Roche Denise: Health and Safety Reform Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Health and Safety Reform Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 13 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16712. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. I am pleased to take a call for the Greens on the first reading of the Health and Safety Reform Bill. We will be supporting it. This bill as you know is an omnibus bill that signals the most comprehensive changes to our health and safety laws for about 22 years when the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992 took effect. Others have critiqued it before me so I will not bother to go into that. This bill follows on from the Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety and also the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy and the recommendations from both of those. The Government has already enacted some of the recommendations from the Pike River royal commission when it passed the Health and Safety (Pike River Implementation) Act last year—some of the recommendations not all of them.The Government has very clearly said that it wants to reduce workplace deaths and injuries by 25 percent by 2020. We agree. No family should experience having a loved one killed on the job—having a loved one who never comes home from work like the families of the 10 forestry workers who lost their lives last year. According to the regulatory impact statement from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment that accompanies this bill it estimates that between 600 and 900 workers lose their lives to workplace illness or disease every year—that is between 600 and 900 people—and that between one to two people die in traumatic incidents at work every week. That is 52 to 104 people killed at work every year. On top of that about one in 10 workers is harmed at work.We will be supporting this bill. Of course we will. We will support any bill that attempts to reduce the incidence of harm to our citizens. We are however concerned that although the reforms in the bill are good they do not go far enough. I think we have heard from this side of the House about that. I note that this bill still takes a bit of a soft approach. That has been carried over from the 1992 Act. In the explanatory note of this bill it says: “Clause 22 relates to the key principle of managing risks. It provides that a duty imposed on a person under the Bill to ensure health and safety requires the person to eliminate risks to health and safety so far as is reasonably practicable; and if it is not practicable to eliminate risks to health and safety to minimise those risks so far as is reasonably practicable.”How does that play out in a forest I wonder? “Reasonably practicable” is significantly different for someone working alone in a forest miles from anywhere with a desperate urge to make his quota. That is very different from an office worker a flight attendant or a warehouse worker. Today I was visited by two of the panel members of the Independent Review of Health and Safety in the New Zealand Forest Industry to talk about the terms of reference for that inquiry. We were slightly disappointed that this Government did not see fit to undertake that inquiry itself but it is clear from whatever evidence you look at that voluntary codes of practice are not enough to keep workers safe in the forests.Much has been made of the fact that this bill is similar to the Australian Model Work Health and Safety Act. It sort of is but not quite. One of the crucial elements missing is the voice of workers. I think this is alluded to in the bit in the agency disclosure statement of the regulatory impact statement from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment in the second to last line which says: “Modifications to the Australian Model Law are proposed where they are considered necessary to fit with New Zealand circumstances.” So what are those New Zealand circumstances?I would suggest that it is union membership. If you have a look at the regulatory impact statement on page 14 there is a fairly telling graph that shows the difference between the rate of accidents excluding road accidents for workers in Australia and workers in Aotearoa New Zealand. If we are introducing the same laws we are failing if we are going to be ignoring the voice of workers and the role of unions in making sure workers’ voices are heard. In Australia in 2012 there were 1.8 million Australians who were members of a trade union. Unions have a place at the table. They are part of the tripartite system of monitoring evaluating and keeping track of health and safety on worksites. We know that in Aotearoa New Zealand a unionised workplace is a safer workplace. I note that the regulatory impact statement does not have a comparative graph in here that compares the health and safety track records of unionised versus non-unionised worksites or worksites that have collective agreements versus those with individual agreements.Unions play a significant part in maintaining a culture of health and safety in the workplace. I guess one of the tragic comparisons we can make is between Pike River Coal and Huntly East Underground Mine. The Pike River mine was as we know un-unionised frequently and workers were basically in a culture where they did not see health and safety as a priority. Compare that mine with the Huntly mine which is highly unionised. Workers are members of the Amalgamated Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union and they certainly stand up for health and safety on a daily basis and do not let the standards slip.In Aotearoa New Zealand we particularly need that voice heard on behalf of workers because workers frequently are in a position where they cannot speak for themselves. We are currently in a position where we have reasonably high unemployment job insecurity and increased casualisation. We have the Minister of Labour who has introduced legislation that will make it worse for workers. The 90-day trials have been introduced over the last term. The latest Employment Relations Amendment Bill removes the capacity for union bargaining and the offer of collective employment agreements in the first 30 days to workers who start. Basically the Employment Relations Amendment Bill counteracts some of the benefits that the Government is trying to put forward in this Health and Safety Reform Bill because the Employment Relations Amendment Bill undermines the ability for workers to have a voice.We are also concerned that it is not just employees who will have a problem with this. Unless we fully resource our Government agencies to ensure that employers are trained up we also risk their ability to participate in creating healthy and safe workplaces. We will be supporting the bill but we are interested to see where we can improve it during the select committee process. I particularly look forward to hearing from the forestry sector about what it will be doing to improve the health and safety of workers in its sector.