Mallard Trevor: Urgent Debates — Pike River Mine Disaster—Release of Report Government Response and Ministerial Resignation 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Mallard Trevor: Urgent Debates — Pike River Mine Disaster—Release of Report Government Response and Ministerial Resignation 
[Sitting date: 06 November 2012. Volume:685;Page:6285. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 I want to first of all acknowledge and pay my respects in this House to the families of the miners who were killed. There are boys who will not go home to their parents there are fathers who will not go home to their wives and their children and there are sons there whose lives have been tragically lost. I was the Minister of Labour for a period of 12 months before the change of Government and like I think all persons who have been involved in this sort of approach I have looked carefully at my conscience and at the actions that were taken over that time because it is an area that was under active review in the time that I was the Minister of Labour. My predecessor Ruth Dyson started some work in the department following the McGowan death in 2006. She started that in 2007 and late in 2007 I inherited the portfolio. I spent some time over the Christmas holidays looking at the matter and indicated that we would have a discussion document. That discussion document was issued early in 2008. I will say as a note to Gerry Brownlee that his offensive comments about it in this House at the time now have come back to haunt him I hope. 
The submissions on that were extensive and they were varied. There is no doubt that many of the mine owners including Solid Energy were working relatively hard to prevent what I thought and still think was a logical change to the regulatory environment to put more trust in the men who know best—that is the men who go underground. We have a system in New Zealand that has been and is much freer than in any like country. The systems are different. The United Kingdom has union-appointed check inspectors who are paid by the employers. Australia has an arrangement of union officials who are paid but who also go underground. These people basically have the right to say stop when they perceive that there is a risk. Our excesses of deregulation in 1992 removed that sort of approach and I am sorry to say that the changes that we made in 2003 which were designed to rebalance that were not good enough. Those changes relied on employers agreeing to arrangements and employers in New Zealand of miners rejected that. As a result at least two people in 2006 and possibly these 29 men died. 
There were extensive submissions to that 2008 review. Both the summary of them and the submissions themselves were made available in I think October and the balance of the people who knew about mining in practice as opposed to libertarian economic theory came out on the side of fairly extensive re-regulation. That went to Kate Wilkinson—and I say to Kate Wilkinson I think that she did the right thing in resigning. I think that as a former Minister it is one of the worst things that can happen when people die on your watch. But I also say to Kate Wilkinson that it was more than that because Ms Wilkinson repeatedly ignored warnings. Kate Wilkinson decided to abandon the review that had been started under the Labour Government. She made some very minor changes for small mines so she narrowed then rejected—even for the narrowing—some of the recommendations and accepted another recommendation for small mines. She left alone that regulation. 
Kate Wilkinson ignored representations on safety issues months before the tragedy from Damien O’Connor who was an MP representing the West Coast. I worked with Damien on his letter to her. It was a letter that was not sent with publicity at all. It was a letter that was sent privately as a warning based on what he had heard and on what all of us who subsequently—and I have been back to the West Coast six or seven times following this and have had lots of discussions with people down there. All of us are aware not necessarily of the full extent of the problems as revealed at the royal commission and the conclusions of its report but we are all aware of how bad it was. Kate Wilkinson was warned and she chose not to act on that warning. In fact she rejected that warning in writing. 
There are some questions that the Government will have to answer still and that is whether Cabinet considered the abandonment of the review of safety in underground mining or whether it was a decision taken by a Minister alone which would be surprising because a decision to have a review was a Cabinet decision. We will want to know in the fullness of time who was briefed and who was aware of those changes. We know as I said before that the whole issue was one that was the subject of mockery by Gerry Brownlee in this House and we do want to know whether other Ministers were involved in that decision. But that is a matter to be considered over a period of time. 
I say to Kate Wilkinson that I do feel for her. As Ministers we all make decisions. I made decisions as Minister of Education where if the decisions made were wrong then people were placed at risk. I say to Kate that I feel for her. She has made the right decision and she is not the only former Minister of Labour who has shed tears on this issue.