Robertson Grant: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 20 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:6055. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): I want to talk today in the context of Part 3—in particular clause 65(3)—about Tom Sewell who was a 21-year-old British backpacker who came to New Zealand. He actually came on a working holiday visa. He found his way to the Bay of Plenty region where he got a job working on a kiwifruit orchard. On his very first day he died in a quad bike accident. He did not have a helmet. He had no training. He had nobody supporting him on that first day. His family in Britain remain today bemused by the fact that this could happen in a country like New Zealand. For anyone who thinks that this is just about the sheer tragedy of somebody like Tom Sewell and his family it is also about our international reputation. Websites have been devoted to what has happened to people like Tom Sewell who have come to New Zealand—their families expecting that they would be looked after their families expecting that someone who came to work to ride a machine like a quad bike would be given at least some training. It did not happen.Under clause 65(3) of this bill if Tom Sewell’s equivalent comes to New Zealand there will not need to be a workplace health and safety representative appointed. They are excluded. They are not here. They are not deemed to be at high risk. That is wrong—that is wrong. It is wrong in the memory of people like Tom Sewell and it is wrong in the memory of the 37 other people who have died in quad bike accidents over the last few years. Just because that orchard falls outside the Minister’s definition of what a high-risk workplaceis it is not good enough. We owe it to everyone who goes to work in this country—whether they are someone here on a working holiday visa on their first day at work or someone who has been a miner on the West Coast for 40 years going to work again day after day. We owe it to every single one of those people that when they go to work we have done everything that we can to ensure their safety. If we pass this part in the form it is in now we cannot answer that question. We cannot say that we have done everything we could have if we pass clause 65(3).I do want to acknowledge Marama Fox. I know the Māori Party supports Supplementary Order Paper 99 in Iain Lees-Galloway’s name to delete that clause and I thank the party for that support. But for us what this means is that if this goes through as it is now we cannot support this bill. I reject the notion that it is somehow or other a dichotomy between what is here right now and the old legislation because it is not. The pathway this legislation was going down was one where this whole Parliament would have supported it. We had large employers small employers worker organisations and the families of those who had had loved ones die all supporting the pathway that we were going down.Then the Government comes along and now we have got a situation where this part of the law is no longer about risk to workers; it is about political risk. That is wrong. It is about the political risk to the National Party from its supporters. There can be no other way of explaining the extraordinary definitions of “high-risk” that now fall outside the scope of clause 65 of this bill. There is no way of explaining why you would exclude sheep poultry and cattle farming but include alpaca farming bird breeding cat breeding crocodile farming worm farming—it is ridiculous. If it was not so tragic it would be hilarious. This is a farce. Do you realise that a high-risk industry according to this Minister is curtain installation but demolishing a building is not? I am not very good at putting up curtains and actually it is probably quite high-risk when I do it but that should not be in a list of high-risk industries.This Minister needs to get on his feet and tell us how it is that cattle and dairy farming orchards kiwifruit that kind of thing are not deemed high risk. If it is about saying we average it out over a year to find the figure then that is not right. We all know that farming is a seasonal business. We need to look at the rates of death in the industries at their peak periods. There is no point in looking at it across a whole year; that is a meaningless statistic.We know that farming—particularly cattle and dairy farming and those intensive cropping industries where there is difficult terrain—is where we see the deaths. So I urge members to support Iain Lees-Galloway’s Supplementary Order Paper 99 that actually deals with this issue and removes clause 65(3) so that we do not have this farcical and arbitrary situation of declaring the magical figure to be 20 or 25 or 30. In the end that denies the reality of the experience that people like Tom Sewell went through. I believe strongly that as a country New Zealand cannot afford its reputation to continue to be tarnished by what is seen internationally as a lax attitude.This bill does some good things. There is absolutely no doubt about that. We have talked about them in Part 1 and Part 2. But here in Part 3 we come to the nub of it. If we are going to get health and safety to be at the level we want it to be then the role of health and safety representatives matters. Yes let us all work together to make it practical. I agree with that. We do not want to impose impractical conditions. But if they are not conditions that involve the workers if they are not conditions that give them the chance to be represented to—as Marama Fox said—actually know their rights to actually know what they are able to do then they do not live up to the standards that we require.In this call and perhaps another one I want to talk also about the amendments that we are proposing in Supplementary Order Paper 100 to clause 66 of the bill. In clause 66(4) we want to add new clause 66(4)(ab): “agree the work group structure with the workers;”. This is a critical point. It is great that there will be a work group and it is great that we are building the partnerships within the workplace to ensure health and safety but if we do not have worker representation in the establishment of those groups we miss out on so much. People in every business I go into today talk to me about the importance of involving their workers in the way they manage their firms.We have all heard the stories about the lean manufacturing model about high-performance workplaces. Every single one of those now is built on the principle of engagement. It is hopeless to impose on a workforce a whole set of rules that it has had no involvement in whatsoever. It is not productive. It does not help with the bottom line and it also does not help with the health and safety of workers. So that is why clause 66 starts off—again as so much of this legislation does—on the right path of the idea that there will be a work group that will help determine the health and safety conditions but if we do not have in that clause that the structure of that work group is agreed with workers then we fall down at the hurdle again.Who knows the most about what is going to work in terms of health and safety? The workers who go in every single day do. And the tragedy of Pike River is that those workers were not listened to when they raised concerns day after day after day. When we are setting up a new structure a better structure—and I acknowledge the Minister; this is a better structure—if we set it up without including the worker voice without listening to the people who know the most about health and safety then we fail. We fail to deliver on the very promise that we should have been making from day one to those who have lost loved ones in workplace accidents.I call on the Minister to do two things. One is to stand up in this Chamber and tell us why Tom Sewell and his equivalents should not be covered by this law. This is somebody who went to work on a working holiday on a kiwifruit orchard to ride a quad bike on his first day and no one gave him any support or training. He was not given a helmet. How can that be allowed to happen? Yet under clause 65(3)of this bill that workplace would not be deemed to be high risk and therefore would not have to have workplace health and safety representatives. We owe it to the families of those who have died to change clause 65 of this bill to take out that arbitrary distinction and give to every New Zealand worker their right to a safe workplace.