Lees-Galloway Iain: Third Readings —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Third Readings —[Sitting date: 27 August 2015. Volume:708;Page:6277. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): After all the conjecture after all the debate after all the commentary and after all the work that has gone into this legislation the Government has gone out with a whimper and that whimper was Paul Goldsmith. It is no surprise at all that the Government has put up that junior Minister to come and read out a speech prepared for him at the third reading of these bills because in the hands of Michael Woodhouse the legislation arising from the Health and Safety Reform Bill has gone from being a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rectify New Zealand’s appalling rate of death and injury at work to being a debacle a farce a shambles and an embarrassment for the Government.Before the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety got his hands on this legislation before the National MPs on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee got their hands on this legislation it was a good piece of legislation. It was based on evidence. It was based on international best practice. It was based on the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy. It was based on the recommendations of the Government’s own Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety and it was based on Australian health and safety law which is has been working well for 10 years. It was based on things that work. It contained things that work. It was a piece of legislation that could have led the culture change that New Zealand so desperately needs because with or without Pike River it was becoming screamingly obvious that National’s ideology of deregulation was failing New Zealand workers and it was killing New Zealand workers.Compare New Zealand with any other developed market economy and our rate of death and injury at work is appalling. It is shameful and that is why the Government had to act. It introduced legislation that honoured the Pike River 29 and their families and all other workers who have needlessly lost their lives at work. That is what this legislation should be remembered for—a step change and an opportunity to acknowledge that for too many years we have been doing it wrong and we have been killing too many people. Instead it will be remembered for declaring that worm farming and lavender growing are high-risk industries while sheep beef and dairy farming—which kill more workers every year than any other industry—and industries like building demolition are going to be defined as low risk. That absolutely undermines this legislation.This legislation has no credibility in the public’s mind. It has no credibility in employers’ minds. People are utterly confused about what this legislation will do because the Government’s messaging has been muddled. It has had its own MPs out there fearmongering about what the impacts on business would be. People like Maurice Williamson Judith Collins and Chester Borrows have gone out into the public and actively undermined this legislation and actively undermined Michael Woodhouse. So employers and the public have no faith in this legislation. The Government has done an appalling job of working with employers to help them understand the implications of this bill for them. That is a result of rampant fearmongering from the Government. That is why we have got schools saying that they are going to rip up their playgrounds and stop sending their children on school camps because this Government has failed to get alongside employers and help them to understand what this legislation is all about.What the Government has done instead is that it has gutted some of the most important provisions in this legislation. We know why and the numbers that we released today tell us quite clearly what this is about. If there had been just five more serious injuries on farms per year then farming would have been defined as high risk. In other words when the Minister went looking for where he should draw the line about what is a high-risk industry and low-risk industry he drew it in just the right place to exclude farming.Hon David Parker: Don’t farms under-report?IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: Indeed. Farms do under-report. We know that WorkSafe has told us repeatedly that the rate of injuries on farms is dramatically under-reported. So actually if we knew the true figures farming would clearly be high risk. There is no need for this ludicrous definition of what is a high-risk and what is a low-risk industry. This is a fix from a National Party that has been bent over by the farming lobby. It should never have had to include this.The simple answer is this: let every worker in New Zealand have access to health and safety representatives if they want them. There is nothing onerous about this for businesses. If small businesses have good health and safety systems if they are working with their employees and if they have regular conversations about health and safety it is highly unlikely that those workers in those businesses are going to put their hands up and ask for health and safety reps. But so what if they do because having a health and safety representative is not an onerous thing. A health and safety representative is not someone in a high-vis vest with a clipboard like some in the National Party would like to believe. A health and safety representative is a worker who has specific mandated responsibilities for health and safety. Their everyday job is to be an employee or a worker in that business doing that business knowing that business—knowing it inside out and knowing what the risks are and being able to identify those and to work with their employer to improve the health and safety systems in their workplace. What is so onerous about that? Why is it that this became the flashpoint for this legislation? Why is it that that Government listens to the employers who do not want to change who do not want to improve practices and who do not want to kill and maim fewer people in their workplaces? Why did it listen to them? Why has this become the flashpoint for this legislation? Why has the National Government and the Minister Michael Woodhouse allowed this legislation to be so undermined over such a ridiculous issue?The simple fact is this: we should trust employers and workers to be able to figure out what works best for them. If having health and safety representatives is what works best for them then we should say: “Go for it. You can have them. You can ask for them even if you’re in a small business.” But instead that choice has been taken away from people working in small businesses by the so-called party of choice the National Party. It does not get it. Improving health and safety improving workers’ rights and improving pay and conditions for working people just is not in the National Party’s DNA. So when push came to shove and a call had to be made was it going to support working people or was it going to support fringe employers who do not have an interest in health and safety for their workers? The choice was easy for that Government; it went with the rogue employers not the working people and not the mainstream employers who came and submitted to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and said the legislation was in good shape as it was.This is a mess that never had to happen. We had good legislation. It could have been made better and more robust at the select committee but instead because the National Government has pandered to special interests this legislation has been undermined the public has no faith in it and the public has no faith in the Minister Michael Woodhouse or in this Government to secure working people’s rights to keep them safe at work and to deal with New Zealand’s appalling rate of death and injury at work. The National MPs should hang their heads in shame.