Moroney Sue: Third Readings —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Third Readings —[Sitting date: 27 August 2015. Volume:708;Page:6281. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): When it comes to health and safety at work when corners are cut people die. This Government is cutting corners with this law. People will die. It is as simple as that. People will die because that Government could not help itself—it could not help itself. In the face of the evidence from the royal commission in the face of all of the hard work that had been done by its own independent task force that it had put in place it still could not go through with putting the very best protections in place for working people. This bill in its third reading shows the National Government reverting to type—absolutely reverting to type.When this bill came into the House for its first reading it had consensus right across Parliament. That is highly unusual but everyone—everyone—put politics aside because we believed that we wanted to do the very best to protect people in their workplaces. So that is where we started from. But through the process National clearly decided to put politics before people. It clearly made that decision.I was on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee which heard this piece of legislation. I saw the moment that politics entered the room. I saw that precise moment. In fact I did a tweet. I did not know at the time how forward-looking that tweet was but I tweeted something like: “Whoa Hurricane Judith just entered our select committee room. She caused a storm and then she walked out and calm was resumed.” That is effectively what it was like. That is exactly what it was like because Judith Collins who was not actually a permanent member of the committee came on temporarily saw what the select committee was doing—its very good work in developing a comprehensive law around health and safety—and started attacking the Minister started attacking the officials and had a go at everyone in the room.Then the next thing we know National is starting to back-pedal on putting the very best provisions and protections forward as recommended by the royal commission and the independent task force. We know that National has decided to put politics ahead of the safety of people at work because it is absolutely obvious what happened next. The decision in the National caucus room was to try to remove health and safety representation for groups of workers in their workplace.I want to spend a little bit of time just reminding people what we are talking about here. We are not talking about a business having to spend any more money employing any other person. We are not talking about a business having to get a health and safety specialist in or a consultant in or any of those things that businesses are actually busy doing right now because of the hash that this Government has made of that bill. We are talking about workers if they wanted to deciding to elect one of their own—someone already doing the job someone already paid by the employer to do the work who understands what goes on day in and day out in that workplace—to be elected as a health and safety representative and then for that person to get 2 days’ training so that they could understand what their role is understand the legislation and ensure that the workers had a voice when it came to their own health and safety in that workplace. What is so hard about that—what is so hard about that?But here is the worst thing about this story. All the international research and evidence says that this is the real key to it: getting genuine worker participation where workers can have a voice in what goes on in their workplace. That is the key to good health and safety in the workplace. But this Government could not help itself. It could not help itself and it got rid of it. But it did not get rid of it for everyone so we are reduced to arguing about who is deserving of the very best protection at work and who is not. What that Government decided was that people who work in workplaces with fewer than 20 employees are not deserving of having the very best health and safety participation in their workplace. That is what it decided.But then it made another gaffe—it made a further gaffe. The Government decided that oh this might look pretty bad for it because a lot of the workplaces with fewer than 20 employees are actually in our most dangerous industries—forestry mining contracting-out companies and farming. And so it decided: “Well we won’t. We’ll make sure that the high-risk companies no matter how many employees they have will have to have a health and safety representative if the workers ask for one.” That is where it really started to unravel because in the Government’s determination to make sure that its support base in the farming sector was excluded from this requirement it went about manipulating the data and finding a figure that worked for it so that it could find a threshold that excluded farming. Well what a shambles because in doing that it ended up including a whole lot of areas that clearly were not very high risk at all and excluding a whole lot of areas that were high risk.The Government made a complete shambles of it. It is the Government’s own fault and no amount of consultation is going to fix up that problem because what went wrong is that it put politics before people—it put politics before people. No amount of tweaking that bit of nonsense is actually going to make a blind bit of difference to the problem that exists from the outset. Everyone in every workplace—no matter what their industry no matter what their occupation no matter how many people are employed in that workplace no matter in what part of New Zealand—should have the best access to health and safety in their workplace. That is what we should have learnt from the Pike River mine situation.During the course of the debate I was criticised for daring to bring a replica urn into the Chamber while we debated the issue because some of the members opposite believed it caused them offence. They felt offended at having a replica urn in the Chamber while we debated this issue. I acknowledge that they felt offended but imagine the offence caused to those families who have lost their loved ones who believed that this legislation was going to fix the problems so that no other families would go through what they had gone through. Imagine how offended they felt. Imagine how offended they felt as they sat up here in the gallery and listened and watched that Government weasel its way out of providing the best health and safety representation possible for workers in workplaces. That is genuine offence—not having to debate an issue because a replica urn is in the Chamber.I am wearing today as are many of us a yellow ribbon. I hope that does not cause offence to anyone. This is the yellow ribbon that actually reminds us about the 29 men who died in the Pike River mine. I once saw the Prime Minister wearing this yellow ribbon—around the Pike River mine. I have not seen him wearing it in the last few weeks while we have been debating this issue but he should have been because this is a yellow ribbon that reminds us that those families want their men home. They want to bring their men home and it is this yellow ribbon that symbolises that.There was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get this right. When I spoke at the first reading on this bill I recalled speaking last year on a piece of legislation that this House passed that we did all agree on I believe. It was designed to regulate the mining sector and it has Pike River mine in the name of that Act of Parliament now. I remember standing up at the time and saying: “Please let us never forget. We’re all in agreement now but please never let us forget that deregulation at work kills people. Never let us fall into this trap again of thinking that deregulation is a good thing in our workplaces because it kills.” I thought at the time that I was saying to Parliament: “Look you know let’s not have amnesia in a decade’s time. Let’s not get it wrong as time goes on.” I am gobsmacked that just a year later we seem to have forgotten the lesson already. This bill could have been so good and sadly the Government has trashed it.