Lees-Galloway Iain: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 25 August 2015. Volume:708;Page:6122. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): Part 6 of the Health and Safety Reform Bill is the part that contains amendments to other Acts. As I am sure people would appreciate health and safety legislation does interact significantly with other pieces of legislation. It does not act in isolation. Therefore in developing a new health and safety regime there have been included in the legislation amendments to some other pieces of legislation—in particular the Accident Compensation Act 2001 and the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act.I will begin this first contribution by discussing some of the changes to the Accident Compensation Act. Clause 244 inserts new sections 174A to 174F into the Accident Compensation Act. This deals with the development and establishment of workplace incentive programmes. New section 174A(1) talks about the corporation developing “… 1 or more workplace incentive programmes to provide incentives for employers and self-employed persons to reduce the incidence severity and impact of work-related personal injuries.” and states that “(2) A Work Account levy determined … may be adjusted up or down for a particular employer or a particular self-employed person in accordance with the terms and conditions of a workplace incentive programme.”In other words the levy that you may pay to the work account as an employer or as a person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) which is the term that we are using in this legislation may be determined by the safety record that you have. This is to be done increasingly under this legislation in conjunction with WorkSafe. The changes contained in this legislation prescribe the process to develop a workplace incentive programme which has to have regard to as new section 174B(1)(a)(i) states: “the extent to which the programme is likely to lead to reductions in the incidence severity and impact of work-related personal injuries and to improvements in rehabilitation and durable return to work; and (ii) the extent to which the programme may affect the Work Account levies payable by levy payers who are not participating in the programme;”. This is the bit where there has been a little bit of concern.My colleague Sue Moroney has raised this and I am sure she will go into this in some depth. This was the area that she looked at most closely during the deliberations of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—the question of whether reducing levies is the best indicator that an injury and prevention programme is working appropriately. The one rather perverse example that did come up during the select committee process was that it is actually more costly for ACC to deal with the ongoing compensation and rehabilitation of a person who is injured than it is obviously for someone who is killed in a workplace accident.So you could have the outcome where the worst result—someone being killed in an incident rather than injured—actually results in lower costs for ACC. So you have got to be very careful when you focus solely on cost as a measure of whether or not a programme to prevent injuries and deaths at work is actually working. We sought some assurances at the select committee. Initially we thought we were getting those assurances but the more advice we took and the more we examined this we realised that actually it is possible that these perverse outcomes could happen because the focus is very much on getting the cost of those levies down.The new sections on the changes to the Accident Compensation Act also go on under clause 249 which inserts new sections 264A and 264B. These provisions deal with a Workplace Injury Prevention Action Plan. This is where ACC—the Accident Compensation Corporation—and WorkSafe must at all times have a Workplace Injury Prevention Action Plan something that I hope ACC has certainly been working on for a long time and would expect to have been in place in the past.New section 264A(2) states that “The Corporation and WorkSafe—(a) may amend the workplace injury prevention action plan at any time; and (b) must review the workplace injury prevention action plan at least once every 3 years.” It has to “(3)(a) outline all workplace injury prevention programmes that will be undertaken by WorkSafe and the Corporation (jointly or separately) in the period to which the plan relates;”. The corporation and WorkSafe have to lay out their priorities for injury prevention but again one of the priorities that is restated is this priority of getting the levies down. Again we warn that it is important that we take care not to confuse reducing levies with effective measures to prevent injury and death at work.Subpart 2 of Part 6 makes amendments to the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act. There are a range of amendments to that Act dealing with matters that have to do with potential injury caused by various chemicals and substances as well as the impact of ongoing occupational disease caused by various substances that people may find that they come into contact with in their working life. It is actually difficult but important that our health and safety legislation addresses the issue of occupational disease. It may not be immediately obvious that an action—the use of a particular chemical or the use of personal protective equipment or the lack of use of it—is causing danger to the worker because you may not immediately receive an injury like a burn or inhale a substance that has an immediate effect. It may be that ongoing exposure to that particular substance over time has a long-term effect.Obviously this is something that we are far more mindful of today than we have been in the past but often we can discover this a long way down the track. You do not realise at the time that it is causing damage but further down the track it turns out that it has been causing damage. So it is important that we are mindful of these matters and the bill goes some way to attempting to address the ways in which that can be done. For instance clause 271 replaces section 74 of the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act with—and this is with regard to the establishment of hazard classification system—provision whereby the Environmental Protection Authority has the ability to prescribe “… for each intrinsic hazardous substance property a number of degrees or types of hazard which may be done either by reference to an international system or by incorporation of material under section 141A:”—a system of classifying different substances and therefore indicating the types of precautions that need to be taken in the use of those substances. You would like a little bit more entertainment Mr Chairperson? Do not worry; we will get to the preliminary clauses soon. This is—Sue Moroney: Well not too soon.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: No not too soon. There are some very technical aspects to this legislation. I can see by the clock in front of you Mr Chairperson that my time for this particular call is coming to an end. I am sure I will get an opportunity to speak again. We will come back to some of the other matters in this part shortly.