispute some of the findings. When you get such a damning report as this when there is such overwhelming evidence of there having been a degree of deception in the way in which the mine itself was presented to the public and to investors then I do not think people should start running for places to hide. They should simply look at how they are going to participate in ensuring that this does not happen again. 
I want to make my final comments about the part of the royal commission report that deals with the recovery effort that was made immediately after the event. I read this with some interest because when I heard about the incident—I was at the time Minister of Energy and Resources—I was in Canterbury so I immediately went to the Pike River site. I got there around 10.30 or 11 o’clock in the evening. What surprised me was the general lack of organisation and lack of information about what the situation was. I think that all I want to say is that there is a need for a number of services who might be involved in these types of incidents to sort themselves out. Andrew Little spoke I think quite appropriately about the way in which the possibility of people being rescued from that mine was held out for such a long period of time—virtually from the Friday night right through until the Tuesday afternoon and then finally with the second big blast on Wednesday afternoon there was a recognition that it was changing from rescue to recovery. 
The tape that everyone saw on television on Tuesday evening should have been available to the families in my opinion on Saturday afternoon. Some of the people who were involved in the incident recovery team or coordinated incident management system process etc. should have been on top of that. What I am forever haunted by is the view that it was an irrelevant piece of footage and did not add to anything. The reality is that when I saw it on Monday it was total confirmation that anyone’s prospects of survival in that mine were exceptionally low. I think there was a general sort of excitement—and it sounds awful in the circumstances—that we might have a repeat in New Zealand of the rescue of the miners who were caught in the goldmine in Chile. The services who are involved here do also need to look at their performance—I am not criticising them; it was difficult and it was hard—so that they can be better prepared for future occasions. This is a good report. The Government will be acting on its recommendations. 
The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.