Hague Kevin: Health and Safety Reform Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Health and Safety Reform Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 30 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5530. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. There is a whakataukītanga kōrero that probably appears most frequently in speeches in this House and from Ministers outside this House: He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata he tangata he tangata.[What is the most important thing in the world? It is people it is people it is people.]I wonder whether instead of saying “he tangata” three times we should be saying it 29 times as a reminder of the 29 lives lost in the Pike River disaster. We were reminded by the memorial out at the Cenotaph yesterday evening of those lives lost which in a sense was the genesis of this bill. I have lost count of the times since the Pike River disaster that I have heard members of Parliament and Ministers say that we owe it to the memory of those men who were lost and to their families to ensure that that kind of disaster can never recur. Perhaps we should be saying “he tangata” 291 times reflecting the 291 people who have perished in their workplaces since the Pike River disaster. These lives are precious. There is nothing more important—no more important responsibility of Government—than to protect our citizens. This is a responsibility that this Government is currently failing and proposes to fail further.Over the decades it has been a familiar refrain from employers that they know best and the way to ensure health and safety in the workplace is to leave it to them because they will be able to tailor a regime that suits their particular workplace and their particular workers. There are good employers and there are bad employers. The job of legislation—the job of Government—is to set a minimum standard and a minimum requirement so that even bad employers cannot get away with less.In the 1990s the Government of the day agreed with what the employers had asked for—to leave it to them—and it deregulated despite the clarity of the message at the time in response to that: that deregulation of health and safety would lead to unnecessary deaths in the workplace. I have pointed out in the House several times in relation to the Pike River disaster and the various pieces of legislation that we have considered subsequently that standard economic theory says that firms will seek to minimise their costs by any means that are available to them legally. That includes cutting corners on health and safety if they are able to do so. At Pike River and at literally hundreds of other workplaces that is precisely what a deregulated health and safety regime allowed bad employers to do.We were pleased when the Government introduced this bill because it was a great step forward from the regime that existed previously. It was not a perfect bill by any means but it was a step forward. Unfortunately the Government has once again caved in to the case made by bad employers and as a result of that we are changing our vote today and the Green Party will vote against this bill. We hope that there will be changes made in the Committee of the whole House that will enable us to once again support this bill.Some of the specific issues—and we will deal with many specific issues in the Committee stage—we want to refer to now. The biggest I think is probably the exemption that the Government intends to grant for workplaces of under 20 people. If people are truly at the heart of the policy then we need to see the policy from the perspective of those whom we are trying to protect—the people who are the workers and who go to work in their workplaces. A person’s right to go to work be safe in that workplace and then come home to their family is no different in a workplace of fewer than 20 employees than in a workplace with more. The Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety and the Government will no doubt argue that that right of those workers needs to be compromised to avoid unnecessary or disproportionate compliance costs for small employers.I used to be an employer in a small business place—in a variety of them in fact. Although I certainly had some gripes about compliance costs health and safety compliance costs were absolutely never one of those. Indeed the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment has taken the extraordinary initiative it seems to me of in fact putting up on its website some information to dispel the mythology around this kind of rhetoric that has been presented from a small group of bad employers.Not only is there no reason not to protect workers in small workplaces to the same extent as we might in larger ones but in fact it is arguable that there is more reason to do so. This is because the international evidencein particular from the United States—the New Zealand evidence is not currently strong enough either way—makes it clear that in general smaller workplaces are in fact less safe than larger ones. The Government’s move to water down the obligations of employers in smaller workplaces actually places less protection on the workers whom we expect to be at greater risk.We have some specific concerns about the treatment of work groups in the bill. Health and safety representatives are there to represent workers but what the bill enables employers to do is deem a particular work group whom these representatives will represent. In other words it will be employers not the workers themselves who decide which workers representatives represent. That is a travesty of the very idea of representation. It may be a drafting error in which case I look forward to the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper on that matter.We are concerned about the situation of home support workers people who will be by definition in very small workplaces. It appearsthat under this legislation nobody essentially will be responsible for the obligations that the employers of those workers have under this legislation. Again this is a travesty in relation to some of the most vulnerable workers in our country. We will raise other matters in the Committee of the whole House.Members will recall that this bill has arisen pretty directly out of the report of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy and from the report of the Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety. Both of those entities recommended sweeping changes. They said that New Zealand’s health and safety law was entirely inadequate and both focused on all employers not just some. They both said that major reform was required and that greater worker engagement was essential and they both heard and retold evidence that unions were essential as worker representatives. They both proposed alignment with jurisdictions that had better health and safety records than New Zealand in particular Australia. The regime that the original bill proposed was precisely what Australia has and it works there. There is no reason in fact to change it.One of the sections in this report of the royal commission on the Pike River disaster is entitled “A failure to learn” and as Sue Moroney has already spoken about in this House that seems to be precisely the route that we are now proceeding down. I recall that when I asked the Prime Minister on 8 November 2012 whether he accepted that deregulation as the royal commission had said had caused the disaster he said no—