Hague Kevin: WorkSafe New Zealand Bill Health and Safety in Employment Amendment Bill Mines Rescue Bill — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: WorkSafe New Zealand Bill Health and Safety in Employment Amendment Bill Mines Rescue Bill — Third Readings[Sitting date: 14 November 2013. Volume:694;Page:14738. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): Next Tuesday will mark the third anniversary of the Pike River disaster and I wanted to begin this contribution by reading a couple of paragraphs from the summary of the report of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy. “It is the commission’s view that even though the company was operating in a known high-hazard industry the board of directors did not ensure that health and safety was being properly managed and the executive managers did not properly assess the health and safety risks that the workers were facing. In the drive towards coal production the directors and executive managers paid insufficient attention to health and safety and exposed the company’s workers to unacceptable risks. Mining should have stopped until the risks could be properly managed. The Department of Labour did not have the focus capacity or strategies to ensure that Pike was meeting its legal responsibilities under health and safety laws. The department assumed that Pike was complying with the law even though there was ample evidence to the contrary. The department should have prohibited Pike from operating the mine until its health and safety systems were adequate.” The commission goes on in damning quote after quote saying that the law was inadequate and describing our own regulatory framework as being years behind those in operation in similar countries.The fact is that those 29 men were fundamentally and comprehensively betrayed and let down by the directors of the company who drove increased production at all costs yet dealt with health and safety as a tick-box exercise and by the Pike River Coal management for its failure to implement proper policies and procedures and its failure to implement training ignoring health and safety advice and taking short cuts at every turn. Those men were let down by the mines inspectors whose monitoring and enforcement were totally inadequate. They were let down by the senior management of the Department of Labour who under-resourced those same mines inspectors and ignored the pleas for further resourcing. It also applied a light-handed approach to regulation of the mining industry. They were let down by Bill Birch Max Bradford and all of those in this House who voted for those laws to gut health and safety regulation and to gut the mines inspectorate and all the subsequent Parliaments that as Andrew Little says have failed to reverse those until now.We come now to putting right. The royal commission and the Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety have certainly done their jobs. The question as I said in my second reading contribution is whether we in this House have done our jobs. I still have a question mark over that matter. Chris Finlayson to his great credit acknowledged in this House the role that deregulation had played in creating the environment that caused this disaster. But on the same day John Key denied that same role. Simon Bridges is the new Minister of Labour. I have not yet heard the Minister speak about the matter of deregulation and what role it played. So for me the jury is out as to whether the Government acknowledges that deregulation of health and safety and deregulation of the mining industry played that crucial role in creating the environment that created the disaster.The fact is that this Government still comes from that same DNA of that 1990s Government. The Government still sees its role as facilitating business and maximising its profits and sees people as just the labour input into the microeconomic theory of the firm. I believe that that is inadequate. So despite all the assurances of implementing the royal commission’s recommendations as others have said for me these bills arising from the Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Bill are still inadequate. Andrew Little has spoken of several of the matters that he has repeatedly raised and I also have repeatedly raised in the House.The creation of WorkSafe is the right thing to do but the Government still steps back from a genuine commitment to tripartite regulation of health and safety. That board ofWorkSafe will still be accountable to the Minister and not to workers or to employers. That is wrong. In my view the functions of the organisation are still inadequate. They actually describe the light-handed approach to ensuring health and safety that I have mentioned already in this contribution. And the failure of the Government to comprehend that this is not just about underground coalmining seems to me to be a failure of responsibility and a failure to understand one of the basic findings of the royal commission. So yes as other speakers have said this is a really major step forward but it is also a lost opportunity and I regret that. If the Minister disagrees I say to him now: “Show me. Show me show the families of the 29 and show my community that actually you are genuine about this health and safety business.”The Green Party is voting for this legislation but we regret that it is not better legislation. Those failures that I have mentioned—to act ethically and responsibly to prevent this disaster from occurring—are now being mirrored as my colleague Damien O’Connor has said in the failure to take responsibility for putting things right. PeterWhittallis still to face charges but others who are implicated in this business have escaped accountability. The owners of Pike River Coal have not been held accountable and have not stepped up to fund the settlements that the court has awarded the families of the 29. They were happy to take the profits and happy to own that mine but not happy to actually fund the consequence of their company acting illegally. The directors who made the decisions around the short cuts likewise have gotten away scot-free from accountability for this disaster and for the loss of those 29 and despite their own personal wealth have also declined to actually fund compensation to those families.The Department of Labour which investigated Pike River Coal did not even bother to investigate its own inaction—one of its statutory responsibilities. It did not bother to investigate whether or not charges against itself were appropriate. So that department also escapes scot-free and with the Prime Minister’s announcements this week the Government which the Department of Labour represented is also declining to fund any kind of compensation for the failure of its department to perform its duties properly. It seems as though those who actually take a loss from this are the 29 families and the 29 men who still lie underground at the Pike River mine.In preparing this contribution I opened the front of the royal commission report where the photographs of the 29 men and boys are a constant reminder to me. I live in Greymouth. I knew quite a number of these men. Joseph Dunbar often played league with my nephew. I often interacted with that boy. I cannot help but feel that this House has not met its responsibilities and I express my regret to my community and those families that we have not been able to live up to the debt that we owe them.