Roche Denise: Third Readings —Text is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Third Readings —[Sitting date: 27 August 2015. Volume:708;Page:6283. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a call on the third reading of legislation arising from the Health and Safety Reform Bill which of course has been split into five parts. I do so with a heavy heart because the reform that was so badly needed is not realised in the legislation that we will be passing today.The starting point for this bill was that we supported it. In fact all of us in this House supported it because we agreed that we had had 20 years of the previous regime and there was cross-party agreement that the law needed to change. It needed to be upgraded because our statistics are pretty appalling. We have had a woeful health and safety record in this country. Just under 300 people have died on the job over the last 5 years. According to the 2013 Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety the annual death toll is around four in every 100000 workers and around 500 to 800 more people die every year as a result of chronic diseases caused by the conditions of their workplace.In addition to that ACC receives 200000 claims annually from workplace accidents. New Zealanders are twice as likely to die in a workplace than Australians. They are three times more likely to die in a workplace here in New Zealand than people are in the UK. The stark truth is that the citizens in those countries are safer at work than the citizens in our own country. As a result of this appalling track record we agreed with the Government and its ambitious targets that it set in 2012 of reducing serious harm accidents and fatalities at work by 25 percent by 2020 and as an interim measure by 10 percent by 2016. But the question is: does this legislation deliver that? Will it deliver that? I remain totally unconvinced that it will.Behind all these numbers are the people—the people who are sons daughters husbands lovers mothers and dads. They are the people who went to work one day and did not come home. They are the people behind the numbers. And then there are the families of these people. In the last week or so we have met some of them. They were brave. They came here and they sat in the gallery and their grief was palpable. Yes sometimes it really did feel like a tangi and rightly so because these families came to this House to ask that the legislation that we are about to pass today be strong enough to prevent future deaths and injuries. They came with their raw grief saying that if we could make safe and healthy workplaces if we could make the law stronger and keep people safe at work then their loved ones would not have died in vain. That is what they were asking for.We heard from the Pike River families. We heard from Kath and Bernie Monk who wanted this Government to keep at least one of its promises. The promise that they wanted it to keep in this instance was about the recommendations from the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy which claimed the lives of those 29 men at the Pike River mine. Both that royal commission and the 2013 Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety said that to improve health and safety culture we need businesses to show leadership we need a strong regulator for enforcements and crucially we need a system where workers are able to participate in their own health and safety systems in the workplace. This is a sound recommendation and this last recommendation about workers’ participation is backed up by absolutely every piece of international evidence that you can find.The main gap in this bill is that of course it applies to some people but not to others to some businesses and not to others. People who work for small businesses with fewer than 20 workers do not have the right to elect a health and safety representative let alone a health and safety committee. The thing is workers in small businesses are 35 percent more likely to have accidents according to the department of labour. Many of the men who died at Pike River worked for small businesses and the department of labour figures do show that 97 percent of New Zealand’s businesses are small businesses. Some of them may be deemed to be low-risk industries and these are the workplaces where the workers will be excluded from asking for and having their own health and safety representative.We have this whole ridiculousness about what is a low-risk and what is a high-risk industry with you know minigolf butterfly breeding and worm farming being high risk and dairy farms cattle farms and sheep farms being low risk. In agriculture alone over the last 5 years there were 104 deaths.There are 28000 people working on dairy farms in this country with most of the farms likely to have fewer than 20 employees and these people are not entitled to elect a workmate designated to look out for their health and safety. And why is that? Because as we were ending the select committee process which was a very long process and after we had heard the hundreds of submissions on this bill National played politics. It was lobbied—or at least one of those members was lobbied—and caused a big hissy fit. It was lobbied by I do not know—a small minority of small businesses. We do not know who it was lobbied by but no doubt whoever it was was worried. They were worried about what it might potentially cost small businesses and I do not know maybe they were worried about rampant militaristic unions suddenly running rampant through their doors. I do not know.But the thing is the existing law the law that we have had for the last 20 years the Health and Safety in Employment Act had already empowered people in small businesses to elect a health and safety representative if they wanted to. And guess what? The sky did not fall in; there was no opening of the floodgates. So those businesses that lobbied the Government’s politicians—I really have to ask them why. What were they trying to hide?Where worker participation is outlined in this legislation essentially it is participation on the boss’s terms and I predict that this legislation will not deliver the change needed in the culture around health and safety—that change from a “she’ll be right” attitude to one where health and safety is front and centre of the minds of every worker in that workplace. Given the climate that we have here at the moment—where some people feel lucky even to have a job where they will not rock the boat because they may lose their job within 90 days for no reason at all or have their hours cut or even be rostered off—workers in this environment are unlikely to raise a health and safety issue on their own terms because essentially they need to raise it with the boss’s approval. When the Greens get the levers of Government we are going to roll back these changes so that there is true democracy at work and workers can raise health and safety issues without fear of punishment.Finally one of the key roles of Parliament in a modern democracy is to be the arbiter between competing interests in society. In doing this a Parliament must carefully consider these interests and must ultimately be guided—we have to be guided—by ethics and morality and there is no morality in depriving some citizens of the best protection for their health and not ensuring their safety at work. No ethical basis exists for that. The nurses in our hospitals our cleaners our caretakers the fishers who brave the seas to bring the food back to our plates and the foresters who harvest the wood so that we can build our houses deserve much better and with this legislation we have failed them.