Delahunty Catherine: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 20 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:6052. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koutou katoa. He mihi nui ki a koutou. It is great to take my first call on Part 3 which seems like a fairly substantial part of this extremely complex piece of legislation and I really do pity both employers and workers in trying to figure out how we went from where we were to where we are. It is a bit of a dog’s breakfast as they say on the farm.I am just quite interested to talk a little bit about farms. If you are going to start talking personal credibility and experience to talk about anything I worked on farms for 10 years often in sheds with fewer than 20 people. We had injuries and accidents. There was no union representation. There was not automatically a great participation by employers and employees. What I saw there was that there were variations. Some farmers are fantastic and have amazing communication with both contract workers like we were and with permanent workers. It is like a family. There might be two or three of you but it is absolutely like you are all family.That is what I feel the honourable Jonathan Young was talking about as if that is what is the norm but I also worked on farms where we slept in sheds that had no windows. That was our accommodation. We were not treated the way I would expect people to be treated. I am not saying it was necessarily unsafe but given the nature of the sheep industry people did have accidents.I think it is incredibly romantic and naive to talk about participation as if participation equals representation and as if they are actually the same thing and all we need to do in workplaces of under 20 people is to talk about participation. It absolutely denies that sometimes the smaller the workplace the greater the risk. It is pretty simple and the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions research—which has not been conducted in this country because it has not been done here but it has been done in Australia and America—says that there are far greater rates of fatality and injury in smaller workplaces. Obviously that would include sheep and beef farms. I must admit I have never visited a cat farm or a snake farm. I have had a worm farm—it was pretty dangerous.Actually on the farm and in any small business of under 20 the human dynamic needs to be protected through good health and safety regulation because sometimes the more intense and small the operation the more potent and dangerous the power issues become. People are far less organised they do not necessarily have anyone to represent them and they are not necessarily when it is one to one capable of representing themselves without the backup of the law against somebody who does not want to treat their farm workers particularly well. We have had story after story in the media about what has happened to farm workers and I bet a lot of them were in workplaces of fewer than 20.So the argument that is in Part 3—I think it was Damien O’Connor who talked about clause 65(3)(a) being one of the key things. He is absolutely correct. You cannot say that because there are under 20 workers there is less need. Size gentlemen does count and it counts all the way through to the smallest. What is important is that everybody gets representation and that everybody gets protection. The way that we do that is by acknowledging that the Health and Safety in Employment Act was designed to deal not with the happy family the mature employer or the fabulously participatory justice-based workplace but where things have gone wrong.The whole point the reason we are standing here and the reason it does sometimes feel like a tangi is that it is. People have died and they have died because of the assumptions that words like “culture change” “participation” and “engagement” do not need to be backed up everywhere with the absolute rights of workers to be able to have health and safety committees and proper representation. So what I want to say about Part 3 is that—