Health and Safety Reform Bill

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. There is a whakataukītanga kōrero that probably appears most frequently in speeches in this House and from Ministers outside this House: He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.

[What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.]

I wonder whether, instead of saying “he tangata” three times, we should be saying it 29 times as a reminder of the 29 lives lost in the Pike River disaster. We were reminded by the memorial out at the Cenotaph yesterday evening of those lives lost, which, in a sense, was the genesis of this bill. I have lost count of the times since the Pike River disaster that I have heard members of Parliament and Ministers say that we owe it to the memory of those men who were lost, and to their families, to ensure that that kind of disaster can never recur. Perhaps we should be saying “he tangata” 291 times, reflecting the 291 people who have perished in their workplaces since the Pike River disaster. These lives are precious. There is nothing more important—no more important responsibility of Government—than to protect our citizens. This is a responsibility that this Government is currently failing and proposes to fail further.

Over the decades it has been a familiar refrain from employers that they know best, and the way to ensure health and safety in the workplace is to leave it to them because they will be able to tailor a regime that suits their particular workplace and their particular workers. There are good employers and there are bad employers. The job of legislation—the job of Government—is to set a minimum standard and a minimum requirement so that even bad employers cannot get away with less.

In the 1990s the Government of the day agreed with what the employers had asked for—to leave it to them—and it deregulated despite the clarity of the message at the time in response to that: that deregulation of health and safety would lead to unnecessary deaths in the workplace. I have pointed out in the House several times in relation to the Pike River disaster and the various pieces of legislation that we have considered subsequently that standard economic theory says that firms will seek to minimise their costs by any means that are available to them legally. That includes cutting corners on health and safety if they are able to do so. At Pike River and at literally hundreds of other workplaces that is precisely what a deregulated health and safety regime allowed bad employers to do.

We were pleased when the Government introduced this bill because it was a great step forward from the regime that existed previously. It was not a perfect bill by any means, but it was a step forward. Unfortunately, the Government has once again caved in to the case made by bad employers, and as a result of that we are changing our vote today and the Green Party will vote against this bill. We hope that there will be changes made in the Committee of the whole House that will enable us to once again support this bill.

Some of the specific issues—and we will deal with many specific issues in the Committee stage—we want to refer to now. The biggest, I think, is probably the exemption that the Government intends to grant for workplaces of under 20 people. If people are truly at the heart of the policy then we need to see the policy from the perspective of those whom we are trying to protect—the people who are the workers and who go to work in their workplaces. A person’s right to go to work, be safe in that workplace, and then come home to their family is no different in a workplace of fewer than 20 employees than in a workplace with more. The Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety and the Government will no doubt argue that that right of those workers needs to be compromised to avoid unnecessary or disproportionate compliance costs for small employers.

I used to be an employer in a small business place—in a variety of them, in fact. Although I certainly had some gripes about compliance costs, health and safety compliance costs were absolutely never one of those. Indeed, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has taken the extraordinary initiative, it seems to me, of, in fact, putting up on its website some information to dispel the mythology around this kind of rhetoric that has been presented from a small group of bad employers.

Not only is there no reason not to protect workers in small workplaces to the same extent as we might in larger ones but, in fact, it is arguable that there is more reason to do so. This is because the international evidence, in particular from the United States—the New Zealand evidence is not currently strong enough either way—makes it clear that, in general, smaller workplaces are in fact less safe than larger ones. The Government’s move to water down the obligations of employers in smaller workplaces actually places less protection on the workers whom we expect to be at greater risk.

We have some specific concerns about the treatment of work groups in the bill. Health and safety representatives are there to represent workers, but what the bill enables employers to do is deem a particular work group whom these representatives will represent. In other words, it will be employers, not the workers themselves, who decide which workers representatives represent. That is a travesty of the very idea of representation. It may be a drafting error, in which case I look forward to the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper on that matter.

We are concerned about the situation of home support workers, people who will be, by definition, in very small workplaces. It appears that under this legislation nobody, essentially, will be responsible for the obligations that the employers of those workers have under this legislation. Again, this is a travesty in relation to some of the most vulnerable workers in our country. We will raise other matters in the Committee of the whole House.

Members will recall that this bill has arisen, pretty directly, out of the report of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy and from the report of the Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety. Both of those entities recommended sweeping changes. They said that New Zealand’s health and safety law was entirely inadequate, and both focused on all employers, not just some. They both said that major reform was required and that greater worker engagement was essential, and they both heard and retold evidence that unions were essential as worker representatives. They both proposed alignment with jurisdictions that had better health and safety records than New Zealand, in particular Australia. The regime that the original bill proposed was precisely what Australia has, and it works there. There is no reason, in fact, to change it.

One of the sections in this report of the royal commission on the Pike River disaster is entitled “A failure to learn”, and, as Sue Moroney has already spoken about in this House, that seems to be precisely the route that we are now proceeding down. I recall that when I asked the Prime Minister on 8 November 2012 whether he accepted that deregulation, as the royal commission had said, had caused the disaster, he said no—

Sorry; the member’s time has expired.

I rise on behalf of New Zealand First and, as a new member, I would just like to say that to be on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, which has taken a big part in helping put this new legislation, the Health and Safety Reform Bill, together, has been a great honour, and I feel very privileged to stand here today on behalf of New Zealand First. We would also like to acknowledge the people who are here in the House today. We have got Sonya Rockhouse, Anna Osborne, and Deborah McMillan who themselves know the sadness of losing people in health and safety accidents, and we have also got a representative here from the New Zealand Fire Service, Mr McGarvey. It is great to have people here who care so much about their family members and fellow workers.

I think this new bill of 247-odd pages is well and truly overdue. I would also like to acknowledge the patience of New Zealand workers and their families in waiting for the second reading of this bill to actually make it to the House today. There has been a considerable amount of work. A lot of time has been given, with those people coming to put their submissions forward, and I also commend Mr Jonathan Young, our chair, for actually enabling us new members to hear from those submitters again, because joining this House only 10 months ago we were very much, as new members, on the back foot. So thank you for that. I think he has done a good job of chairing us.

I have heard a lot of passion in the House today, particularly from Mr Iain Lees-Galloway and Sue Moroney, and it gives me great pleasure to speak to their passion, which they hold so tightly. There was some good, robust discussion at the select committee with regard to putting this bill into place. Conversely, I would also like to commend the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety himself for his words. Somewhere in the middle, between the passion and sincerity, and what this Government is trying to put together, is a very prescriptive piece of legislation to reduce the number of deaths in our workplaces by 25 percent by 2020. New Zealand First stands here to say that we 100 percent support the intent of this bill but we cannot be supportive of this bill as it sits here in front of us today. I would like to talk today about some of the unintended consequences of this bill, which New Zealand First has some concerns about. I would also like to say that if we could get some of these changes, which might be small in the number of words they take up and small in the number of pages that are required to eloquently put what we are trying to say, they would be of very, very large overall benefit for New Zealanders.

When we talk about health and safety in our workplaces, it really comes down to a three-pronged spear. We have workers, or employees; employers; and, of course, governance that oversees health and safety, and the enforcement of it. When you have those three things in good, solid legislation you are actually going to have a massive reduction in deaths and severe incidents causing major harm to our workers. If I look at our current occupational health and safety legislation, I see that two of those prongs have been missing. There has not been the support from enforcement and labour inspectors—they have not been adequately funded—and, of course, there was not anything in that legislation that enabled worker participation. Just for the people at home who are watching this today, and for those members of the House who have not had the pleasure of reading this bill, as some of us have, I say that there are some new terms coming in now. Employees are no longer called employees. They are called workers—to keep it nice and simple. An employer has now become a PCBU, a person conducting a business or undertaking. That in itself, I think, is a good thing.

I want to talk about some of the good things in this bill, so that we are not sitting here and throwing stones at the Government for the sake of throwing stones. The term “person conducting a business or undertaking” enables a multiple number of them, so that a variety of people are taking ownership of looking after their fellow workers, their employees, etc. Having worker participation in that process helps build and change the culture of the “she’ll be right” attitude, which Mr Scott spoke about earlier. I have to say that one of the concerns we brought to our select committee, and one of the things that we would like to say, is that for every action there is going to be an equal and opposite reaction. That is Newton’s third law. That goes through life in just about every single thing we have an effect on. If you change something, something else will change. We have got an opportunity here, today, with this new legislation, and we will certainly be putting some Supplementary Order Papers through when we get to the Committee of the whole House, to try to take off some of those unintended consequences or, as Newton said, the inaction of those actions.

The first thing I would like to talk about and bring to people’s attention is that 99 percent of New Zealand’s workforce is made up of small to medium sized enterprises. Quite a lot of the engagement that we are going to have and we are going to see brought into play will have a serious impact on some of those businesses, particularly around compliance costs. When Sue Moroney mentioned the fact that having a health and safety representative does not put any financial cost whatsoever on to the person conducting a business or undertaking, the employer, that is not actually entirely correct, because of course to have a health and safety representative you first need to have a trained health and safety representative. That comes at a considerable cost to all businesses, but it has an impact particularly on those small to medium sized enterprises, or SMEs—the acronym that everybody talks about in this House. What I would like to ask—certainly I will be putting through a Supplementary Order Paper to that order—is a question that was asked of the Minister in the House today. It is whether this Government will help to fund those course costs—the courses could be for up to a week; we do not how long they are going to take and we do not know the cost of those courses—to ensure that those small and medium sized businesses are not hamstrung by further costs.

The concern of New Zealand First is that we seem to be having an abundant number of extra compliance costs in our day-to-day lives. Just let me bring some of those costs to your attention. The costs are already in place now, and we can see further costs coming in. For example, in the building industry where you have got a drill or an appliance that has got a cable attached to it, every 3 months you have to get an electrician in to certify that cable, tag it, and pass it on. I know of a small business in Tauranga that employs a very small number of people. That business owner has spent $1,200 in the last 6 months just on getting his certifications for his tools. It was not that long ago, it was only a few weeks ago, when I walked into PlaceMakers and looked at these people who were changing a lightbulb. It reminds me of the start of a bad joke: how many people does it take to change a lightbulb in New Zealand? Well, the answer is one, and 99 other people to turn the building round it. What we saw, in the middle of PlaceMakers, was a scissor lift, with two people up the top, two people down below, and four cones out there. They all had hard hats and safety goggles on. It gets back to common sense. You know, dead right—we are concerned about the common sense of this. That is taking things to the next level, I have to say. We have got more to say on that.

We need to be careful that the good legislation that we are trying to bring in to save the lives of people in our workplaces is not brought in to such an extent that it is hamstringing small businesses from moving forward. Small businesses do employ 99 percent of the people who work in New Zealand. That is a serious concern.

There is another concern that we have around those costs, and it is in clause 28, which states that no worker can be levied or charged for any PPE—which again, sorry to use the acronym, is personal protective equipment—by the employer or the person conducting a business or undertaking. We absolutely agree with that. It makes sense—it is common sense. If you have got somebody who needs to do a job, then they should have that equipment supplied to them—whether it be a hard hat or safety goggles.

Where I do not understand it is that we have got the opportunity to fix this problem up by simply putting in a codicil to clause 28, and make it clause 28A, to make people, your workers, personally responsible—it is about personal responsibility—to ensure that they look after and maintain the equipment that has been given to them. There is nowhere in this legislation that enables a person conducting a business or undertaking to charge a worker who has no regard for their health and safety equipment whatsoever. The Minister mentioned earlier on today that it can get picked up in another bill somewhere else, in some new legislation. But, again, that comes at a cost to those small businesses. The cost to get HR personnel in to reprimand a staff member who is not looking after their health and safety equipment, or not showing up with it, is a further cost that needs to be looked at and remediated and sorted out. We will be putting in some Supplementary Order Papers to that effect when we come to the Committee of the whole House. Thank you.

I intend to take only a reasonably brief call on the Health and Safety Reform Bill at this point, because this bill will get a lot of debate when we go to the Committee of the whole House. I know there will be a lot of amendments flying around. Because I am going to take a brief call, I am going to restrict my speech to just the big heading issues, under the heading of balance.

Everything in life has a risk associated with it. When we drive on the roads in our cars, when we fly on planes tonight when this Parliament lifts, when we go sailing in a boat—there are deaths every year from those activities. The Government always tries to regulate and legislate to try to minimise the deaths from those activities. I was Minister of Transport for a number of years and I know I could have brought the road toll to zero just by making the speed limit 5 kilometres per hour and having only self-laying track armour-plated vehicles on the roads. The economy would have been bankrupt within a day, it would not have worked, but I could have held my hand on my heart and said: “We’ve had no deaths.” So why am I saying this? Because it is about balance. We think now that the road toll we have, with the laws that we have, and the vehicle standards and the warrant of fitness testing we have, is about right. We are trying to improve it every year, we are trying to reduce the number of deaths, but in the end people will die on our roads, and many of them will actually have been in the workforce at that time. We are trying to reduce aircraft accidents. If you want to reduce the chance of anybody dying in an aeroplane, you just ban flying. But of course, again, that is not sensible—an extreme view.

What this legislation has tried to do is have the right balance point. I am the first to admit—if the Labour Party members want to have an evil demon beast over there whom they can stick the skewer into, put my name on that—that I was uncomfortable with this bill as introduced as not having the right balance point. I wanted to see some more balance in it. That does not mean to say I am in support of people being killed in the workplace. I want to try to reduce deaths in the workplace as much as we can. There is not a single member in this Parliament who does not want that. For God’s sake! Please get one person to stand up and say “I’m happy for more people to be killed in the workplace.”, because no one will. But what we want is a balance. What we want is legislation that says this is not about having ridiculous self-laying track vehicles, or a speed limit of 5 kilometres per hour. This is not about banning aeroplanes from flying altogether so that we have no aviation deaths.

This bill is about making sure that employers have some obligations, but that they are not ridiculous and they are not extreme. Those obligations are to provide the best possible safety conditions in the workplace that they can. That does not mean that even after this bill or the bill as introduced or any other legislation in this place is ever passed there will not be deaths in the workplace. There will be—just like there will be deaths on the road, just like there will be an aeroplane crash within the next few years, and just like there will be some more drownings before the end of this year. I am delighted that the Government took some time, backed the truck up a little bit, had a look at this legislation again, and brought back to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee some changes that I think get us closer to the balance point. That is what this legislation is about—making sure that we make the workplace safe, but doing it in a balanced way so that we do not have ridiculous extremes at either end, and where we are not cutting off people’s arms and legs willy-nilly, because we do not want that, or where we make it so onerous for people to stay in business that it is not economic any more, and they, finally, say that it would be better to sell up their business and go and invest in the Auckland property market. That is what we have done with this bill today.

Debate interrupted.