O'Connor Damien: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 19 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5976. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): I guess it is a responsibility not an honour to speak on Part 1 of this bill. I would like to go back and I appreciate your advice Mr Chair. I want to keep to Part 1 of the bill. It is around the reasons for the whole development of this bill and the issue I guess of small or large workplaces. Obviously they are defined in Part 1 as the armed forces intelligence and security agencies and aircraft—all places that are generally quite large places with quite a number of workers. Can I just go back to what has been the driver of this bill and it has been mentioned on occasion of course. Pike River Coal a large workplace has been seen as the primary driver—the place of a shocking disaster that gave rise to a new awareness around health and safety.I have to go back a couple of years from that to a small workplace to one where there was a maximum of six employees and indeed only two workers in a mine. An accident occurred and one of the workers Robert McGowan was killed. I raise this because I do not think his name or the agony that his wife has had to go through over those years has been mentioned. I can remember as if it were yesterday his wife coming up to me in the street in Greymouth on the day after the Pike River disaster and saying to me: “I told you so—I told you so.”What had happened as a result of that terrible accident in a small workplace in a mine—a small high-hazard workplace like a farm I guess—was that Robert McGowan had lost his life. An investigation was carried out and indeed there were queries of the mining industry. The conclusion of the Department of Labour’s investigation was that it was only the small workplaces that were risky and the larger workplaces were indeed well run well regimented and had everything in place. But incidents like that and I have to say subsequent ones in areas other than mining but in high-risk places have often been in small environments and small workplaces where people have suffered terrible tragedies.Part 1 covers health and safety at work. I guess I am trying to define workplaces and exclusive economic zones and in keeping in line with the tight nature of our debate I welcome the opportunity to expand on that later on. I think the definitions are in areas that we in Labour are challenging. The compromise that the Minister—not the compromise; he does not say that. The Government does not say that; we say that. The balance I guess that the Government has claimed as being achieved through changing the definitions in the bill in our view is very very dangerous and will inevitably lead to fatalities.I hold before you a book Tragedy at Pike River Mine: How and why 29 men died which I am just starting to read. It has been out for a little while. It has in here quotes from Hansard. It has quotes from debates in this House. I say to members in this House that as we go through this piece of legislation be very careful of what you say. Be very careful of what you say because people will read what we have said in this House. If we have been obviously compromised in our thinking and in our advocacy then the public in the future will have every right to come back and say to us as MPs that we were irresponsible.Some things are obvious. Some things need to be carried through in Parliament. For whatever reason—political expediency wheeling and dealing negotiation balance; call it what you like—if we proceed with Part 1 or Part 2 or Part 3 or whatever of this piece of legislation and it does not provide proper protection by way of legislation we cannot hold the hand of every worker in every workplace in the country. We understand that. But legislation has to be comprehensive enough to try to protect often the minority of people who do not have the skills have not been given the training or do not have the awareness. Those are the people—