Mitchell Clayton: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Clayton: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 20 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:6036. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): It is great to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take a call on Part 3 which is really the pièce de résistance of the Health and Safety Reform Bill. It is where the rubber meets the road for us certainly. Mr Damien O’Connor raised a good point—certainly New Zealand First’s interpretation is about the culture in Part 3 and I think the Government needs to be commended in part because it understands that health and safety representatives are the key to helping change that culture. So two thumbs up—well done for acknowledging that. I want to also while giving the Government a slight piece of a “well done” take a bit away from it and say that it has not gone far enough. Understanding that such a large percentage of New Zealand businesses are actually small and medium sized businesses and that a large percentage of those businesses are where a lot of harm is caused I think the threshold of having to have 20 or more workers to qualify for a health and safety representative is too high. We need to ensure that we can get that gap down a little bit. In this part New Zealand First does actually have three amendments on Supplementary Order Paper 110 to be put in there and we would like to have them very seriously considered for moving forward with this bill.I will start with probably one of the most important amendments the insertion of a proposed clause 65AA which would have the training costs of health and safety representatives covered by the Government. Subclause (1) of that reads: “Training costs for health and safety representatives in small- or medium-sized enterprises are to be funded by the Government.” Subclause (2) of clause 65AA on our Supplementary Order Paper is: “The training costs referred to in subsection (1) include course costs travel and time off work to attend training.” That may actually have a significant impact with another amendment on our Supplementary Order Paper which reduces the number of workers required to engage a health and safety representative from 20 down to 10.The reason why we have gone with this second amendment to take it from 20 workers down to 10 is of course to make it as affordable as we can for those small businesses understanding that a large number of New Zealand businesses is made up of those small businesses and that many of those businesses are hand to mouth. They are in most cases businesses where people have set themselves up into a business and are actually doing it as a source of income—for a job. It is not necessarily about profit; it is actually about survival. We think those costs of those health and safety representatives—course costs the travel costs the time away from work costs—should be covered by this Government and in this legislation. If we could get the support from the Government and our cross-benchers to support these costs being covered then we would drag off our amendment with the reduction from 20 workers down to 10 and we would certainly be keen to support Labour with its complete and utter removal of a threshold because we are talking about a culture change.When questions were asked in the House of the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety 2 weeks ago by me and others we asked about those costs and the Minister said that the benefit or most of the benefit lies on the employer or the person conducting the business or undertaking and that therefore they should wear the costs. But in order for culture change to happen one you need education and two you need good leadership. As a Government that is in leadership—your sole role in governance is to lead—you should be taking that lead. Everybody will have the benefit of a health and safety regime where our numbers of deaths have been drastically reduced. If a Government can stand up and say that this is important for our workers this is important for our employers and this is also very important to our Government then that is the pragmatic solid approach that it should take to alleviate the stress.Culture is very important because of course we are talking about imposing some legislation from the top down. If you do not have the buy-in from the bottom—the people who are actually being affected in their workplaces—you certainly will not have the overall blanket support for this new legislation and it might go by the wayside. Even with the extra $8 million for labour enforcement officers out there in the workplace you still will not have the support that is required because there will be no buy-in. Health and safety representatives are the key. They are the knights in shining armour to try to alleviate this atrocious number of workplace accidents injuries and deaths in New Zealand when we compare ourselves with the rest of the world—twice as many as they have in Australia and nearly four times as many as they have in parts of Europe is just unacceptable. We absolutely support this culture change.