Williamson Maurice: Health and Safety Reform Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliamson Maurice: Health and Safety Reform Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 30 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5535. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga): I intend to take only a reasonably brief call on the Health and Safety Reform Bill at this point because this bill will get a lot of debate when we go to the Committee of the whole House. I know there will be a lot of amendments flying around. Because I am going to take a brief call I am going to restrict my speech to just the big heading issues under the heading of balance.Everything in life has a risk associated with it. When we drive on the roads in our cars when we fly on planes tonight when this Parliament lifts when we go sailing in a boat—there are deaths every year from those activities. The Government always tries to regulate and legislate to try to minimise the deaths from those activities. I was Minister of Transport for a number of years and I know I could have brought the road toll to zero just by making the speed limit 5 kilometres per hour and having only self-laying track armour-plated vehicles on the roads. The economy would have been bankrupt within a day it would not have worked but I could have held my hand on my heart and said: “We’ve had no deaths.” So why am I saying this? Because it is about balance. We think now that the road toll we have with the laws that we have and the vehicle standards and the warrant of fitness testing we have is about right. We are trying to improve it every year we are trying to reduce the number of deaths but in the end people will die on our roads and many of them will actually have been in the workforce at that time. We are trying to reduce aircraft accidents. If you want to reduce the chance of anybody dying in an aeroplane you just ban flying. But of course again that is not sensible—an extreme view.What this legislation has tried to do is have the right balance point. I am the first to admit—if the Labour Party members want to have an evil demon beast over there whom they can stick the skewer into put my name on that—that I was uncomfortable with this bill as introduced as not having the right balance point. I wanted to see some more balance in it. That does not mean to say I am in support of people being killed in the workplace. I want to try to reduce deaths in the workplace as much as we can. There is not a single member in this Parliament who does not want that. For God’s sake! Please get one person to stand up and say “I’m happy for more people to be killed in the workplace.” because no one will. But what we want is a balance. What we want is legislation that says this is not about having ridiculous self-laying track vehicles or a speed limit of 5 kilometres per hour. This is not about banning aeroplanes from flying altogether so that we have no aviation deaths.This bill is about making sure that employers have some obligations but that they are not ridiculous and they are not extreme. Those obligations are to provide the best possible safety conditions in the workplace that they can. That does not mean that even after this bill or the bill as introduced or any other legislation in this place is ever passed there will not be deaths in the workplace. There will be—just like there will be deaths on the road just like there will be an aeroplane crash within the next few years and just like there will be some more drownings before the end of this year. I am delighted that the Government took some time backed the truck up a little bit had a look at this legislation again and brought back to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee some changes that I think get us closer to the balance point. That is what this legislation is about—making sure that we make the workplace safe but doing it in a balanced way so that we do not have ridiculous extremes at either end and where we are not cutting off people’s arms and legs willy-nilly because we do not want that or where we make it so onerous for people to stay in business that it is not economic any more and they finally say that it would be better to sell up their business and go and invest in the Auckland property market. That is what we have done with this bill today.Debate interrupted.