Mitchell Clayton: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Clayton: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 25 August 2015. Volume:708;Page:6142. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): We are coming close to the end of a 14-hour Committee stage where we have had some pretty robust discussions from this side of the benches and only very few people on the National side have actually got up and spoken to this. But I would like to commend those people who actually have taken many many calls to put their passionate voices forward.The Health and Safety Reform Bill really is a bit of a cock-up in my opinion. At the start of the select committee deliberations we said that New Zealand First was close to being able to support this bill and we had a number—a great number—of Supplementary Order Paper amendments on the Table that we were hoping were going to get some sort of common-sense support for from the National Government the Government that is supposedly out there supporting small businesses with their ever-increasing load of increased compliance costs to run their businesses. Under this new legislation some family members if they are in a farm workplace are potentially going to be caught up embroiled in legal culpability. In the event that their husband goes out and has an accident the spouse could lose the farm and be sued a lot of money and potentially even spend some time in jail.We have got the cock-up that has come out in recent times of what is the definition of—what is actually going to be—a high-risk work group in our society. We have come out with things like worm farms butterfly farms and lavender growing. I mean goodness me! This bill had great expectations from the people of New Zealand. The submitters that we have heard from going into this were very excited about seeing some positive change. The rhetoric that the Government has thrown out towards us said that we were going to reduce health and safety incidents and death in our workplaces by 25 percent in the next 5 years.Well goodness me this is a half measure of what is expected by the people. We hear the likes of Andrew Bayly in the Chamber here saying that 97 percent of our country’s workers are actually employed in small businesses yet this does not capture them. Thirty percent of all people employed in New Zealand are not going to be captured under the 20 workers threshold.I have to say it is of some concern to New Zealand First and particularly to me that we have the situation where we put an amendment forward to reduce the number of workers able to actually get themselves a health and safety representative at work from 20 down to 10 and then of course we did not get the support from Labour—which was a big surprise—or those Greens. The reality is that if you are talking about real engagement and actually helping the workers have that bottom-up approach to supporting their workplaces then that was the real opportunity to go and do it. They did not even get to vote for their amendment. It was wiped off the table and yet there was no support there. It is a bit of an embarrassment when they are sitting up there yelling out about how well they have done to try to get the best deal they can and they did not even support reducing the threshold of those workers from 20 down to 10. That is what it is about: getting the best that we can get for our workers.I have to say that the Health and Safety Reform Bill would probably be better called the “Too Little Too Late Bill” because it has been a long time since the Pike River tragedy. It has been a total of 5 years. There has been a huge expectation out there within the community the working groups of New Zealand to get this bill sorted out once and for all right first time. Yet we are finding ourselves with hiccups where we cannot even get ourselves that representation—where small businesses cannot get their health and safety representative training paid for by the Government.In retrospect if you think about it in many ways that health and safety representation training is partly paid for by the Government already but it is paid for as a tax incentive. The Inland Revenue Department will give you a 100 percent deduction for that. However it will not cover the likes of the cost of the travel the time off work and it certainly will not cover your accommodation costs.For example if you are living in Gore and you are wanting to travel to Christchurch to go and get your health and safety representative training done that is going to be a cost a huge burden—an extra cost in the ever-increasing costs of running small businesses in this country—that could be waived and that the Government could take responsibility for in actually paying for those costs. Of course then people would not need to claim it back in their taxes because it would be something that the Government is offering. If it is truly about health and safety reform that would have been one measure that I would have thought the Government would have taken heed of and actually supported.I have to say that there is a media report that has just come out this afternoon. It has got here: “Late addition of national security provisions concerns Law Society. The New Zealand Law Society has expressed its significant concerns at the last-minute addition to the Health and Safety Reform Bill of provisions for a closed material procedure for court proceedings where national security is involved.”