Delahunty Catherine: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 19 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5971. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Tēnā koutou e te Whare Pāremata and also greetings to all who have experienced the reality of workplace un-safety. I would just like to acknowledge the people who spoke in Parliament last night about their experiences. Bernie Monk said to me: “We didn’t want memorials and tears; we wanted action.” and those words are ringing in my ears. He said that he had said this to the Prime Minister of New Zealand and he has not had it so it was a very powerful moment for me personally to hear that directly from Bernie. I would also like to acknowledge my friend—he is one of the reasons I came to Parliament—Mr Joe Harawira who is also in Parliament at the moment. He along with his many many colleagues from around Aotearoa has had incredible experience of workplace lack of safety and he is still fighting—and I am not convinced that Part 1 of the Health and Safety Reform Bill will address this—for ACC recognition of his being poisoned in the workplace. So these people have had an amazing experience. I toured the country with them on a tour called the People Poisoned Daily Tour in the early 2000s and they got a designated doctor whom they have since lost because the Government is no longer funding that. So I just want to mihi to Joe Harawira today and say that many of us will keep fighting for the fact that workplace safety is not just about large workplaces and not just about current issues; it is also about historical unfinished business.It is not just about the obvious dangers. There are many forms of health and safety that people are unaware of in what might appear on the surface to be safe workplaces. If you are talking about farms if you are talking about forestry and if you are talking about the timber industry and the mills people suffer not only from terrible accidents and from the refusal of the employer to understand those very obvious risks but also because they do not always understand the chemicals they are dealing with. That is what happened to Joe and that is what happened to his many many friends and family because the chemical that they were exposed to has intergenerational effects. It has the effect of impacting on the worker their partner and their kids intergenerationally. I have seen cases of people with holes in their heart and the lists of miscarriages and the terrible cancers and the diabetes that come when workplaces do not take safety seriously. I am not convinced yet that this “Tolstoyan novel” that we have before us is actually going to address what has happened to the sawmill workers of the Bay of Plenty and of Aotearoa. I am not satisfied yet and neither can they be.I want to go to Part 1 and in clause 3 “Purpose” subclause (1)(a) states: “protecting workers and other persons against harm to their health safety and welfare by eliminating or minimising risks arising from work”—that presumably means everybody—“or from prescribed high-risk plant;” which is obviously going to be debated later. “Work” does not exclude workers in the home. “Work” does not mean not in all forms of agriculture. “Work” does not exclude prisoners. “Work” means work and a worker is someone who is doing the work not somebody whom you decide is not actually entitled to protection because they do not fit into a category—it is about when people are working. So I am at a loss to see how anybody could be excluded from this. This is not about one size fits all—that is an incredibly disrespectful way to talk about everybody’s right to be included in health and safety legislation. I cannot think of anybody in any circumstance at work who should not be protected. A small workplace of fewer than 20 on the farm or off the farm a large timber mill a small site—everybody is at work. Prisoners work. Everybody works and this bill does not protect them because you cannot fulfil clause 3(1)(a) without making a better job of clause 3(1)(b).Clause 3(1)(b) states: “providing for fair and effective workplace representation consultation co-operation and resolution of issues …” but that cannot be achieved if workers cannot select a health and safety committee their own representative and all of the other things that go with that. The whole reason that we had the Pike River disaster was that Peter Whittall would not listen to the workers. It was not a bunch of workers refusing to put on their safety gear; it was methane every day day after day—methane methane no ladder methane. There was a room full of complaints. Read Rebecca Macfie’s book—read the book. Those workers complained every single day that they were at risk and what happened? A big fat nothing and they died—a big fat nothing and they died. And what is happening to the sawmill workers is a slow creeping death and I am not exaggerating. You talk to them and find out whether I am exaggerating. It is a slow creeping death because they still cannot get recognition of the danger of the chemical to which they were exposed even though it was banned in 1980. So we have got a lot of work to do and this bill unfortunately for all its merits—for which we have tried to support it—does not fully do that work. It actually excludes some critical issues particularly the issue of protecting workers.I was at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee one day—and I do not claim to have anything like the knowledge of those of you who went right through this particularly my colleague Denise Roche but I was there—when somebody on the select committee said: “Oh do we have to use the word ‘worker’?”. I found that very revealing. I think it symbolised for me the problem. The ideological problem of the Government is that it does not understand that participation is not equity. Participation is not justice. Calling everybody the same thing will not result in protection from tragedies like Pike River. If you are a forestry worker on the Napier-Taupō road you are the one at risk—not your boss not the contractor not the shareholder. The reality in the workplace is that the most effective way to achieve health and safety is to empower the workers so that they can actually get their issues through collectively so that they can be heard as issues of mutual responsibility because of course it is about mutual responsibility but you cannot achieve that with power inequity.Jonathan Young: A workplace of two people?CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: Two people of unequal power Mr Young and that is the word that no one wants to talk about. I have been a worker and I have been an employer and I know the feeling—I know it because I am an employer right now in this House of an executive assistant. I have more power than my worker and therefore there have to be checks and balances. This is not balanced if the health and safety legislation does not allow for the health and safety committee. We absolutely need the workers to be able to identify the risks as well as the good employers who already want to do that.We cannot sit by after what has happened in this country what we have seen these people go through—the people who came to testify yesterday. We cannot sit by and say: “Hey we’re all in this together now. We’ve had the experience of Pike River and the forestry deaths and the sawmill workers are still dying of the poison but actually we are all just going to be good now because we have got a bill that says it is all about everybody.” I do not think those people who experienced this—the sawmill workers who fought for more than 20 years to get basic justice for what has happened to them and their families—are particularly romantic about legislation. They are not romantic about Parliament. They are not romantic about participation. What they want is justice and justice requires the law to regulate to create power equity. If we are not prepared to do that we should just say so. Call it something else but it is not comprehensive health and safety; it is health and safety based on the idea of cooperation when there is a power imbalance.I know that there are many many details in the bill and there are many alleged checks and balances but there is not going to be safety for the people I came to Parliament to represent if we do not improve this bill—and today is the last day. Denise Roche and others have put up Supplementary Order Papers; Iain Lees-Galloway has put up Supplementary Order Papers. The Government has put up Supplementary Order Papers but our analysis is they are not really changing things profoundly; they are basically continuing business-as-usual. Tweaks are not what it is needed. What we are looking for is to hear that shift in the consciousness and heart of the Government. We are waiting for that shift that “Aha!” moment where Government members get that it is about equity and that safety comes from making sure that power is balanced—not that balance is balanced; this is not a circus act. This is about balancing power and then we will get safety. And then we would be delighted to support all the other positive things in that bill. We would be delighted to but until such time as that is there we cannot.We are very disappointed because we were hoping the work overnight by the Māori Party on the Supplementary Order Papers would result in changing some of the fundamentals. The families last night talked about coming here for justice. Their stories are simple and painful and cannot be minimised and cannot be overlooked. So we will keep standing up for that until the last minute of this bill because nobody should go to work and experience the risk of this kind of creeping—or immediate—health and safety destruction. I urge people to go to talk to Joe Harawira.