Moroney Sue: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 19 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:6009. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour):Well what a bunch of weasel words. What a bunch of weasel words from the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety to actually try to describe what everyone knows happened in the National Party caucus when it bottled out of delivering proper health and safety systems for all workers in New Zealand. That is what has happened. That is what has happened here and there are no weasel words that will hide that because what the Government has done is it has actually decided who is worthy and who is not worthy of the most effective health and safety representation. That is what the National Government has done. The Labour Party believes that every worker no matter what industry no matter what size of workplace and no matter what location in the country they come from deserves the most effective health and safety representation if they want it.Minister you left one vital part out of your deliberation on this part of the bill: all the requirement was going to be was that if workers requested an elected health and safety representative then their employer would be required to allow them to do that. That is all that was going to be required and when the bill went to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee that is exactly how it read. That is exactly how it read because that is what the royal commission was recommending that is what the task force was recommending and that is what every party around this debating chamber agreed with.Sadly because of the mean-spirited nature of the National Government and because of its lack of commitment to getting genuine health and safety representation right across the board it has lost the support of some of the parties in this Parliament. That is a very great shame because this should have been a non-partisan issue. The Government has managed to screw that up and make it a partisan issue because it has come to the defence of some of its backers and supporters and has actually bottled out of having this legislation with the strength it had when it first came to this Parliament.The Minister is right about one thing: this is the crux of it. This debate is the one that I think we have got to pay serious attention to because it is the part that says that for around about 25 percent of the workforce even if they want to have one of their own elected to speak on their behalf when it comes to health and safety that is not going to happen. That is the decision of this Government—25 percent of our workforce. Not just any old 25 percent of the workforce but the 25 percent of the workforce that in some instances work in the most dangerous sector in this country: agriculture. The Minister can use the figures any way he likes to try to dumb that down but the truth of the matter is that agriculture kills more people in New Zealand than any other workplace. That is a fact. Nothing that the Minister says is going to stop the New Zealand public from understanding that. They know about the quad bike deaths. They know about the unnecessary deaths of people who have been knocked over by stock. They know about the unnecessary deaths of people who have been killed by hay-bales. They know about these things and no amount of weasel words and moving the data around is going to convince people otherwise and it certainly will not convince the Labour Party otherwise.We have Supplementary Order Papers to fix this—to fix this sham of pretending that the most dangerous workplaces in New Zealand are not the ones that that Government will exempt from being required to have elected health and safety representatives in place when the workers ask for them. I want to reiterate that last part of the sentence again: when the workers ask for them. There is your flexibility Minister. If it is not going to be the most effective system then the workers are not going to want it. But that party opposite listened to the likes of Talley’s which came along with its bad health and safety records and said to the select committee that workers would demand these reps whether they were going to work or not. Talley’s said that workers were going to demand them because it thought there was a hidden agenda.There was some other secret agenda some unnamed agenda that Talley’s would not name that they convinced the National Party members was going to ruin workplace health and safety and ruin the workplace.Well I put it to the Minister again and I would like an answer to this: is this the way in which we are going to allow situations like bonus payments to happen which drive bad health and safety work practices? Is this the way in which we are going to allow the meat plant chain to be sped up against the will of the workers which causes serious harm without that being challenged by an elected health and safety representative?Here is the other part of Part 3 which in combination with this I think is very dangerous: the determination of work groups. I can see that what is going to happen is that large workplaces are going to restructure themselves so that they come under the provision of having 20 workers or fewer. If they seriously want to avoid the requirement that restructuring will start happening and I confidently predict it because we have seen it before. We have seen it before when pieces of legislation have given employers an out and lesser compliance because of the number of workers they employ. They simply restructure themselves so they fall into that and that will make New Zealand a laughing stock again in terms of our health and safety record. This is a country that has no excuse for having a bad health and safety record and yet we lead the tables that you do not want to lead internationally over workplace deaths and it is not acceptable. This part lets us down badly. The Labour Party actually voted for both of the first two parts of this bill because they made sense. This part we will be voting against. We will be absolutely opposing it because this is the part that dilutes it.Why is it that they so badly do not want to have elected health and safety representatives in those smaller workplaces and on those farms? One of the things I did before I came to this place was to train those health and safety representatives. The one thing that is going to make sure that small workplaces actually comply with this legislation is that a living breathing trained elected health and safety representative will be there to know whether this legislation is being complied with or not. If there is not an elected health and safety representative who is trained to know whether it is being complied with or not who is? Who is going to be on every single one of those dairy farms who is going to be in every corner dairy who is going to be in all of these small workplaces to know whether this has actually been complied with or not? Because it ain’t going to be WorkSafe—it ain’t going be WorkSafe unless that Minister is going to start employing a whole lot more WorkSafe officers to be in all of those workplaces all over the country. That is the value of having elected health and safety representatives. They are on the ground. They know what is happening they know what is not happening and they get trained in this legislation to know what the obligations of all the parties are—but not under this Government.Under this Government even though the workers might desperately need one of their own to be elected to speak on their behalf if they are in a small workplace with fewer than 20 employees unless it is a high-risk industry—and now farming is apparently not high risk under this Government—they are not going to be able to get their voices heard on health and safety.The Minister talks about workplace participation as though it is something that just naturally happens in the workplace. Well I put it to the Minister that the Pike River mine would have been able to comply with this part of the bill and it would have been able to say that it had workplace participation going on in health and safety because every once in a while it would meet and talk about health and safety. Every once in a while it would have meetings with its workers and preach to them about what was going to happen with health and safety. But did those workers have a voice a genuine voice in health and safety? No they did not and it has become far too painfully clear that they did not.I would challenge the Minister to tell this Committee how he is going to ensure that worker participation systems are going to be in place where there is a genuine say from the workers and not just a tool box meeting where they get told what is going to happen next—what is and what is not going to happen how they are not going to get their ventilation sorted out and how they are not going to get the emergency exit that they need in their dangerous workplace. That is exactly what happened in the Pike River mine and I believe that this is what will happen under this waffly idea of a worker participation system.