Urgent Debates — Pike River Mine Disaster—Release of Report, Government Response, and Ministerial Resignation

Honourable members, I have received a letter from Darien Fenton seeking to debate under Standing Order 386 the release of the report of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy, the release of the Government’s response to it, and the resignation of the Minister of Labour, the Hon Kate Wilkinson. This a particular case of recent occurrence for which there is ministerial responsibility that warrants the immediate attention of the House by way of an urgent debate. I call on Darien Fenton to move that the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance.

I move, That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance. [Interruption]

💬 Mr SPEAKER: Order! I want to hear Darien Fenton.

Firstly, I note with sadness, again, the needless deaths of 29 men on that awful day nearly 2 years ago at the Pike River mine. My thoughts and the thoughts of the Labour Party go out to the families whose lives have been broken by this tragedy. Their heartbreak is inconsolable. Their courage is immense.

After they were told yesterday the findings of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy, they said that they hoped that good would come from this tragedy, that the legacy of the loss of the men will be that we do something about our appalling health and safety record not only in mines but across the country. That is the job of the Government, and the Government needs to adopt all of the recommendations of the Pike River mine commission without delay and extend them to all workplaces.

The ex - Minister of Labour and John Key can blame the Department of Labour—and there has been a lot of that going around in the last 24 hours—they can try to shift responsibility on to the overworked and under-resourced staff, but that is not good enough. It is good that the Minister has stepped down over this. She should. John Key says it is the honourable thing to do. Kate Wilkinson says it is about her integrity. But this is not about the Minister. It is not about her. She stood on the stage with the Prime Minister at the memorial for the Pike River mine deaths, next to Peter Whittall. She wanted to be part of that. But she has wanted no part in making the real change that is needed. It has been almost 2 years—2 years—since this tragedy happened.

I do believe that eventually Kate Wilkinson became very concerned about health and safety. She was laissez-faire about it to start with, and, as John Armstrong has described, she was the ultimate deregulator. She was a born-again deregulator. But she eventually came round to it, and set up the task force to look into health and safety in New Zealand because of our alarming record of deaths and injuries in this country. So the deaths of 29 men in the Pike River mine are just part of this picture.

Something changed her mind. She was telling the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union (EPMU) in a letter back on 12 November 2009, in response to the consultation around underground mining that my colleague Trevor Mallard, the former Minister of Labour, had set up—around underground mining, not small mines; she narrowed it to apply to only small mines—that she “considers that an educational rather than regulatory approach is appropriate to support small mine operators …”, and that she “considers that the existing legislative framework under the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992 already provides a good basis for effective employee participation.”, and that she “does not agree to a regulatory change to introduce ‘check’ inspectors, nor for an approved code of practice for employee participation … in the mining sector.” So she had a chance back in 2009 to respond to some work that had been done, to respond to some work that had been initiated by Labour—consultation. She had a chance to do something, and she told the miners union that she did not agree to it. That was 3 years ago—before the Pike River mine tragedy.

That Minister, Gerry Brownlee, stood in this House and mocked that consultation document. He held it up, with its picture of Damien O’Connor—who is from the West Coast, and has had to live through this tragedy and work with the families—Trevor Mallard, and an EPMU delegate. He held it up, and he mocked it.

💬 Hon Gerry Brownlee: No, I didn’t.

Shame on that Minister! He mocked it. He mocked it. He mocked it, and that shows you the attitude of this Government to health and safety and to mine safety. It all very well, 3 years and 29 deaths later, to be saying it is going to do something about it.

At the same time, going back, the Government was busy making cuts to the Department of Labour, to health and safety and employee representative training. I remember asking the former ACC Minister, who was responsible for prevention, why the Government was cutting worker participation, why it was making millions of dollars worth of cuts to the training of health and safety reps on the job—those workers on the job who are entitled to have a voice, who are entitled to have a say, and who are entitled to stand up for their safety on the job. Do you know what he said? “Oh, that is a touchy-feely notion.” He said it was a touchy-feely notion. That is disgraceful. I do not believe that that Minister has changed, as well.

In June 2010, 5 months before the first explosion, Kate Wilkinson wrote to my colleague Damien O’Connor, who had raised his genuine and serious concern about mine safety on the West Coast, that she did not see a need for any review of the current mines inspection regime. You know, she kept saying it time after time after time.

Let us look at the cuts that the Government made to workplace health and safety. Let us look at the cuts that it made. It cut the ACC-funded training for workplace health and safety by $1.5 million. It ran the Department of Labour down. It ran the Department of Labour down to the point where there was only one inspector, one mines inspector, for the whole of the country—for the whole of the country. The department had a vacancy but could not find a replacement, because it did not pay enough. That inspector was also responsible for checking the thousand or so quarries throughout New Zealand. He said they had not been inspected for ages—so goodness knows what has been going on there—and he said that safety issues at Pike River were difficult to address because inspectors visited the mine only occasionally. What we found out through questioning is that those inspectors could not even get the money—the travel allowance, the travel costs—to travel to mines to carry out an inspection, so stingy had this Government become. It was so mean and so focused on cost cutting that it denied a travel allowance for the mine inspector to go and inspect the mines.

At that time when that evidence was given to the Pike River royal commission the Minister of Labour was called on to resign. She was called on to resign because she had discounted the proposals that had been put forward, arising from the consultation document and review, by my colleague Trevor Mallard. She discounted them. She wrote to the EPMU saying that they were not necessary, she narrowed the inquiry to small mines, and she did nothing. So there were calls on her then to resign. Do you know what she said? “I have no intention of resigning.”—she had no intention of resigning. She was confident back then that she had done everything for this mine. Now she is not, of course, because we all know the terrible, terrible story that has come out of this Pike River mine commission.

We have gone from having something like 9,735 workplace health and safety reps trained in the workplace in 2008, to half that in 2010-11, and it has continued to drop. And yet what did the Pike River commission of inquiry say? It said that one of the most important things about workplace health and safety is employee participation—employee participation. The Government also scrapped industry training funding for health and safety courses. So more money—$9.5 million—was taken out of that. That cost people’s lives. And the Employment Relations Education Contestable Fund was cut by 40 percent in Budget 2010, and much of it was being used for health and safety training. The families want something good to come from this inquiry. The first thing the Government could do is reinstate that funding to get things moving while it mucks around thinking and considering implementing the recommendations of the inquiry.

New Zealand has a terrible, terrible death and injury record. Over 100 people a year die from workplace accidents, between 700 and 1,000 people die as a result of gradual work-related diseases, over 6,000 people notify the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment—including what used to be called the Department of Labour—of a serious harm incident in their workplace, around 190,000 people claim medical costs from ACC as a result of being harmed at work, around 23,000 people are injured seriously enough to be off work for more than a week, and around 370 people are injured seriously enough to require hospital care and be diagnosed with a life-threatening condition. Our injury rates are almost twice those of Australia and almost six times those of the UK.

This is a cultural issue, but it is also an attitude issue. I thank the Acting Minister of Labour today for making it very clear in answers to my questions that he does not understand the link between workers’ rights—look at those members pulling faces. Minister Finlayson does not understand the link between workers’ rights, the way they are treated on the job, and the confidence they have to raise health and safety issues. She has never understood that. So all of these proposals can be implemented, and at the same time the Government is proposing changes to employment law that will take away rights of low-paid cleaners. That will have an impact on the health and safety of every school where there are contracted workers. I bet the Government has not told parents that the schools are about to have their toilets cleaned by franchise companies that are understaffed. The Government is also about to weaken collective bargaining, making it harder for workers to get pay increases and so on. I have said this to the former Minister of Labour time and time again: until you get the understanding that you can have all of these things—you can have, if you want, a mountain of labour inspectors, because that is what the Government is going to need—but if you never get the picture that until workers feel safe enough on the job to raise safety issues, until they are confident enough to be able to do that, until they can join their union and collectively bargain without fear, and until we have laws that actually promote that in the good tradition of other countries in the ILO, our health and safety record is going to continue to be a disaster.

Again, I want to record our condolences to the families. We know that it was a terrible day for them yesterday. I do thank them for their courage and their determination. There is a lot of work to do on this issue. Labour will support, of course, the recommendations being implemented, but we say they need to be done quickly and they need to be done soon, and the Government needs to get real about other things that affect workers in the workplace. It needs to get real about it, in memory of the 29 men who died at the Pike River mine.

That was a very disappointing speech from Darien Fenton. Yesterday I thought the Leader of the Opposition quite correctly stood up and said Labour would accept its share of responsibility, and I applauded him for that. But within 24 hours we have had a nasty and unpleasant speech from Darien Fenton that really lets the side down. There are major issues that need to be addressed—major issues that need to be addressed—and I have already said on a number of occasions that this Government is utterly committed to addressing them.

Last week the report came out, and yesterday Mr Brownlee and I went down to Greymouth to present the findings of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy’s report to the families. I want to refer to what the royal commission said about those families, on page 27 of volume 1: “The loss of 29 lives at Pike River exacted an enormous toll on the men’s families, friends and colleagues. Many family members attended the commission’s hearings. A number provided written witness statements and some provided heart-breaking oral evidence to the commission. The commission was impressed by their fortitude and courage.” It is fair to say on behalf of Mr Brownlee that we certainly saw that yesterday. They are very, very fine people, and what they had to deal with yesterday as the report’s findings were read out to them was not pleasant.

Let me make it perfectly clear, as the Prime Minister has made it clear, that there are 16 recommendations in the report and, as has been said, all of them are going to be followed. There is an issue as to structure in relation to whether or not we have a Crown agency or a Crown entity, but in many respects that is a technical matter. The substance of the recommendations is to be accepted and yesterday Cabinet met and agreed to the intent of those recommendations, and it said they would be progressed urgently. As I said to the families yesterday afternoon, I gave them my categorical assurance that everything that needed to be done would be completed by the end of 2013.

There are a number of findings in the report. I do not intend to go through them in detail; some of them make profoundly sad and unpleasant reading. They contain significant criticism both of the directors and the executive management of the company, and of Government regulators. Directors are criticised for failing to ensure health and safety was being properly managed, and executive managers are criticised for not properly assessing the health and safety risks that the workers were facing. As I said to the families yesterday, and I say it in this House this afternoon, there has been some comment in the last few days about whether or not we should look at the offence of corporate manslaughter in New Zealand. A change would enable prosecution of companies and organisations when serious management failures result in death. That issue is going to be looked at. The task force will be looking at that issue. There are precedents from the United Kingdom in 2008. If we need to go down that path, we will indeed.

Let me say something, given Darien Fenton’s claims about the 1992 Health and Safety in Employment Act. It is important to bear in mind just exactly what the commission said, under the heading in volume 1, page 32, “Legislative change required”: “The HSE Act remains generally fit for purpose. The commission has identified a few changes, although the suggested expert task force may well identify more. Two areas in the act require early attention.”, and the first—and I responded to it in answer to one of her more coherent questions, in question time today—is “Worker participation (including contractors)”. They said that “The legislation on worker participation should be strengthened. Workers sometimes do not understand health and safety rules or ignore them to get the job done. They should be entitled to receive key information on health and safety risks without having to ask for it.”, and that is something I totally agree with. As I said, I will be looking forward to working both with employers and unions to ensure that any necessary changes are made.

The second issue, which I have also highlighted in answers to questions this afternoon, concerns the duties of directors. Again, the report says that this is the second area that requires early legislative attention—that of dealing with governance by the board of directors. They should see health and safety risks as their concern and should give them the same careful attention they apply to other risks facing the company. There are various ways in which those reforms could be enacted, either through the Companies Act generally or through the 1992 legislation, but I give my assurance to the House that those matters are going to be looked at as a matter of urgency. The third area I might just touch on is that the commission has recommended that the penalty regime be reviewed to ensure health and safety obligations are taken seriously. Again, I totally agree with that and we are looking at that as a matter of urgency. So in terms of the 1992 legislation, it is generally fit for purpose but requiring some urgent remedial legislative attention, and that is going to happen. The Government will be acting on these matters and will be inviting the independent task force to review those matters to ensure that there is a strong health and safety focus and governance. It is beyond any question, I would have thought, having read some of the material in this report, that New Zealand’s record in this area is simply unacceptable.

On regulatory change, the Government accepts that there were systemic failures in the regulatory regime across successive Governments. We could stand here and adopt the old “you too” approach and point the finger. But where does that get the families of the 29 men? Where does that get health and safety in New Zealand? It is the responsibility of all of us to address these issues, and not get into “it happened under your watch; it happened under your watch” kind of routine. I think that is demeaning and insulting to those poor men. The royal commission also found there is no predictable period following an explosion when a gassy mine may be safety entered before a second explosion. Importantly, it rejected criticism that rescuers did not go into the mine during the so-called window of opportunity. I was very pleased to read the commission’s very helpful report on the issues of body recovery. I have said to the families, when Mr Brownlee and I were meeting them yesterday, that they want someone they know they can engage with on these issues—as it were, a point person within the bureaucracy—so they are not having to deal with layers and layers of bureaucracy when dealing with these matters, and I have undertaken to get back to them within 14 days, naming such a person. So I am very keen to see what I can do during my tenure as Acting Minister of Labour, holding this portfolio, to address these issues. I am not particularly interested in pointing the finger of blame across the Chamber at three former Ministers of Labour, who were in power for 9 years. I think that that is pretty childish and immature. I want to get on with the important task of addressing these issues to honour the memory of those 29 men who died so sadly.

I also, in closing, want to place on record my acknowledgment not only of the families but also of Nick Davidson, their lawyer, and his tireless advocacy on their behalf, and I also thank the commissioners for their tremendous work. It is, I think, a very powerful report. It is a call to this Government and to all of us that we need to get on with these issues immediately. There is, as I said to the families, a real determination on the part of this Government to address these issues, and, as I say, they are a mixture of legislative and regulatory. We are going to get on with these straight away, and I look forward to the cooperation of other parties in this House.

I want to finish by reading the words of the commissioners, with which the Government is in complete agreement: “The lessons from the Pike River tragedy must not be forgotten. New Zealand needs to take urgent legislative, structural and attitudinal changes if future tragedies are to be avoided. Government, industry and the workers need to work together. That would be the best way to show respect for the 29 men who never returned home on 19 November 2010, and for their loved ones …”.

The very quotation that the Acting Minister of Labour, Chris Finlayson, has just used to conclude his remarks was the one I was intending to begin my speech with, so thanks for the extra few seconds, Minister.

The Green Party welcomes the report from the royal commission on the Pike River disaster. We believe that all of the recommendations in the report deserve to be implemented in full and without delay, and we offer to play our part in ensuring that that occurs. To that end, I have offered our party’s willingness to collaborate and have suggested that a cross-party group to oversee the implementation of the recommendations would be a valuable way forward.

I want to look briefly at some of the historical context to this disaster, against which we must view the recommendations—not in detail, but in the broad strokes—because I do believe that the wave of ideology from the 1980s and 1990s that saw a belief in small government lies at the heart of this issue. That philosophy had at its heart the belief that individuals and firms acting out of self-interest and aggregated all together would actually represent the best outcomes for society as a whole. I believe that that ideology is fundamentally wrong, and that it has been demonstrated to be wrong again and again, most recently in the report received yesterday.

Amongst this language of “unfettering” and “unshackling” that accompanied the 1980s and 1990s, we saw the Health and Safety in Employment Act in 1992 reflecting, actually, the Robens report from 1972 in Great Britain, which believed—appropriately, I think—that employers ought to have greater responsibility for the safety of their workers. That was a good thing. But, critically—and the commissioners, in their report, make this point—when New Zealand implemented that Act and that general direction, rather than having a corresponding growth in standards, regulations, and codes of practice that would provide appropriate guidance for employers, New Zealand did the reverse. The commissioners expressed some disbelief, some astonishment, that we did that. But what New Zealand did at that time was to strip away all of the regulations. So we were left with an Act that placed the onus on employers, but with virtually no guidance whatsoever. The standard, of course, that the Act imposes is one of “where practicable”. That, as the royal commission identifies and as we have discussed in the House over the last couple of years, is one of the critical failures of the regulatory regime.

In tandem with that failure of regulation we also saw a failure of enforcement and oversight, with a mines inspectorate that had been built up, in fact, over centuries, whittled away—decimated, in fact, first of all, and then whittled away—to the point that when the Pike River disaster occurred we had just two mines inspectors, who were trying to enforce the light-handed regulation in all of New Zealand’s mines and all of New Zealand’s quarries.

The central problem that occurs is this. The whole economic theory is based on the rational choice model: individuals and firms will make choices to maximise their own self-interest, and aggregating those together will produce the best results for society. In the theory of the firm—again, a sort of fundamental tenet of economics—firms will act to maximise profit, and they do that by increasing revenue and reducing costs. Health and safety costs significantly, and generally does not bring in any revenue. What that means is that unless there is some constraint on the firm provided by the Government as regulator that requires compliance with mandatory standards, then firms, or at least some firms, will take shortcuts. They will not do some of the things that could improve worker safety. And they will especially do that on what we call process safety risks. These are the risks that have a low frequency—so they do not happen very often—but when they happen, they have an extremely high consequence. These are the very risks involved in the Pike River disaster.

At Pike River we had a company that was short on cash and that was way behind in production. The evidence that is provided in the commissioners’ report is that the company started with good intentions, but as it fell behind in its targets those good intentions went by the wayside and production was put ahead of safety. The company became unresponsive to repeated worker calls for improved safety mechanisms, and became obstructive, in fact, to occupational health and safety. That reflects exactly what we would expect to see in that light-handed regulatory environment. All of this was able to occur because of the catastrophic failure of the Government as regulator. So the regulations were inadequate and included that “where practicable” standard. What that means, of course, is that a company that is well resourced can afford to do everything that we would expect of a company to ensure worker health and safety, but a company like Pike River Coal, which was behind in its production schedule and was cash-strapped, will say: “We couldn’t afford to put in that second exit from the mine. It would not be practicable for us to do so.”

The royal commission evidences the inspectors struggling with that standard, and saying: “Well, technically, you”—the Pike River Coal company—“have complied with the regulation.” There were just those two inspectors, who repeatedly called to their superiors for greater resources to be able to do their job, and said it was not possible for them to do it; inspectors, who were not trained in systems audit, systems improvement in quality and safety; inspectors whose seniors knew nothing about mining; inspectors who were unclear how to interpret the standard.

So contrary to what the Prime Minister has just said in the House in question time today, but actually in agreement with what Minister Finlayson has just said in his contribution to this debate, it is extremely clear that it is the failure of the regulatory regime, of the Government as regulator—it is the failure of deregulation—that has led to a situation where this company, Pike River Coal, could take those catastrophic risks. Those are the risks that have led to these 29 deaths. So there is no question that deregulation is absolutely implicated in this disaster.

I want to conclude by expressing my own view and, I know, the view of many of the Pike River families. It is one of relief in relation to this report, the report of the royal commission, because many of us sat through all of the evidence, we heard the evidence, and we believe that the commission has done a thorough and comprehensive job. It has not pulled its punches. It has made the right recommendations. We welcome the Government’s general support for those recommendations, and we again offer our support and our cooperation in ensuring that all of those recommendations are implemented in full and immediately.

To say that the report of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy is sobering, is an understatement. This was the worst mining disaster in 96 years, 29 lives were lost, and it should not have happened in this day and age. It was a tragedy that should not have happened and that could have been prevented. So the question that I ask, and the question that most New Zealanders will be asking today, is where the responsibility lies. The royal commission found that the Department of Labour did not have the focus, capacity, or strategies to ensure Pike River Coal was meeting its responsibilities under health and safety law. Serious problems with the mine’s ventilation and drainage systems were identified, and yet nothing was done. Permits were given without any real scrutiny of health and safety requirements.

The underlying reason for this shocking state of affairs, which, I am sad to say, reveals New Zealand as a Third World State as far as mine safety goes, is light-handed regulation and inadequate resources for the department, which lacked the necessary means to ensure safety at this mine and, presumably, at others. Every New Zealander should feel ashamed of Government negligence on mine safety—because it is, first and foremost, a Government issue, and it is, secondly, a company issue. I think the Prime Minister was completely wrong when he said today that it was, firstly, a matter for the company itself. It is not. It is, firstly, a matter for the Government to ensure a robust safety culture in this country. It just shows, I believe, more bad leadership by this Prime Minister, more “spray and walk away”, and more light-handed stuff, which leads to this sort of result.

When Pike River Coal management was advised that a ventilation shaft with a 110-metre ladder was unsuitable as a secondary emergency exit, no checks were in place to ensure that the necessary action would be taken. The commission noted that during the inquiry, when Department of Labour inspectors were shown examples of safety records, they were visibly dismayed by what they were seeing. If only they had been dismayed 2 years ago. It is unforgivable and totally unacceptable that this could ever have been allowed to occur in this country.

The royal commission’s findings are clear and unequivocal: this has been a systematic failure by Government—I repeat, by Government—to ensure workplace safety in New Zealand. The responsibility for what happened at Pike River does not simply rest with field inspectors, who acted within legal guidelines and standards set in place by regulators. The responsibility, ultimately, rests with the Government itself; it rests with the Department of Labour; it rests with the Minister of Labour, who, to her credit, has resigned; it rests with Cabinet; and it certainly rests with the Prime Minister, who was so visible immediately after the events of Pike River. To Chris Finlayson I would say simply this: too little, too late. The right course of action was for the Minister to resign, and New Zealand First praises Mrs Wilkinson for that decision. But she is the fall guy for an inept Government now trying to squirm out of its responsibilities.

This Government, I believe, stands indicted in the court of public opinion for what is nothing less than its negligence over a lack of a robust safety culture in this country. That has occurred since 1992, and every Government since then also stands indicted. New Zealand First calls upon the Prime Minister to acknowledge his own culpability and that, indeed, of the National Government as a whole. Since the 1990s there has been a recurring theme of removing sound regulation for the sake of increased efficiency—so-called—and increased profits. Policy makers have demonstrated an appalling lack of regard for human life, and regulatory responsibility for the maintenance of safe standards has been transferred from Government departments to businesses themselves. It went far too far. It was really an abdication of responsibility and it demonstrably did not work.

Now we have seen the worst possible results of this tried and failed Government policy. Now is the time for the Government to admit its failure, not just to accept the 16 recommendations that Chris Finlayson talked about. That is the very least we can expect. We need much more than that. We need also for the Government to give the country an unequivocal assurance that a new, much tougher regulatory regime will be introduced. This must include, at the very least, a new offence of corporate manslaughter, to bring home to those who run companies that deal in industries that are difficult and dangerous and perhaps require much more regulation that they must also take responsibility for themselves. The Government must also give the country a similar assurance that the responsible department will get the expert staff and the resources it needs, too, to ensure the rebuilding of a safety culture in New Zealand business—mining, in particular—that will drag New Zealand back out of the Third World status we have fallen into.

I would like to conclude by saying again that New Zealand First deeply regrets what happened at Pike River, offers again its sympathy to the families of those who lost their lives, and will do all New Zealand First can to assist this House, this Parliament, and the country to bring back a level of safety for industries such as mining, where safety is so important, and to bring back a regime that we can all rely upon to ensure that disasters of this kind never happen again.

Lest we forget. One thing the people of the West Coast can be very sure of in this whole uncertain matter—one thing they can be sure of—is that I will never forget learning of the explosion at Pike River, the overnight travel from Wellington, and the waiting, initially enthusiastically, in the hope of rescue, only for that to be replaced by increasing dismay as the full dimensions of the tragedy became clear. I will never forget that period of my life. I will never forget attending the daily hearings of the royal commission as it sat in Greymouth. I will never forget my impressions of the thoroughness, the compassion, and the expertise of the commissioners under the leadership of Justice Panckhurst. I will never forget the representations of the barristers acting for all the different parties and groups. I will never forget those. I will not forget the meetings with the families and their solicitors, nor, indeed, the aspirations of them all for an outcome that would help to ameliorate, if not end, their grief.

The meeting yesterday to present the report of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy provided some conclusion for all involved in waiting, waiting, and waiting. The adoption of the recommendations, I think—as people said to me after the meeting—will go a long way to be a fitting memorial for those who lost their lives through a lack of safety in the workplace. I have consistently, throughout my involvement with the families, avoided saying that I know how they feel, because I do not think one can possibly imagine how people feel after what they have endured with that first tragedy. But what it did do was inspire me to go and find my own father’s grave, which I had never seen. It was their inspiration that obliged me to do that. So I would like to say again that I will never forget, and I will continue to walk with each and every one of those people for as long as they require a companion.

Let me begin by acknowledging the 29 men who lost their lives on 19 November 2010. I want to particularly acknowledge Blair Sims, who was the Amalgamated Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union delegate—one of three delegates—whom I met at one of the regular delegate meetings that the union held. He was very proud of his union role, and his family specifically requested that he have union paraphernalia at his memorial service. I want to acknowledge the families of the 29 men, who have been through so much in the last 2 years, as they have grieved and as they have attempted to come to terms with what could possibly have happened on that tragic day. And I want to acknowledge also the co-workers, the comrades, of those 29 miners and the contractors, who have also suffered in their own way. The sense that many of them expressed to me as I met them was “There but for the grace of God.” That could have been them, and they knew that.

The report of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy is cogent, it is powerful, and it is a validation—at last, in my view—of the serious problems that lie at the heart of health and safety in the workplace in this country. I want to acknowledge the work of the commissioners, Justice Panckhurst, Stewart Bell, and David Henry. It is an outstanding report. It is clear, and there can be no disagreement with it. They have cited the evidence, and they have drawn their conclusions.

The Acting Minister of Labour said that we should not forget the lessons, but the sad reality is that we have forgotten the lessons. We have forgotten the lessons of Strongman. We have forgotten the lessons of Brunner and of Kaitangata. We keep forgetting those lessons, because every generation, every cycle of politicians and bureaucrats, thinks it knows best. But this is no time for smugness or self-contentedness, it is no time to say that some are to blame and some others are not, and it is certainly no time for the sort of conceit that I have seen expressed in newspaper editorials today, particularly in the New Zealand Herald, which sort of blame the company, the Government, and the workers.

I look at the role of the media, the ones who cheered on Peter Whittall that time 2 years ago and elevated him to hero status; and the newspapers, and other media whose journalists unquestioningly accepted everything they were told by the company and its public relations representatives. I know there were public relations representatives there, because as soon as I arrived in Greymouth on the Saturday after the first explosion I met them—not one, not two, but, by Monday, five public relations representatives representing Pike River Coal. I criticise the media whose journalists would not question the deception that the entire nation was put under, that these men would come out alive, when it was quite clear within hours that they were not going to, and yet Peter Whittall’s continued representations that there was a chance they would come out alive were peddled time and again.

Let us not be smug. Pike River Coal is thousands of New Zealand workplaces. Pike River Coal is the ultimate conclusion of years of corporate hubris and of years of running down the institutions that protect workers. In 1998 the Department of Labour’s Occupational Safety and Health Service department had 317 workplace inspectors. In 2008 it was 130. There was a tragic story of the mines inspector who was called upon to investigate incidents in the underground mine at Pike River—serious incidents like flashes. When the manager whom he was reporting to told him that their travel budget had run out, he was not allowed to go. It is a travesty. The other important institution that has been run down is the workers’ voice. The media has increasingly privileged the corporate voice over any others in this country, and policy makers have too. I just ask this question: in light of a report that is the most damning on a single business in New Zealand, in light of a report that is recommending the most radical change affecting business regulation in New Zealand, where is the business voice? Where is Business New Zealand? Where is the New Zealand Initiative? Where is the Employers and Manufacturers Association (Northern)? Nowhere to be seen. They have nothing to say. But when the Government announces another deterioration of workers’ rights, the press releases come out, and they are all over it. But they have nothing to say. We do not have business leadership in this country. We have greed and self-interest, and Pike River Coal is the apotheosis of it. The Government, if it does anything else, must support every recommendation, and that must include a stand-alone agency to look after health and safety, as Britain has and as other countries have. We must change the culture of health and safety in New Zealand. Nothing less will save millions of other workers in this country.

On behalf of the ACT Party and the people of Epsom I want to express my profound sorrow to the families of the Pike River mine 29. Although it can never compensate for the loss of loved ones, I hope that the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy’s report, which could be best described as brave, provides some closure to those seeking answers on what went terribly wrong on 19 November 2010 and on what led up to that fateful day.

I have been an employer for 50 years and I can remember two occasions in the restaurant business vividly when I warned a dishwasher that unblocking an InSinkErator in a sink with his hands was going to lead to a disaster. On three or four occasions I told that dishwasher that he must not do it. On another occasion I told him that if I saw him putting his hands into it without unplugging it at the wall, I would have to sack him. Sure enough about 3 months later I learnt that he had put his hands in to unblock the InSinkErator and lost most of the fingers on his hands. On another occasion with someone dealing with fat, I said to the worker: “You cannot come to work in this kitchen handling big buckets of hot deep-frying fat wearing jandals. The floor is wet. You are going to have a disaster.” I was away from the business one day and I got a call to say that he came in in shorts and bare feet, slipped, the boiling fat went all over him, and the rest is history. So for employers and employees these things can happen.

These were just one or two occasions in a business that I was associated with. Employers have to be ever vigilant that employees can do things sometimes that are going to cause some danger. You can only do your best to try to help them out. I know that this is an institutional matter that we are talking about, but on Saturday I drove down a street in my electorate and I saw a man in sandshoes and shorts on a tin roof washing his roof with a broomstick and a hose. I do not have to tell you how dangerous that is. We all do things in business and at home that are dangerous and we can be told until we are blue in the face that this is dangerous.

Although it can never compensate for the loss of the loved ones, the royal commission’s report about the responsibility of employers to employees and employees to their workmates can never be underestimated. Justice Panckhurst’s report makes harrowing reading; in essence, everything that might have gone wrong did go wrong. Like trying to fix the InSinkErator while it is plugged in or trying to carry hot buckets of fat in a restaurant in bare feet, the Pike River tragedy was waiting to happen. The geology and the geography were difficult, the rock was shattered, and the coal was deep. The company was undercapitalised, there was a high turnover of management, and the company directors relied heavily on the safety assurances of the company management, which would have been under huge pressure to deliver to a company that was under huge pressure to deliver to its bankers. There was a high expectation and a high ratio of inexperienced miners to experienced ones. That is why in a kitchen that we would run we would often have an experienced person with an inexperienced person so accidents that can happen in a small workplace do not happen. But accidents that happen in a big workplace are multiple, and in this case multiplied 29 times.

The mining method was novel. The placement of the air extractors and equipment was unorthodox, and not fire protected. Methane detectors were often ignored in the desire to keep the mine up and running and producing coal for the management, so that the management could produce it to the board, so that the board could produce the cash to the bank. The ACT Party supports the free market and entrepreneurship, but we also support employing people and not exploiting them, looking after people and valuing them, teaching people and monitoring them, and having a two-way relationship with them where dollars do not come before safety and security. The commission finds that the Health and Safety in Employment Act is largely fit for purpose. However, it finds that the industry-specific regulations made under the Act are not, and it suggests changes and more extensive reforms of the regulations.

Finally, can I say this: in relation to Pike River Coal the Department of Labour essentially believed that the mine was compliant with the regulations and that active assessment of regulatory requirements and compliance in safety was unnecessary. It is always necessary, because workplace safety is always paramount, and we have learnt a lot of very valuable lessons. I am very sorry for the 29 miners and their families at Pike River.

I think it is unfortunate that we are having this debate. It is unfortunate that we are having this debate, because it is very unfortunate that 2 years ago a significant tragedy took place that claimed the lives of 29 individuals. I do not think there is a soul in New Zealand who could easily forget what happened on 19 November 2010. It was a time when, I think, just about every New Zealander was glued to the television, hoping—hoping—that there was an opportunity, that there was a possibility, that the 29 individuals down there, who ultimately lost their lives, would come back safely. Sadly, it was not the case. I think I would like to echo the comments made by a number of members in this House that we all have in the back of our minds thoughts of the families of those miners and for the individuals who lost their lives.

The Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy has done a lot of work on this issue. It has done a lot of work on the circumstances, finding out the facts, and looking at the situation that led to the tragedy on 19 November. The royal commission was established roughly 10 days after the tragedy took place. It has finally brought its report back to the Government, and now it is out in the public domain. This report, I believe, is crucial in helping us to identify what went wrong. It is very easy to throw around blame. It is very easy to try to point fingers after the fact. But the point of it all is that now we have to look forward. We have to look at how we can prevent future tragedies like this happening. We have to look to how we can improve health and safety situations for New Zealanders so that tragedies like this do not occur in the future. The royal commission has made 16 recommendations. The Government has broadly accepted all of them, with some tweaks that still need to be looked at on how those recommendations are implemented. But the Government broadly accepts those recommendations because the Government believes that it is important that we work very hard as a Parliament and as a Government on how we can keep New Zealanders safe.

I think it is worthwhile pointing out that the work that is going to take place on working on health and safety for New Zealanders does not start today; it started quite some time ago. In the 2 years since the Pike River tragedy, a large amount of work has been done to beef up the regulatory regime for workplace health and safety. All underground coalmines in New Zealand have been safety checked and audited by independent experts from the Australian mining industry. We have also funded $1.5 million for a new high hazards unit, which has a team solely focused on mining. We have boosted funding for health and safety by approximately $37 million, and an independent task force has been set up to review the health and safety system in this country. That task force will be reporting back in approximately April next year. The Department of Labour had some failings identified. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the new Government department, has accepted that the department should have done better. The Minister has also accepted responsibility and has done what I believe is—and many members have been calling—the honourable thing, and that should be highlighted as well.

The report reinforces the need for change in the regulation of mines in general, and particularly with regard to the issues that arose in this case. We need to work hard to ensure that that is done quickly, because at the end of the day New Zealand’s safety, the safety of mines and the safety of the people who work in mines in New Zealand, is what needs to be kept in mind. We have heard a little bit throughout the debate about the pointing of fingers, and a little bit about who is to blame and where we should be apportioning blame. That is quite easy to do in hindsight, but I just want to re-emphasise the point that the best thing that will come out of this report is future work on health and safety. Recommendations will be implemented from this royal commission.

It is not a tragedy we ever want to see repeated in this country—29 men suffered the ultimate sacrifice, and we do not ever want to have to be standing in this House ever again, 2 years after an event, speaking about what is going to be done to help ensure it does not happen again. We do not want it to happen again. We want to ensure that robust systems are put in place, big changes are put in place, so that a Pike River never happens again. I thank the royal commission for the work it has done, and I look forward to the work that is going to be done going forward to implement its recommendations to make workplace health and safety better for all New Zealanders.

I want to first of all acknowledge and pay my respects in this House to the families of the miners who were killed. There are boys who will not go home to their parents, there are fathers who will not go home to their wives and their children, and there are sons there whose lives have been tragically lost. I was the Minister of Labour for a period of 12 months before the change of Government, and, like, I think, all persons who have been involved in this sort of approach, I have looked carefully at my conscience and at the actions that were taken over that time, because it is an area that was under active review in the time that I was the Minister of Labour. My predecessor Ruth Dyson started some work in the department following the McGowan death in 2006. She started that in 2007, and late in 2007 I inherited the portfolio. I spent some time over the Christmas holidays looking at the matter and indicated that we would have a discussion document. That discussion document was issued early in 2008. I will say as a note to Gerry Brownlee that his offensive comments about it in this House at the time now have come back to haunt him, I hope.

The submissions on that were extensive and they were varied. There is no doubt that many of the mine owners, including Solid Energy, were working relatively hard to prevent what I thought, and still think, was a logical change to the regulatory environment to put more trust in the men who know best—that is, the men who go underground. We have a system in New Zealand that has been, and is, much freer than in any like country. The systems are different. The United Kingdom has union-appointed check inspectors, who are paid by the employers. Australia has an arrangement of union officials who are paid, but who also go underground. These people basically have the right to say stop when they perceive that there is a risk. Our excesses of deregulation in 1992 removed that sort of approach, and I am sorry to say that the changes that we made in 2003, which were designed to rebalance that, were not good enough. Those changes relied on employers agreeing to arrangements, and employers in New Zealand of miners rejected that. As a result, at least two people in 2006, and possibly these 29 men, died.

There were extensive submissions to that 2008 review. Both the summary of them and the submissions themselves were made available in, I think, October, and the balance of the people who knew about mining in practice, as opposed to libertarian economic theory, came out on the side of fairly extensive re-regulation. That went to Kate Wilkinson—and I say to Kate Wilkinson I think that she did the right thing in resigning. I think that, as a former Minister, it is one of the worst things that can happen when people die on your watch. But I also say to Kate Wilkinson that it was more than that, because Ms Wilkinson repeatedly ignored warnings. Kate Wilkinson decided to abandon the review that had been started under the Labour Government. She made some very minor changes for small mines, so she narrowed, then rejected—even for the narrowing—some of the recommendations, and accepted another recommendation for small mines. She left alone that regulation.

Kate Wilkinson ignored representations on safety issues months before the tragedy from Damien O’Connor, who was an MP representing the West Coast. I worked with Damien on his letter to her. It was a letter that was not sent with publicity, at all. It was a letter that was sent privately as a warning based on what he had heard and on what all of us who subsequently—and I have been back to the West Coast six or seven times following this and have had lots of discussions with people down there. All of us are aware, not necessarily of the full extent of the problems as revealed at the royal commission and the conclusions of its report, but we are all aware of how bad it was. Kate Wilkinson was warned and she chose not to act on that warning. In fact, she rejected that warning in writing.

There are some questions that the Government will have to answer still, and that is whether Cabinet considered the abandonment of the review of safety in underground mining, or whether it was a decision taken by a Minister alone, which would be surprising, because a decision to have a review was a Cabinet decision. We will want to know, in the fullness of time, who was briefed and who was aware of those changes. We know, as I said before, that the whole issue was one that was the subject of mockery by Gerry Brownlee in this House, and we do want to know whether other Ministers were involved in that decision. But that is a matter to be considered over a period of time.

I say to Kate Wilkinson that I do feel for her. As Ministers, we all make decisions. I made decisions as Minister of Education where if the decisions made were wrong, then people were placed at risk. I say to Kate that I feel for her. She has made the right decision, and she is not the only former Minister of Labour who has shed tears on this issue.

Everyone participates in this debate this afternoon filled with the wisdom of hindsight, and I do not think that you serve the best interests of those who are most deeply affected by these losses by getting into the sort of finger pointing exercise that I fear we are heading for. Yesterday Mr Finlayson and I went to the West Coast to give the families the first opportunity to see the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy’s report and to hear firsthand the Government’s response to it.

It is a report that does not pull any punches. It does not attempt to excuse anything. It is a report that tries its very best to understand exactly what happened without having had the ability to enter the mine and know for sure exactly what the causes of this tragedy have been. When we spoke to the families, I think they showed all of the characteristics that they have been recognised for by the royal commission. Those quotes of the commission have been mentioned many times this afternoon. They are part of the public record in the commission’s documents. When we came to the question time, we would normally expect a number of people asking for questions of clarification. There was, I think, an immediate sense or an understanding that the words in here—“preventable deaths”—were cutting pretty deeply into those family members’ hearts. One woman asked me very directly: “What do you think you’re going to do? All I want is my husband back. Why can’t I have that?”. You know, everyone knows that is not something that you can deliver or something that you can do, but it does show that for the 2 years since this event there has been no opportunity for the families to be at any way in peace with themselves or to come to terms with the deep grief that they have for the family members they have lost. All that we can do is ensure that every opportunity is taken, every piece of legislation is used, and every regulation is changed so that this does not occur again.

It is easy for the finger pointing to happen. You can look in this document and see the dreadful account of so many lives lost in underground mining in New Zealand. You can recognise in this commission’s own words that we have failed to take full cognisance of what those losses meant in the past, and then make a determination not to do that again. The commission’s report is damning on both the company and the regulatory system. The incidents that were reported, which seemed never to get the light of day, and never to be understood by people, do make sober reading. There is one on page 105 of the report that very explicitly says from a deputy underground, experienced in conditions: “Get the [damn] ventilation sorted out so we can cut coal. This ventilation issue has dragged on for 2½ bloody years!!!” That was in a period in the year 2010, indicating that for a very long time, virtually from the start of the portal project, and then the cutting of the various roadways into the resource, it saw problems, and apparently nothing was done.

The commitment that the Government makes is to pick up all of the recommendations in this report, to implement as many of them as possible, as quickly as possible, and in particular to give recommendation No. 1 the full consideration that the royal commission obviously wants the Government to make. That should be a consideration that produces a regime that will endure for a much longer period than the 1992 legislation, the Health and Safety in Employment Act, but also picks up many of the elements of things that have been mentioned here today. The decline of the regulatory environment did not happen overnight; it happened over a long period of time. In fact, Andrew Little today, I think, indicated that very well. He talked about the extraordinary drop in the number of safety inspectors in the Department of Labour between the mid-1990s and up until the date he chose, 2008. I think what that indicates is, perhaps, an overconfidence that there was a growing culture of safety in New Zealand, and I do not think that that could be denied. More people are more safety conscious these days than certainly was the case when I worked on building sites 30 or 35 years ago. But, none the less, we can do a lot better, and we do need to avoid the sort of incidents that occurred so tragically at Pike River.

I want to make a comment about the company directors’ response to the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy. They have today said that they are going to dispute some of the findings. When you get such a damning report as this, when there is such overwhelming evidence of there having been a degree of deception in the way in which the mine itself was presented to the public and to investors, then I do not think people should start running for places to hide. They should simply look at how they are going to participate in ensuring that this does not happen again.

I want to make my final comments about the part of the royal commission report that deals with the recovery effort that was made immediately after the event. I read this with some interest, because when I heard about the incident—I was at the time Minister of Energy and Resources—I was in Canterbury, so I immediately went to the Pike River site. I got there around 10.30 or 11 o’clock in the evening. What surprised me was the general lack of organisation and lack of information about what the situation was. I think that all I want to say is that there is a need for a number of services who might be involved in these types of incidents to sort themselves out. Andrew Little spoke, I think, quite appropriately about the way in which the possibility of people being rescued from that mine was held out for such a long period of time—virtually from the Friday night right through until the Tuesday afternoon, and then finally with the second big blast on Wednesday afternoon, there was a recognition that it was changing from rescue to recovery.

The tape that everyone saw on television on Tuesday evening should have been available to the families, in my opinion, on Saturday afternoon. Some of the people who were involved in the incident recovery team or coordinated incident management system process, etc., should have been on top of that. What I am forever haunted by is the view that it was an irrelevant piece of footage and did not add to anything. The reality is that when I saw it on Monday, it was total confirmation that anyone’s prospects of survival in that mine were exceptionally low. I think there was a general sort of excitement—and it sounds awful in the circumstances—that we might have a repeat in New Zealand of the rescue of the miners who were caught in the goldmine in Chile. The services who are involved here do also need to look at their performance—I am not criticising them; it was difficult and it was hard—so that they can be better prepared for future occasions. This is a good report. The Government will be acting on its recommendations.

The debate having concluded, the motion lapsed.