Twyford Phil: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 19 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5960. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): Members of this Committee will be well aware that Labour opposes this bill at this point. We do so with a sense of gravity and disappointment. As the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety said in his opening remarks there was a consensus of support behind this bill when it was first tabled. In fact a great degree of consensus existed in this House behind the first version of the bill. Outside this House the business community and the trade union movement and all manner of interest groups and commentators expressed support for what was to be a generational change in the architecture of our health and safety system in New Zealand. I do not need to remind members that the Pike River mine disaster was an epoch-changing event in New Zealand. I think it reminded everybody when the truth came out finally through particularly the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy that that event that disaster was a damning indictment of a complete systemic failure in health and safety.I want to direct my comments in Part 1 to the purpose clause and make some general comments about Labour’s view of this bill now. We went from a feeling that there was widespread support for these changes for the new architecture for the Australian model law that offered a new template within which to build a really fit for purpose health and safety system for New Zealand today. I cannot underline enough how disappointed members on this side of the Chamber are by—I know the Minister does not like to hear that this bill has been watered down but it has been. It has been watered down. It has been substantially weakened by the carve out in the bill that effectively exempts firms with fewer than 20 employees from the requirement to allow the appointment or election of health and safety representatives when requested. It is going to carve out from the provisions in this bill more than 300000 New Zealand employees or one-quarter of the workforce perhaps.The Minister said in his opening remarks that the bill’s provisions around worker representation were going to cover 75 percent of the New Zealand workforce. Well what about the other 25 percent? Do they not deserve to be safe at work? They do not—Jonathan Young: Of course they do.PHIL TWYFORD: Well Jonathan Young the chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee says “Yes of course they do.” but he is happy to stand up and vote for a bill that effectively cuts those people loose and denies them—Jonathan Young: No it doesn’t.PHIL TWYFORD: —it certainly does deny them—the right to be protected at work by effective worker representation structures in the workplace. That is and will be the nub of this debate.John Key said in the aftermath of the Pike River disaster that he was going to do everything. He said that he was going to do everything to deliver on the promise of remedying the glaring shortfalls in our health and safety system. This carve out this watering down is a betrayal of that promise. It is quite interesting that when you tally up the purpose clause in the bill against some of the commentary from the Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety you can see that in the transmission from the royal commission to the independent task force to the basic architecture of this bill there was a faithful representation of the findings and the recommendations from the task force into the purpose statement of the bill. That is why we did actually have a substantial level of agreement.