Dowie Sarah: Underground Coal Mining Safety Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDowie Sarah: Underground Coal Mining Safety Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 24 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4728. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): I rise in opposition to the Underground Coal Mining Safety Bill but as my colleagues have done I will not move any further without acknowledging the intention behind this bill. It is extremely admirable that the member Damien O’Connor has brought this to the floor in response to a tragedy that should not have happened and that of course is the Pike River mine tragedy. We are shortly coming up to the anniversary of that disaster where 29 men on the West Coast lost their lives. I can certainly say as someone who comes from a tight-knit community that when a tragedy such as that occurs everybody would have known one if not many of those men and my sympathies are with those families in that community where such a huge and significant tragedy has occurred. It was a tragedy that should never have happened but now we need to move forward and certainly learn from it. But as my other colleagues have mentioned time has moved on and events have superseded this bill. Following on from Pike River there was of course the royal commission into the tragedy and there were 16 recommendations from its report. It should be noted that the Government has adopted those recommendations and one of those of course is to reform our law in respect of health and safety acknowledging that New Zealanders as a culture require a step change in health and safety—a step change in how we view it and a step change in how we deal with health and safety in the workplace—and that is certainly something that the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee has been looking at over the past months.I just want to pick up on a point raised by the member opposite—Mr Lees-Galloway. He suggested that this side of the House is deliberately slowing down the legislation. Well yes we are because we want to get health and safety legislation right. This is the biggest reform in 25 years and we need to make sure that the law is fit for purpose. We have a new concept coming into play a PCBU or person conducting a business or undertaking and we must make sure that that is fit for purpose not only for our large high-risk industries but also for the businesses that are low risk. But in acknowledging that in respect of Pike River in 2013 new regulations were introduced in respect of mining administration and what they did was require mining operators to “put in place new health and safety management systems; appoint people to new safety critical roles; make sure their workers meet new competency requirements; comply with strengthened minimum standards; meet new requirements for emergency preparedness … and; meet notification and reporting requirements.” So that in itself is a step change but this new Government bill coming into play a bill that will again raise the bar means that New Zealanders have to take health and safety seriously and look at it as an integral part of their business. As part of that the Government has established WorkSafe New Zealand and the challenge will lie with it to get the balance between carrot and stick to encourage businesses to look at their safety culture but also to take a hard line on those operators who are not compliant with health and safety laws and are not putting their people first in respect of health and safety.I just want to touch on some statistics. Obviously it is part of the Government’s programme to reduce deaths and injuries at work by 20 percent by 2020. If we look across some of those high-risk sectors we can see that we definitely need a reduction—for example in the rural agriculture sector there were 20 deaths last year. So this legislation is timely. I am not apologetic for slowing it down. We need to take a look at it. We need to take this law reform seriously. It is the biggest law reform in health and safety in 25 years. But in respect of this bill from Damien O’Connor it has been superseded by events and despite the intention we oppose the first reading.