Health and Safety Reform Bill

The title of this bill is the Health and Safety Reform Bill, and that is what we thought we were going to get: genuine reform of our health and safety regime in New Zealand. Certainly, that is why members on this side of the House voted for this legislation at the first reading, because that is what we thought we were going to get and that is what New Zealand so desperately needs: genuine health and safety reform.

If you compare New Zealand’s rate of deaths and injuries at work per capita with any other comparable country, our record is woeful. We did not need the Pike River tragedy to realise that we needed genuine reform of our health and safety system, but it took Pike River to create the political impetus for that Government to be prepared to do anything about health and safety reform. But even in the absence of Pike River we knew that we needed reform of our health and safety systems, because we kill and maim more people at work than any other comparable developed nation.

So when the Government told us we were going to get a health and safety reform Act we thought that was brilliant, and we thought—when we saw this bill at its first reading—that it was based on the recommendations of the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy. We thought that it was based on the recommendations of the Government’s own Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety and that it was based on the Australian model law. We thought that it looked quite good, and we thought that we were going to get genuine reform of health and safety.

How times have changed in the nearly 1½ years since those first reading speeches. How much things have changed, because that Government over there has shown its true colours and demonstrated that reform of the health and safety systems—reform that genuinely will improve health and safety so that workers have a real say about how health and safety regimes will operate in their workplaces, reform that is based on evidence, and the kind of reform that looks at the things that we know work and the things that have the greatest impact on health and safety in workplaces—has been thrown out the window because of politics. The National Government has bent over as far as it can to accommodate its supporters in the rural community and to accommodate people like the Talley’s Group, which came to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and told us about how health and safety representatives were going to be the destruction of its business, as though people working in its business were for some reason going to want to destroy it from the inside.

So did the Government listen to the reasonable, sensible employers who came to the select committee and said: “We think this legislation looks pretty good; it could do with a few tweaks here and there.”? No. It listened to those who were opposed to the idea of genuine reform, as this title suggests—genuine reform of the health and safety regime in New Zealand. It listened to those who came along and said: “This legislation is an overreaction. This legislation is a knee-jerk reaction to what happened at Pike River.” That is what some of these employers and other groups came along and told us at the select committee. They were in the minority. It is not what the majority of submitters came and told us, but they were the ones that the Government listened to.

So really, this title has become a misnomer. This title has become completely misleading, because we no longer have genuine reform of the health and safety regime in New Zealand. We no longer have the type of reform that we actually need.

💬 Andrew Bayly: We do—it’s called 247 pages’ worth.

If Andrew Bayly disagrees with me, then Andrew Bayly should get to his feet and take a call on clauses 1 and 2 of this bill, and tell me why I am wrong. If Andrew Bayly is not prepared to do that, and if Jonathan Young is not prepared to do that, and if any of the other National MPs who were on the select committee and who were prepared to water down this legislation and were prepared to weaken it and were prepared to do things that were asked of them by their special interest groups will not do that, then we have to believe on this side of the Chamber that, actually, they do not have an argument against us saying that this is not genuine reform any more. They actually know in their hearts that we are right and they are wrong. If they are not prepared to get up and tell us why we are wrong about this, then we have to believe that we are right and they are wrong.

I would like to talk a little bit about the commencement clause as well, because this is a rather complicated commencement clause. The different clauses of this legislation will commence at different times. We have got everything from commencement on the day after the bill receives the Royal assent all the way through to the final cut-off point of 1 January 2018. So that is over a period of 2½ years that this legislation will slowly be rolled out. That is understandable, actually. This is a large document. It is—

💬 Andrew Bayly: 247 pages—comprehensive.

It is 247 pages long, and Andrew Bayly reads every single one of them every night. It could have been comprehensive, Andrew Bayly. It could have been comprehensive, but, unfortunately, the National Government ripped the guts out of it, so it is not comprehensive any more. It is just a lot of paperwork for not a lot of substantive change.

But this commencement clause does have a number of different parts. I have looked closely at which clauses will commence immediately after the bill receives the Royal assent, and they are some of the more technical aspects.

💬 Sue Moroney: Some of the more contentious parts.

Some of those aspects relate to the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act, as well. My colleague Sue Moroney says it is some of the more contentious parts. I am sure that will be part of her contribution on the commencement clause.

Most of the bill, actually, will come into force on a date appointed by the Governor-General by Order in Council. That is something that often makes members of Parliament a little bit nervous. It certainly makes the Regulations Review Committee a little bit nervous. There are members of the Regulations Review Committee in the Chamber and I would like to hear from them as well—about how commencement clauses that are brought into effect by Order in Council make them nervous—because what that does is it actually takes the legislative process out of Parliament’s hands and puts it into the Government’s hands.

I do not think that we would be able to support that approach on this side of the Chamber were it not for subclause (3) of clause 2, which says that “Any provision that has not earlier been brought into force comes into force on 1 January 2018.” So the Government cannot delay the commencement of any parts of this legislation past 1 January 2018. It is kind of a quid pro quo, so that Parliament knows that this legislation will be fully enacted by 1 January 2018. We will accept that it is practical for aspects of the legislation—a considerable chunk of the legislation, in fact—to be brought into force by Order in Council, by the Government, but because we know that that all has to be done over a 2½ year period, we will be able to accept that.

But the fact is that it does not matter how long it takes to enact this legislation—this is not the reform we were looking for. This is not what New Zealanders were promised. This is not what the families of the victims of the Pike River tragedy were promised. What they were promised, what we were promised, and what the people of New Zealand were promised was real reform—reform based on evidence, reform based on best practice, and reform based on overseas changes that have already been made on overseas legislation that has been working well for a number of years in a similar context to the New Zealand environment. That is what we were promised. That is what we thought we were going to get, but, sadly, because this Government has been prepared to play politics on health and safety and because this Government has been prepared to play politics with working people’s lives, this bill should no longer be called the Health and Safety Reform Bill. This should be called a list of promises that were made to the victims of one of the most horrendous workplace tragedies in New Zealand and that were broken by this National Government.

As has been said many times in the course of this debate, this was our chance to get things right when it comes to workplace health and safety. And I am not talking about our chance—it was not Labour’s chance, and not New Zealand First’s or the Greens’ chance. It was the chance for this Parliament—every member in this Parliament—to get things right, in the face of one of the worst health and safety records that any OECD country has, in the aftermath of some of the worst tragedies we have had in workplaces in New Zealand.

It started, in most people’s living memory, with Pike River: 29 lives snuffed out because of hopeless management, total carelessness, and an appalling level of regulation and oversight by the Government agency responsible for doing so. There has been a succession of deaths—far too many—in one of our other crucial industries, the forestry industry. And then, since that time, there have been more than a hundred deaths in, arguably, our most important industry—agriculture and farming. So this was our chance as a Parliament, on behalf of the millions of voters who put us here, to reflect on the situation, take some positive steps, and get it right.

The great thing is that we were going so well. There was a consensus that had been reached. I sat on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee that first started considering this bill, and there was a consensus. It was chaired by David Bennett at the time. There were other National MPs and MPs from plenty of other parties, and we were united in our purpose. We understood what our job was. We knew the gravity of the task in front of us, and we grasped it. We were making headway. The great thing is that at that time—and that was before the last election—we were in agreement. We were making a difference. We could see what the future looked like. We understood what the issues were and what was needed.

Things were going well even after the election, when the select committee resumed—different membership, different chair. Jonathan Young, the MP for New Plymouth, took it up. He is a responsible member who had led other select committees and was very good at weaving together a consensus—because that is what his track record has been. So we, quite rightly, had confidence that the Government was serious about seeing through the task of getting health and safety in New Zealand right.

But then in the last couple of months it changed. Something happened, and it was not on our side. Something happened with the Government. Those members got unsettled and they wanted to make a change. They have undermined one of the most important tenets of workplace health and safety—that is, effective representation by the workforce.

Anybody who has had anything to do with workplace health and safety—and, in particular, has had anything to do with improving workplace health and safety, often from a very bad starting point—knows that the starting point is the front-line workforce. It is their engagement and their understanding, how they are educated and what they get to make of it, their input into it and who represents them, and how their interests and their concerns and their issues are advocated. That is what is most important, and that is what the nervous Nellies in the National Government sought to undermine. If there is one thing that defines National, it is that National has never understood working New Zealanders. It does not get it. It does not understand it—never cared about it.

So now we are at the point, in this Committee stage, where we are being asked to sign off on a piece of legislation that does not respect its title. This is not health and safety reform. This will be a backwards step. Yes, there are some improvements in enforcement, a bit about extra powers about prohibition notices, but the thing that matters most, which is the engagement of working people with the risks and the hazards that surround them—that has been undermined. That is the most disappointing thing, and that is why, when it comes to the title of this bill, it no longer reflects the task that was before the select committee—the task that has been before this House. We will always look across the Chamber for the rest of this Parliament and say to those members opposite: “You have let down working New Zealanders.”

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order!

You have actually let down a lot of—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order!

Sorry. Those members, not you, Mr Chairman, have let down working New Zealanders. It is not just working New Zealanders they have let down; they have let down hundreds of thousands of businesses as well.

Big and small businesses have been in touch with us. I had a farmer on the phone to me today, saying that he cannot understand why the National Government has backed out of the issues about involving the workforce. He said that he was very proud of his farm. He was so proud and so pleased with the processes that he had put in place with the engagement of his workforce that he had got WorkSafe to come and have a look, come and audit it, and he was very pleased with the engagement of WorkSafe New Zealand. He was very pleased with the feedback that he got. He said that it gave him some advice, like things that could be improved, but he enjoyed dealing with it and he was proud to demonstrate the way he approached health and safety on his farm.

I want to talk about clause 2, the commencement clause, because I have never seen, though, admittedly, I have been in Parliament for only 4 and a bit years, a commencement clause that gives rise to so much uncertainty and that is so all over the place—more all over the place than the Māori Party—than I have seen in this clause here, clause 2. There are multiple parts to the commencement of it. Some parts come into force on the day after the date on which the Royal assent is given, and some of them are specified. There are more parts specified as coming into effect on the day after the Royal assent. Then there are other little bits carved out and they are saved for a different commencement date. Then there is this overriding thing that the rest of it will come into force by Order in Council, which is when the Minister and the Cabinet decide. It may not be all the rest of it; it will be bits and pieces as and when they want.

Well, that is ridiculous. This is hopeless. This is typical of this National Government. It is a piece of legislation that is going to affect 2.4 million New Zealanders and no one will know when, between now and 1 January 2018—which is proposed in Supplementary Order Paper 109—this is going to come into effect. Some bits will, much of it will not, and it is proposed that it will be at some time between now and 2018—2½ years away. What a ridiculous situation for New Zealanders to be in. What an appalling situation for that National Government to put this Committee in, to ask it to approve a commencement clause that is such a dog’s breakfast. No one is going to know which bits are in at what time—some time in the next 2½ years.

They sit there smirking and smugly laughing at each other because, as typifies the members opposite, they think when it comes to workplace issues it is all just a bit of a joke. You do not actually have to care. You just do stuff, you make promises, and then you break promises. You put stuff up, you tell people you want to be serious about it, and then you pull back because you are not really, because when push comes to shove, there is a set of interests that National will always give greatest priority to, and it will not be the interests of working people.

We see that in this legislation. We have seen it in its backing out on effective workplace representation. We see it now in a commencement clause that is going to cause just absolute confusion, and create an utter shambles for people who will look at this piece of legislation and wonder when on earth the whole lot of it is going to come into force. When are the bits relevant to them going to come into force? When are the butterfly farmers and the worm growers going to know that they are going to be part of a high-risk industry that has to have workplace representation, whereas their colleagues running a dairy farm or a beef farm are not going to have to? That is the question that is going to arise under this commencement clause. It is just all over the place.

Unfortunately, it exemplifies the worst of this bill. What should have been a bill that we championed, all of us; that we all rallied around; that we could at this point be celebrating as the achievement of this Parliament as a whole—we are left disappointed. We are left disappointed and unable to understand—even aside from this legislation’s glaring holes and big flaws—when it is going to start.

We are coming close to the end of a 14-hour Committee stage where we have had some pretty robust discussions from this side of the benches, and only very few people on the National side have actually got up and spoken to this. But I would like to commend those people who actually have taken many, many calls to put their passionate voices forward.

The Health and Safety Reform Bill really is a bit of a cock-up, in my opinion. At the start of the select committee deliberations we said that New Zealand First was close to being able to support this bill, and we had a number—a great number—of Supplementary Order Paper amendments on the Table that we were hoping were going to get some sort of common-sense support for from the National Government, the Government that is supposedly out there supporting small businesses, with their ever-increasing load of increased compliance costs, to run their businesses. Under this new legislation, some family members, if they are in a farm workplace, are, potentially, going to be caught up, embroiled, in legal culpability. In the event that their husband goes out and has an accident, the spouse could lose the farm and be sued a lot of money, and potentially even spend some time in jail.

We have got the cock-up that has come out in recent times of what is the definition of—what is actually going to be—a high-risk work group in our society. We have come out with things like worm farms, butterfly farms, and lavender growing. I mean, goodness me! This bill had great expectations from the people of New Zealand. The submitters that we have heard from, going into this, were very excited about seeing some positive change. The rhetoric that the Government has thrown out towards us said that we were going to reduce health and safety incidents and death in our workplaces by 25 percent in the next 5 years.

Well, goodness me, this is a half measure of what is expected by the people. We hear the likes of Andrew Bayly in the Chamber here, saying that 97 percent of our country’s workers are actually employed in small businesses, yet this does not capture them. Thirty percent of all people employed in New Zealand are not going to be captured under the 20 workers threshold.

I have to say it is of some concern to New Zealand First, and particularly to me, that we have the situation where we put an amendment forward to reduce the number of workers able to actually get themselves a health and safety representative at work from 20 down to 10, and then, of course, we did not get the support from Labour—which was a big surprise—or those Greens. The reality is that if you are talking about real engagement and actually helping the workers have that bottom-up approach to supporting their workplaces, then that was the real opportunity to go and do it. They did not even get to vote for their amendment. It was wiped off the table, and yet there was no support there. It is a bit of an embarrassment when they are sitting up there yelling out about how well they have done to try to get the best deal they can, and they did not even support reducing the threshold of those workers from 20 down to 10. That is what it is about: getting the best that we can get for our workers.

I have to say that the Health and Safety Reform Bill would probably be better called the “Too Little, Too Late Bill”, because it has been a long time since the Pike River tragedy. It has been a total of 5 years. There has been a huge expectation out there within the community, the working groups of New Zealand, to get this bill sorted out once and for all, right first time. Yet we are finding ourselves with hiccups, where we cannot even get ourselves that representation—where small businesses cannot get their health and safety representative training paid for by the Government.

In retrospect, if you think about it, in many ways that health and safety representation training is partly paid for by the Government already, but it is paid for as a tax incentive. The Inland Revenue Department will give you a 100 percent deduction for that. However, it will not cover the likes of the cost of the travel, the time off work, and it certainly will not cover your accommodation costs.

For example, if you are living in Gore and you are wanting to travel to Christchurch to go and get your health and safety representative training done, that is going to be a cost, a huge burden—an extra cost in the ever-increasing costs of running small businesses in this country—that could be waived and that the Government could take responsibility for in actually paying for those costs. Of course, then people would not need to claim it back in their taxes, because it would be something that the Government is offering. If it is truly about health and safety reform, that would have been one measure that I would have thought the Government would have taken heed of and actually supported.

I have to say that there is a media report that has just come out this afternoon. It has got here: “Late addition of national security provisions concerns Law Society. The New Zealand Law Society has expressed its significant concerns at the last-minute addition to the Health and Safety Reform Bill of provisions for a closed material procedure for court proceedings where national security is involved.”

The title of this bill is the Health and Safety Reform Act 2015—that is what it will become if it is passed. My colleague Iain Lees-Galloway talked about how misleading that title actually is, because what we wanted was true reform, and now, unfortunately, we do not have it.

What we know about workplace health and safety—and I think it is probably something that we can all agree on in this Chamber—is that when short cuts are taken in the workplace over health and safety, that costs lives. Well, here we are, with this Government taking short cuts over health and safety in this bill—it will cost lives. It will cost lives, and all of those members opposite need to think about that because they have now been cast as the villains in this piece.

They have been cast as the villains in this piece, who have moved to specifically ensure that those people in small workplaces, which are workplaces with fewer than 20 employees, and those people in high-risk industries like farming are going to be excluded from having the very best representation—the very best representation. This is not just because I think it is the very best representation or because the Labour Party thinks that or the Green Party or New Zealand First think that; it is because the international evidence shows us that when workers get their own voice, and when they have a health and safety representative elected by them and trained to do the job properly, then that is going to be the most effective foil to poor health and safety in the workplace. That is going to be the very best preventative measure.

Many of the submitters who came before the select committee said just that. Not only the unions but many of the businesses came in support of this bill, in general, and were pleased that Parliament was united in supporting a comprehensive approach to health and safety reform. That is what the title of the bill was at the outset, and that is what we genuinely believed that all of us wanted to achieve.

I have got to say, having been on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, that that consensus held for a very, very long time. For almost a year and a half that consensus remained. And then—well, actually, I will tell you the minute that I saw that consensus start to wobble: it was when Judith Collins came and subbed in on the select committee one day. She was kind of there by accident, but, boy, did she make a change to what was going on in that select committee. Her one, accidental visit to that select committee while subbing in for another member, I believe, changed everything. I believe that changed everything because, suddenly, she was there questioning the officials, questioning whether the Minister actually had his act together over this bill, and causing mayhem—causing mayhem—in the select committee room. The other MPs from the National Party in that select committee room sat there dumbfounded. They were not quite sure exactly how to respond.

I have got to say that Jonathan Young, the chairperson of that select committee, did an awfully good job of retaining some measure of decorum in a chaotic situation for the National members. But here was one of their colleagues questioning the wisdom of whether the Government should even go down this path at all with health and safety.

That was the minute I heard and saw the consensus start to slip—that was the minute that it happened. Christopher Bishop laughs, but he is the only one over there who is actually finding it humorous at all. The rest of them are deadpan.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! The title and commencement.

Sorry, the title and commencement. Right, so the title and commencement—why I raise these issues is because it does all come back to the title, which is about health and safety reform. We genuinely did believe that we were embarking on that journey together as a Parliament, and for almost all of the time that has been the case. It has been in only very recent times that that has changed. Why has that changed? Well, it has changed because of politics. Politics have been put in front of the principle of having the best health and safety practices.

💬 Chris Bishop: Come on.

Everyone knows that. Well, Christopher Bishop seems to be the only person who does not know it, but everyone else—

I rise to take a call on the title and commencement clauses of the Health and Safety Reform Bill. I have to say that I agree with previous speakers that the title potentially does not necessarily reflect what the bill does.

I agree with the previous speaker, Sue Moroney, that where we started out on this bill was with a lot of goodwill right across the House, and with an intention to make good health and safety law that kept people safe at work: people like the nurses, who care for our sick and our fragile in our hospitals; people like the home-care assistants, who may work in people’s homes caring for the elderly, the frail, and the disabled; people like those who brave the sea and collect fish that we buy to eat; and people who work on farms producing the meat that we export and that we also buy for ourselves. These are the people who invest their bodies on a daily basis in the work that they do, providing for all of us, and we as legislators—as people who are working on this legislation—have a duty of care to them to provide legislation that keeps them safe at work.

I thought that reform, as in the title of the Health and Safety Reform Bill, meant it would make things better, because that is what we intended to do. That is why we were picking up the recommendations from the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy and why we were picking up the recommendations from the Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety—to put them into legislation that would actually make things better. That is what I thought reform meant. I agree with Andrew Little, I think it was, who said that we had had a united front on this right from the start, but the reform part has actually sort of fallen away, and what we have got is something that is not reflected in the title. It is probably more like a “Broken Promises Bill” more than a Health and Safety Reform Bill.

We have had families from the Pike River mine—we have had Bernie and Kath Monk come and speak to us last week. We had families who have lost their sons, their husbands, or the father of their children come to speak to us last week about what they considered to be the broken promises that are in this bill. That, I think, is a much more accurate reflection of the title of this bill. These were the people—these were the people—who were saying to us: “Our loved ones will not have died in vain if we can have legislation that actually does protect people at work.”

What they were saying was that to exclude workplaces with fewer than 20 workers from being able to even ask for a health and safety rep, let alone a health and safety committee—these were ways, and they knew that these were ways, that would keep people safe at work. Sons, fathers, husbands—it would have kept them safe at work, and yet we have failed. We are getting to the end of this Committee of the whole House stage, despite the fact that we have tried to put forward Supplementary Order Papers—

💬 Carmel Sepuloni: There are three more speeches to give on this.

OK. Well, we are not coming to the end of the Committee stage, but we are getting through it—we have been through a lot of the schedules—and what we have seen is a constant rejection of Supplementary Order Papers that could have made it a little bit better.

I do not understand why the bill has come back to the Committee of the whole House with a whole host of changes that we did not even think about in the select committee, which strikes me as a very undemocratic process. To rock up to the Committee of the whole House with a whole bunch of stuff that nobody has actually discussed before and say: “This is what’s going to be in the bill.” just makes a mockery of the fact that we have been through a very full submission process. So maybe this is the “Anti-Democracy Bill”—

I want to speak to the issue that has been raised or emphasised today by the New Zealand Law Society. Nowhere in the version of the bill that went to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and that people submitted on was there a reference to people being able to be tried in respect of offences where they could be convicted on the basis of evidence they did not hear and that their lawyer could not see, either. Those provisions were inserted at the select committee stage after submissions had closed and they were not even referred to by the select committee when it was drawing the attention of this House to the amendments that were being made to the legislation. Supplementary Order Paper 108 then makes further amendments to those provisions and I want to describe, if I have time, what the Law Society is saying about them, because it says—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): No, I am afraid that these have not been discussed in the Committee stage. What we are talking about now is the title and commencement, and one needs to tie the debate back to that. If we look at Speakers’ ruling 127/5, there is some latitude, however, to summarise those things that have been discussed during the course of the Committee stage. This is new material you are bringing up, which has not been discussed by this Committee.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. This was raised by Jacinda Ardern in the debate on Part 4.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I will listen very carefully.

Thank you, Mr Chair. The Health and Safety Reform Bill does not in its title say that it is taking away the right to a fair trial. That is the effect of these provisions, according to the Law Society, and it recommends the removal of the provisions to await the outcome of an inquiry by the Law Commission in respect of national security information. The Law Society says that the effect of the provisions is very broad because they apply to investigations by the police, not just by security agencies, and that the definition of “classified security information” is very broad. It makes the point that none of this was subject to a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet because it was introduced late in the process at select committee, and neither were the—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I am sorry but what you are referring to was not part of the Committee’s consideration—and I am referring to the Committee of the whole House. I am listening very carefully to what the honourable member is saying and I ask you to tie it back to the commencement and title—that is what we are on—and the peroration, which is a summing up of those things that have been discussed within the Committee of the whole House.

Thank you, Mr Chair, and I do note the Minister trying to influence the Chair—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Oh, no.

Mr Chair—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): No. The member will sit. You will withdraw that comment. There is no influence whatsoever on the Chair by any member of this Committee. This is impartial material and I get my advice from the Clerk. All right?

Thank you, Mr Chair. The Law Society makes the point that the commencement of this legislation ought to be delayed, and this is within the date of—there is a variety of commencement dates provided for, as Andrew Little has already addressed in this debate. The Law Society is saying that these provisions ought not to come into effect until the Law Commission has reported back. It is most unusual—most unusual—that we would in this Parliament pass legislation that took away the right of an accused to hear the evidence that was being used against them, and most rare for the court not to be able to challenge the validity of doing that, and that is what the Law Society says is happening here.

I want to turn to another point. The exclusion of farms, essentially, from the ambit of organisations that need to have worker representatives is part of a continuing trend by this Government exempting the farming sector. We saw it in respect of emissions pricing: 50 percent of New Zealand’s emissions come from—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order!

Well, Mr Chair, I think it is—I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. With respect, it must be in order for me, when the Government is excluding the farming sector, to point out—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We are not talking about emissions, and that was not part of the debate. You have got 5 seconds remaining.

I am not going to bother.

I move, That the question be now put.

I am speaking on the commencement clause of the Health and Safety Reform Bill. Many, many people have lost their lives in order for this piece of legislation to be produced—29 of them at Pike River and hundreds and hundreds of others—because by any First World standard we have had inadequate health and safety provisions.

If I go back to 1992—and I have referred to that—I quote here what the member said: “The proposed requirements for safety and health committees and representatives would have been totally confused. The accountability structures would most certainly have been confused if some of those amendments had been accepted by the Committee.” The member goes on: “The National Government took out these parts because it happens to believe that workplaces and the workplace environment is best managed by the employers having No. 1 responsibility to put what the legislation clearly establishes.” That failed. That failed the mining industry and it failed workers in New Zealand. The National Government has once again failed to produce proper health and safety legislation.

How can we support the commencement of this bill? It is called a reform bill. One of the previous speakers said: “I went to Google to quote it. ‘Reform—to make changes in order to improve it.’ ” How can we claim that we are making improvements when alpaca farming, bird breeding, pet breeding, rabbit farming, and worm farming are considered high risk, and sheep and cattle farming, dairy farming, tree pruning, thinning in a forest, and explosives laying are considered low risk? It is bizarre and ridiculous.

We are speaking on the commencement of a bill that will not necessarily take us forward in terms of health and safety across this country. I cannot say it is a joke, because that would be dishonouring the hundreds of people who have lost their lives due to failed health and safety, to bring us to this point here in the House when we hoped—and the Labour Party supported the legislation’s referral to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—we were making real progress. It really was a reform bill. That is what we hoped. Now we believe it has failed.

I am not sure whether the commencement date of 2018 is right or wrong, other than to say it is a long, long way down the track from 1992, when the National Government brought in health and safety legislation and all its principles, and a long way down the track from 1997 and the other amendments that have taken place.

I feel very compelled to do everything I can to get it right. It was not long before the Pike River disaster that I tried to raise the issues myself with the Minister. Assurances of proper process and proper oversight were given, but to no avail. We have, in Opposition, the absolute responsibility to point out every fault in this piece of legislation, to remind the Government that it failed in 1992—the same ridiculous, pathetic excuses about workplace representation. What an arrogant, arrogant approach, to say that employees do not know what is safe and what is unsafe and have no wisdom in the workplace.

Mr Chairman, I say to you and to this Committee that I have learnt, as an employer, to listen to the people at the coalface, to listen to the people who are doing the dangerous work, and to ask them and get guidance from them as to how to improve—but no. The vast majority of workers working in small to medium sized enterprises up and down this country will not be covered by the majority of provisions in this legislation because they are in workplaces with fewer than 20 employees—in spite of the percentages I hear from the Minister and the Government.

I do not know what the true figures are; I do not believe many of the figures coming from the Government. Can I say of the commencement, which is the clause that I am referring to here, that I have concerns that if we support this in the way that the legislation is going to be put in place, we are not—

I rise to take a call in this debate around the title and commencement clauses of the currently named Health and Safety Reform Bill. I want to pick up on my colleague’s point, which has been made consequently by Damien O’Connor, about the meaning of “reform” being “to make it better”—to act on the unnecessary deaths that are happening in our workplaces as well as the injuries, and the fact that in the last 5 years there have been 104 deaths in agriculture in this country.

This legislation was prompted by the royal commission that was established in response to the Pike River mine tragedy and the subsequent Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety, which both recommended that we as a country needed stronger worker participation in our legislation to ensure that we had safe workplaces to ensure that these unnecessary deaths would stop. So my suggestion is that “Reform” is inappropriate—that actually, as it has been characterised by the Council of Trade Unions, this is a bill that waters down those protections. “Waters down” is more appropriate.

The bill that was discussed by the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, where there were so many submissions made and so many people urged this House to pass legislation that honoured the dead and protected those still living—that was upheld, and the committee was working in that light. The committee was working towards legislation that would truly reform, and then, at the last minute, what we have been given in this Committee is a piece of legislation that actually waters down existing provisions. Under today’s law any business, regardless of size—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Title and commencement. Come back to that.

Sure. This is referring directly to the title and the point around reform and the fact that this is a watering down, because the existing law requires employee participation in the system regardless of the size of the workplace.

For this Government to introduce legislation that puts 20 employees as the limit and then some categorisation that is entirely opaque to this Committee around “high risk” is not doing an honour. It is not reforming. It is not what we consider to be the health and safety reform that is required, because we know that participation is at the core of what will make our workplaces safer. That is the essential part that is missing at the moment: the protection for workers to have a safe voice. That requires systems. It does not happen naturally. It is not happening in workplaces without that designated position.

We are hearing from employers. They are saying it is happening when clearly it is not, because people are dying in their workplaces. They are saying that workers are speaking up and have the opportunity to participate, but they are not because they are worried about their jobs and about being able to put food on the table. Their voices are not being heard because there is not a protected position.

This bill is not delivering the reform that is required to ensure that participation and to ensure the possibility of having safer workplaces. That, to my mind, is dishonouring the memory of the dead and is—I do not know. It is spitting on the hopes of those families who came to us and said that this legislation was their hope to have meaning out of that tragedy. To be in this Chamber and be debating the concept of this as being reform when it is clearly not is just so very deeply disappointing. I do hope that the Government has an epiphany and that somehow from here something changes.

I move, That the question be now put.

Can I just acknowledge my colleague Jan Logie from the Green Party, who has just resumed her seat, and say that her words really took me back to the initial announcement of the first explosion at Pike River mine. This whole Parliament was in agony, not knowing what had happened and not understanding it, but we all felt totally united in grief and support at such a tragedy.

That grief and support turned to anger as people, particularly Damien O’Connor and Kevin Hague, brought to this House the issues that have driven this health and safety reform legislation. We learnt of the disregard for the well-being of the people who worked in that mine. It was a pretty terrible place to work anyway, with the greatest respect to coalminers. It is a hard life, actually, but the employers there—or the people who operated the mine, because some of them were contractors, of course—seemed to have a total disregard for the well-being of their staff. So the anger in this Parliament grew.

It is not often that every party in this House says that this is an issue we can address together. I think it gave us, as members of Parliament, confidence that when the health and safety reform legislation was introduced, it had been driven by an understanding that things were wrong and needed to be made right and that this Parliament was the right place to do it. We had the Royal Commission on the Pike River Coal Mine Tragedy, which did a very rigorous investigation that uncovered yet more tragedies that we had to learn of. Those 29 Pike River mineworkers lost their lives not through any disregard by themselves—they lost their lives because they went to work and were killed on the job.

We wanted the findings of the royal commission, the commitment of the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety—and the Prime Minister’s commitment, actually—and the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee’s work to bring back to this House a bit of legislation that meant we could all say that this was the best we could possibly do, because that is what those dead workers and their families deserved from this Parliament. The title of this legislation, the “Health and Safety Reform Bill”, did reflect what this Parliament wanted to see in the legislation. We wanted to see reform of a system that failed for too many people, a system that allowed people to turn up to work in the morning and to never come home again. This Parliament said we did not want that system to continue; we wanted reform.

Then somehow along the line, what happened? What happened, Minister, to your personal commitment, which I heard in this House on more than one occasion? What happened to the Prime Minister’s commitment?

💬 Dr Megan Woods: Judith Collins.

I think it sounded like Judith Collins led a bit of a rebellion, and the lives of not just the Pike River mineworkers but the lives of other people in New Zealand who had died just doing their job seemed to count for less than National’s internal battle about what should be required of whom in this legislation.

We started hearing that some groups of workers would not be entitled to the same level of protection—it was too onerous on the employers or the standard was not high enough. The title reflects reform; it does not reflect: “Well, we think we’ll have a little tinker.” We wanted something that was the best-possible effort. We did not want a watered-down version of the best-possible effort. We did not want something that protected the National Party voting base or reflected individual misunderstandings that some National MPs have about what the best system is. I think the Minister knows what the best system is, and I think the Minister knows that this is not it. This is not the true reform that this Parliament wanted and deserved. I am really disappointed that, as a result, Parliament is divided on a bill that we should be united on.

I want to talk now on the commencement provision, which is the other part of the debate that we are having. We have heard already, several times—

I move, That the question be now put.

We have canvassed quite widely the issues. This has become quite repetitive on clauses 1 and 2. On many occasions I have asked members to come back to clauses 1 and 2. [Interruption] Order! I am speaking. The Committee of the whole House can decide, so the question is that the question be now put.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. This debate started less than an hour ago. It is a debate on the preliminary clauses, which gives members an opportunity to be reasonably wide ranging in the contributions that they make on this part of the debate. We have had only a small number of members making a contribution so far, and a large number of members on this side of the Chamber—

Thank you. I hear the member—[Interruption] I hear the member. I have been making a note of those who have sought calls. I have given preference to those people who are on the select committee and those who have had calls during the course of the debate. This debate has been going since last week—since last Wednesday. When we are on the title and commencement clauses, these are the preliminary clauses—although there is some latitude, and I actually quoted the Speakers’ ruling at the time, which was Speakers’ ruling 127/5. They are for members to make concluding remarks. It is a summarising of concluding remarks. The debate has become quite repetitive. On a number of occasions I have asked members to come back to clauses 1 and 2. The Committee will decide whether we accept a closure motion or not.

I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. We have had on a number of occasions recently evidence that the ACT member is often offsite when the whip—

I thank the member for those comments. This has been dealt with some time ago. When a party whip casts a vote for another party, as one would well know, it is their integrity that is at stake. If they were to cast a vote knowing that that person was not in the precincts of Parliament, then that would be a very serious matter and one—[Interruption] Order! And it would be one of privilege. The Government’s third whip has cast a vote and that is to be accepted.