Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Chair. Here we are we're talking about the Estimates for workplace relations and safety. I want to start off with workplace relations—in particular where this Budget has about $143 million sent to WorkSafe New Zealand. Like just about every other area of Government spending they have increased spending in this area by about 50 percent since they came to office five years ago. It was about $89 million back in 2017; now it's $143 million so there have been big increases in spending. There's also been a 25 percent increase in staff and yet 12 years after Pike River and nine years after the Act in 2013 to establish WorkSafe what we're seeing is adverse trends over the past four years in the three key areas that WorkSafe was measuring itself against: first on fatal injuries which has been static or very slightly worsening but largely static since 2016; on serious non-fatal injuries but serious injuries they have increased since 2017 from about 14 per 100000 people to 18 per 100000 people—this is not just because the population's increased; it's as a proportion of the number of people—and the third key area that they were basing themselves on was working injuries requiring people to be off work for more than a week. That has slightly increased and it certainly hasn't reduced. Now the goal was to be reducing these significantly. So serious injuries non-fatal injuries have increased significantly. Fatal injuries and being away from work for more than a week have been static or very very slightly increasing. So the question is that we've got a 50 percent increase in funding 25 percent more staff and yet we're not making particularly any progress; in fact we're getting worse on one of the core measures of improving safety. It's not of course just the $143 million that we're talking about here; we're talking about the safety of New Zealanders at work which is a very important thing so that people know when they go off to work they've got a good chance of coming back to their families and not being injured not being hurt not being poisoned or having to deal with hazardous substances. It's not just accidents but workplace injuries and it's not of course just the cost of WorkSafe. This has been in relation to enormous regulations that have gone across the community which have a very big impact on the cost of everything that we do in New Zealand whether it's building a house or building a road which the Minister should know a lot about which improves safety for motorists such as the magnificent expressways through Waikato for example which have finally been completed—much safer roads. But the cost of building roads has been increased significantly through the regulations around health and safety. The purpose of that is to save lives and yet when we look at these measures we don't seem to be making the progress that we're getting to. So my fundamental question to the Minister: over the last five years as this work—this operation—has matured why have we stagnated or indeed started to suffer worse outcomes around serious non-fatal injuries in the workplace? Then a whole bunch of related questions—because the Minister did get an independent review of WorkSafe by SageBush and so I presume he has been slightly worried about these things. It's a pretty damning report that we've received and that we've been considering in the light of how this all flows from the Estimates debate and one of the very basic questions that they expected to find was that WorkSafe would be able to clearly describe what it does—pretty basic—the activities that it undertakes the resources that it uses and the impacts or outcomes of its efforts. That's pretty basic. It's what you'd expect for any organisation. Then what did they find when they looked into WorkSafe? They found the description was rather unclear: We could not locate a description of how its core activities linked to its outcomes." "We didn't have a clear framework of the tools to assess the value of its activities." and "We found that WorkSafe is not yet able to identify activities and associated resources that underpin each of its core activities." In essence what the report found was that it was all a bit vague actually and they couldn't really sort of articulate what they were trying to do and how they were going to measure it. Instead of the three key measures that they're not making much progress on—in fact one of them is going backwards significantly—they've now come up with a whole bunch of new measures most of which are very very vague indeed with one of them being that the workplace will be healthy and WorkSafe now instead of trying to reduce the exact numbers will be just striving to reduce that metric. I don't know what that means. Is that a target to reduce it by 10 percent over five years or to keep it steady or to have it increasing slowly or—no it's to just reduce it over time and then there's a whole series of new measures. The problem with if every time a new Minister comes in and is in charge of an organisation that is doing a very important task in the country in terms of trying to improve safety in the workplace—if every new Minister comes along and decides "Well I don't like the old measures of progress."—reducing serious non-fatal injuries for example—"I'm going to come up with a whole bunch of new ones." which he has. He's come up with 22 or something like that—a whole bunch of new measures. But of course then you can't compare it with how it was going before. You lose all the ability to have a sense of how we're making progress for all the effort that we're making as a country in this space.So the question I have for the Minister is: why did he change all the measures why did he move away from the ones that he wasn't making progress on and fundamentally why does he think progress has stalled when it comes to workplace accidents and reducing the overall number of them in the past four years and why has it got worse when it comes to serious non-fatal accidents?Is he concerned that as SageBush independent research has shown his organisation—which he's been responsible for for a while and this Government's been in place for five years—doesn't have a clear sense of what it's trying to achieve what it's using to achieve those things and whether it's actually making progress against them? So these are pretty fundamental questions—pretty basic questions—and I'd like the Minister to start reassuring us on each of them over the next few minutes. Thank you Madam Chair."