November 18, 2025 • 28 mins
15 years ago, 29 men went to work and never returned home.
The Pike River mine explosion shocked New Zealand and the world, prompting three inquiries, a new regulator and new laws.
But new research shows New Zealand workers are still more likely to die than those in Australia or Britain.
The Public Health Communication Centre Aotearoa report said this country kills twice as many workers as Australia and four times as many as Britain, on a per capita basis.
The number of work-related deaths has not substantially reduced since 2010.
Victoria University of Wellington workplace health and safety lecturer Dr Chris Peace joins The Front Page to talk about our poor safety standings and what needs to change.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Kyoda. I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page,
a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. Fifteen
years ago today, November nineteen, twenty ten. Twenty nine men
went to work and never returned home.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Ignored all the science and things are wrong.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
The pirate of mind I ever mentioned intended board.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
There's no legal accountability, so that there was no risk
in them doing what they did except losing their essay.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Here has a looking down air.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
I feel pretty high, but.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Just get cheat to bring her down and puntry the
other door.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
Door.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Hello, Milton, come in, Milton.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Yeah's that Malcolm?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Sorry, Malfo is actually looking for Milton.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
He's one of the contractors.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
What's the second mean?
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Uh negative, I'll just have a look in the contract book.
I think you know what you mean. Is that the
one guy with a mistake?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, you got a mastache? Heah, that's the one he's
doing the four inch pipeworks.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah. Hello, Sparky's hello underground, any Sparkys. The Park River
(01:58):
mine explosion shocks New Zealand and the world and resulted
in three inquiries, a new regulator and new laws. But
despite to all of this, new research shows New Zealand
workers are more likely to die than Australia or the UK.
Today on the front page Victoria, University of Wellington workplace
(02:20):
and Health and Safety lecturer doctor Chris Peace is with
us to discuss whether we've learned anything from what happened
at Pike River. So Chris, tell me some statistics about
workplace safety in New Zealand. How are we going?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Not very well is the short answer. If we compare
ourselves to other countries and major trading partners. For example,
generally we say that we're killing four times more people
in New Zealand than in the UK. Now that's got
to be in the context of per one hundred thousand workers,
(03:03):
and we killed twice as many people as Australia. Again
per one hundred thousand workers, we're somewhere around about twenty
fifth in the OECD, So Holland I think is number
one in terms of not killing workers. The UK is
around number four and we're number twenty five. So we're
(03:27):
not doing very well if we compare ourselves internationally, and
that's crossing the country somewhere in the order of five
point four billion dollars per year because of death injuries, rehabilitation,
compensation and so on. So we're talking something that's a
(03:48):
big problem.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Why why are we so bad at it?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Well, I'll have to say you can probably tell from
the accent that I will born here, but I've been
here neither Chris. I got here in nineteen eighty and
there are a lot of things that I discovered then,
and on reflection, I think I can see some of
the really good things about New Zealand as well as
(04:16):
some things that get in the way of workplace health
and safety. Because of ACC. Well, I've got to say
I think ACC is one of the most brilliant things
that New Zealand has. Because of ACC, employers don't have
to worry about being sued by workers if they are
injured or worse killed at work. But that means the
(04:40):
low fault liability side opens up employers to not having
to worry too much, not so much about workplace health
and safety. So since fifty plus years it's I think
that's fifty two years now since ACC came in. The
imperative that I grew up with in the UK of
(05:02):
if you're injured at work, you sue and your employer
if they lose a case in court, your employer has
to pay. Those imperatives don't exist so much in New Zealand.
And when we did the deal, when we changed from workers'
compensation to ACC, part of the deal was that New
(05:23):
Zealand would have a strong regulatory system, and so we
got ACC, but we didn't get the strong regulatory system
that led us to eventually the Health and Safety and
Employment Act. Hell of a lot of time was spent
arguing about whether something was a hazard or a significant hazard.
(05:45):
What was the difference perception. One person's significant hazard was
somebody else's just minor hazard. So we got all the
way through to fifteen years ago with Pack River, just
before Pike River. We with hindsight, yes, but it was
pretty obvious to people on the inside. We had a
(06:07):
system where the then Department of Labor Health and Safety
team was under resourced, underfunded. They if they send an
inspector to Pike River, they didn't have enough expenses that
they could claim to stay overnight and actually go to
the mind to see what was wrong or what was right.
(06:28):
So we lost twenty nine men up Pike River, and
the whole series of reports the Royal Commission and people
saying yeah, we need to do better. When we kill
or seriously injure a worker, they suffer, but so does
their family and their far out and their co workers,
(06:49):
and it just it ripples through the economy. We got
work Safe no longer part of what became Ministry of Business,
Innovation and Employment, and we were promised that underpinning the
new Act would be a whole lot of new approaches
(07:10):
to regulatory system, the regulatory system, and that would include
a proof codes of practice, up to date guidance, new regulations,
not more regulations, but new regulations that recognized how things
have changed over the years in the economy and New Zealand. Unfortunately,
(07:33):
most of that never happened. The draft regulations on plant
and equipment were consulted on, extensively, agreed to be jolly good,
well written, up to date, modern, and then there was
this long silence. They just quietly got shelved change of government.
(07:53):
Along that journey, of course, we also had Fakari when
twenty two people died at on for and then others subsequently,
there was a major distraction in there for Work Safe,
doing the investigation and taking the prosecution. It absorbed not
just I think it was about fifteen million dollars in cost,
(08:15):
but also a hell of a lot of time. So
we've got a new government and the Minister would like
to reform the system. But to do what And this
is something I'm writing about at the moment for the
fifteenth anniversary of Pike River. What do we get instead
(08:37):
of what we've got? Well, there's a consensus view that
the Act is perfectly good. In my view, we could
rename the Act from Health and Safety at Work Act
to the Wealth and a Safety at Workout, because what
it's actually doing is talking about how a business should
(08:58):
be managed, how it should be operate rated, including getting directors,
the officers of the business involved in how it is functioning.
They do. Directors do that already most of the time
for the financial side.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
But they have no culpability, do they? And that's the kicker.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Oh they do now? They do now. Section forty four
sets up the duty of due diligence of officers In
New Zealand. We've had a few court cases, including an
important one last year when Maritime New Zealand, one of
the regulartory agentsies prosecuted the ex Chief Executive of Ports
(09:40):
of Auckland. He was convicted and the judge's decision is
or should be, almost mandatory reading for every director in
every business in New Zealand. But I don't know that
we're really getting the message across. I think it's unfor
fortunate that we talk about the law as if it's
(10:03):
a cost for business. It isn't. And what I just said,
if you want to think it through, carefully read the
Act and realize why it should be renamed the Wealth
and Safety at Work Act. It's about how to run
businesses better, more effectively without wasting money on workers who
aren't there because they're sick or injured or worse dead.
(10:26):
Is all of those on costs and the five point
four billion we could eliminate them with effective health and safety.
So that's my big take on what's wrong.
Speaker 5 (10:37):
All right? We have so many one members approved by
Pike Robber. Some of the guys who are down their
mind at the moment are our members. One of our
delegates is down there, so we have a pretty clish
interest yet expect. But also we represent miners generally, and
when it's something like this happens, people forget which mining
company they work for. What they all pull together. This
(10:58):
is a this is a dreadful time or the families
of those guys who are down there, and it's type
for everybody to rally around and provide support. So we're
down here to make sure that that's happening, that the
families are supported, that the other miners are kept in
touch with what's going on, and that people are assisted
to get through this this agonizing time that we wait
(11:18):
to get the rescue BEFO underway. Once that happens, then
obviously the next thing is to ask the questions about
what happened, why happened, and at some point we need
to be involved in that as well.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
That this is do you have any safety concerns at
Pike River?
Speaker 5 (11:34):
Well, we know that Pike River as a company has
The've got an active health and safety committee, the union
is well represented on it. There's been nothing unusual come
out of that that what have led us to the
sort of things that have happened here. So there's nothing
unusual about Pike River or this mine that we've been
particularly concerned about, which is why I think then when
(11:55):
we get through the rescue effort, the questions then need
to be asked. You know, what did happen and why
did it happen and if anything could have been done
to prevent it.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
How has this affected the mining community both here and
generally in.
Speaker 5 (12:07):
You I think listen miners Barren. You know there are
understand there's a shadow goes up every spine because the
underground miners, they know that every day, every time they
go underground, anything like this could happen. It could have
happened to them, So they brought together pretty tightly. We've
had some amazing messages of support, not just from New
(12:28):
Zealand but from around the world, from mining unions around
the world. We've been conveying those messages to our members
down here of support, and I think it's it's that
sort of stuff, that solidarity that helps get the mining
community and their families through an incident like this.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
What are the most crucial lessons for New Zealand and
what should we have learned from the Pike River mine
disaster now if we're looking back fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
On, I think the two big things were it's all
very good to wish for less regulatory interventions, but sometimes
you really do have to have strong intervention. You really
do need to make sure that people understand if they
(13:14):
breach the law negligently, even grossly negligently, then the regulatory agency,
mostly Work Safe, will have the power to take them
to court. I think we need to increase the fins.
I was back in the UK when the British changed
finds to unlimited if it went into the Crown Court,
(13:38):
a bit like sending the case to the High Court
in New Zealand. That puts shockwaves through New zeal As, sorry,
through the British industry. And yes there've been multimillion pound
fines in Britain, but it's pushed businesses to thinking seriously.
So make sure that we've got the right fines and
penalties in place, including a charge of manslaughter. And there
(14:00):
have been a few people in New Zealand who have
grossly negligently allowed the deaths of workers. So we need
the deterrents I think we need I keep looping back
to this. We need to get up, to grow up
and start thinking of the Health and Safety Work Act
as an impediment to business, to start thinking how important
(14:24):
that is for better business. The second thing that we
need is directors and officers. In the legislation, an officer
is a director, the chief executive or somebody else who's
got significant influence in a business. I think a lot
(14:44):
of businesses, big businesses where the directors are now asking questions,
have understood what needs to happen. I'm not sure that
everybody has really got the message. So so there's a
need to get the message over to all directors. How
do we do that? Every year a director has to
(15:08):
tell the company's office that yes, there's still a director
and yes these their contact details. Perfectly simple for a
joined up approach across government for the company's office to
send all such directors an email reminding them, and the
emails written by WorkSafe a reminder of their responsibilities. Under
(15:30):
the Health and Safety Work Act. Every business does a
GST return, so it's all of the contact details are
known to ID and they could also send an email
on behalf of work Safe, so there's no breach of
the Privacy Act here. They could send an email from
(15:52):
work Safe to all businesses reminding them of their responsibilities,
and then there's no excuse. Nobody can say, but I
didn't know. I didn't know you had an email that
told you, and the the one through I r D
could because the I r D knows the sort of
business are involved in. It could point the direction, point
(16:14):
you in the direction of better more informed advice on
the work safe website. So what else could we cover?
What else do we need to do? I think that
would if my wish list, you know, if if Father
Christmas was a real person and was in the in
(16:35):
the game of delivering my wish list for Christmas, that
those things would be it. I'm not sure whether the
minister is listening. I don't think the minister has read
the report that several of us wrote that the Public
Health Communications Center published last week. She said that she
(16:56):
hasn't read it. Will this government listen? Will they realize
that we're killing too many people at work, We're making
too many people sick because of work, and it's costing
US five and a half billion a year.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Do you think that they're more they're more preoccupied with
cutting red tape.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Yeah, but sometimes red tape is there for a reason.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Quite right. And when you were talking before, actually I
don't know why I thought of it, but I thought
about seat belts. When seat belts came a mandatory wearing
of seat belts, there were people there were riots, and
you know, not riots in the street, but I remember,
you know, doing vox There were vox pops on television
and like, what do you think about wearing seat belts?
Speaker 4 (17:45):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Well, I think it's ridiculous, and like, what do you feel? Well,
they're so uncomfortable. But there's now, years later, solid research
to suggest that if you're wearing a seat belt, you
are x times less likely to die. And that gives
me the impression of yes. Sometimes the fire alarms at
work a bit annoying to leave my desk, go downstairs,
(18:09):
get ticked off by the fire warden, come back up,
knowing that it's a fire drill. But in the end
it's all going to make sense, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
The minimum that it does is make you aware of
this being an aspect of workplace health and safety. It's
a fire drill, but it's health and safety. I want
to get to something that before. Maybe you do road cones.
Why on earth do we have so many road cones?
Originally the idea was that you marked out places that
(18:43):
people should not drive. Why wouldn't you want to drive there? Well,
because there's a road worker doing something improving the road,
repairing the road, putting in new pipes, whatever it is,
and it's not very nice to run over people who
are working on the road, so we divert the traffic
round road cones and sometimes we put somebody with one
(19:05):
of those lollipop signs or better still, traffic lights. Do
we have too many road cones? Yeah, we went too
mad with them at one stage. I think it's about
three years ago now the industry started to think about
how to improve high safety, the work on the road safety,
(19:26):
and that they've gone too far with road cones are
just something that you wave around, a sort of shroud
waving thing. We weren't doing it well enough. So we've
now arrived at a point where there's a risk based
approach to highway working. It's going to take time and
(19:47):
money to introduce that and make it safer for everybody
on the roads and to have fewer road cones but
also better temporary traffic management on the roads. Was that
because the Minister got grumpy about road cones and introduced
the hotline to report road cones? Now, the industry was
(20:10):
doing it already, and I think what the Minister needs
to do is pay attention to that as an object
lesson and how to encourage business to do it. Itself.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Two years after one of New Zealand's worst mining disasters,
a reporter has revealed it could have been prevented. Twenty
nine miners died in an explosion at the Pike with
a coal mine. Investigators found there were twenty one warnings
of excess meeting gas in the weeks before it happened
that were either not noticed or ignored. The report does
not say what sparked the explosion, but suggests it could
(20:45):
have been an electrical fault. The miners are thought to
have died almost instantly. The bigger picture the investigators described
is damning. They say there was a production before safety
culture at the mine, an unsuitable ventilation shaft, only one exit,
and no planning for a coal mining emergency. And even
though the mining company was young and inexperienced, the Department
(21:07):
of Labour allowed it to operate without adequate monitoring.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Did you have enough staff for health and safety?
Speaker 2 (21:13):
No good? You ask for more staff is constantly.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
The Minister for Labor, Kate Wilkinson, has stepped down.
Speaker 4 (21:23):
The The Partner of Labor for which she was the Minister,
could have potentially prevented these mean losing their lives. It's
possible that if they had done their job better, it's
possible that ase men might not have died.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
The Pike River Company has long since gone bankrupt and
is not defending itself against nine labor violations. The former
chief executive, Peter Whistle, is pleading not guilty to twelve
health and safety violations, and an Australian contractor has been
fined for providing a faulty meeting detector. The families of
those who died have called for the Pike River management
(21:59):
to face criminal tis chargers. That's unlikely to happen, but
the inquiry has recommended major improvements in workplace safety regulation
to prevent similar disasters in the future. Kroen I Malone
ol Jazeera.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
You mentioned before about corporate manslaughter charges. Now we don't
have them here in New Zealand. Both the UK and
Australia have added that corporate manslaughter for recklessness causing death
at work? What is it and why should we.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Well, you've almost hit the nail on the had there.
Corporate man's slaughter would be a charge that somebody grossly
negligently did not do something or did something. So I'm
thinking of something that an email that came in yesterday
(22:53):
from work Safe. I think I get pretty much all
of their emails, and some of them I read, some
of them might glance at and delete. This one was
about a case where somebody was delivering building materials to
a site with a machine that could lift and take
them through. Unfortunately, they lifted too high and hit overhead
(23:17):
power lines and the operator of the plant, the mobile plant,
was killed. I don't want to anticipate what the investigation
has shown on what works they would want to do.
But if I now generalize from that, if you know
that workers are going to be operating machinery in the
(23:40):
vicinity of overhead power lines eleven thousand volt power lines,
and you don't do things to anticipate the risk of
hitting those power lines or simply coming too close to them,
and the power line is discharging and killing the worker,
if you don't anticipate that, when we know it's one
(24:02):
of these stupid everybody knows if they work in the sector,
that that will kill if you don't anticipate that. In
my book, that's gross negligence, and that's language that I
grew up on originally in the UK before I came
to New Zealand simple negligence. Now maybe not the manslaughter charge.
(24:24):
It simple negligence where somebody strained their back because they
tried to lift something that was too heavy. That's one
of the biggest costs to the country musculos collegial disorders.
But gross negligence is relatively rare. It's relatively rare, but
an awful lot of the cases that work Safe takes.
(24:47):
And I've read the district court decisions of probably two
or three hundred out of the one thousand since the
Health and Safety at Work pack came in, and there
couple of one hundred that I think would have been
gross negligence where a manslaughter charge could have been taken.
What does it mean in practice? If somebody is prosecuted
(25:10):
in Australia or the UK, the prosecutor has to prove
what I call gross negligence. They have to prove that somebody,
there's a lovely old English legal work, that there was
a contumious disregard for the safety of the worker, it
was beyond disgraceful. If they convinced the court that that's
(25:34):
the case, then there could be a prison sentence or
there could be a very large fine for corporate manslaughter,
and that would be different from in the UK the
unlimited fines that exist under the Health and Safety Workout,
the British Health and Safety Workout. Is it needed? I
(25:58):
think it is needed here in New Zealand because we
have had cases where a corporate manslaughter of charge should
have been laid but couldn't. There's another bit of legislation
that's missing, and that's disqualification of directors. You can disqualified
directors in the UK. I'm not sure about Australia, but
(26:21):
certainly in the UK if they have again, if they
as a director have done something that caused death or
serious injury, disqualify them for five years. But again the
prosecutor has to prove to the court that's needed. This
is an awful lot of me wanting to sound like
a nasty chap. It's probably because forty odd years ago
(26:45):
I worked as a regular cheap person. I was an
inspector in the UK. I think we can do better
with encouragement and getting businesses to understand that we're talking
about improved profitability. But there are some people in New
Zealand who really should be taken out of being directors
(27:07):
because they have been recidivists. And I won't name anybody
in a podcast like this, but there are recidivists and
they should be disqualified as directors, and in some circumstances
may be convicted of a manslaughter charge.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Thanks for joining us, Chris, my pleasure.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Thank you for the time this morning.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at enzidherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is
produced by Jane Ye and Richard Martin, who is also
our editor. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front Page
on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune
(27:58):
in tomorrow for another look by behind the Headlines.
Kyoda. I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page,
a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. Fifteen
years ago today, November nineteen, twenty ten. Twenty nine men
went to work and never returned home.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Ignored all the science and things are wrong.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
The pirate of mind I ever mentioned intended board.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
There's no legal accountability, so that there was no risk
in them doing what they did except losing their essay.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Here has a looking down air.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
I feel pretty high, but.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Just get cheat to bring her down and puntry the
other door.
Speaker 4 (00:50):
Door.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Hello, Milton, come in, Milton.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Yeah's that Malcolm?
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Sorry, Malfo is actually looking for Milton.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
He's one of the contractors.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
What's the second mean?
Speaker 3 (01:13):
Uh negative, I'll just have a look in the contract book.
I think you know what you mean. Is that the
one guy with a mistake?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, you got a mastache? Heah, that's the one he's
doing the four inch pipeworks.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Yeah. Hello, Sparky's hello underground, any Sparkys. The Park River
(01:58):
mine explosion shocks New Zealand and the world and resulted
in three inquiries, a new regulator and new laws. But
despite to all of this, new research shows New Zealand
workers are more likely to die than Australia or the UK.
Today on the front page Victoria, University of Wellington workplace
(02:20):
and Health and Safety lecturer doctor Chris Peace is with
us to discuss whether we've learned anything from what happened
at Pike River. So Chris, tell me some statistics about
workplace safety in New Zealand. How are we going?
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Not very well is the short answer. If we compare
ourselves to other countries and major trading partners. For example,
generally we say that we're killing four times more people
in New Zealand than in the UK. Now that's got
to be in the context of per one hundred thousand workers,
(03:03):
and we killed twice as many people as Australia. Again
per one hundred thousand workers, we're somewhere around about twenty
fifth in the OECD, So Holland I think is number
one in terms of not killing workers. The UK is
around number four and we're number twenty five. So we're
(03:27):
not doing very well if we compare ourselves internationally, and
that's crossing the country somewhere in the order of five
point four billion dollars per year because of death injuries, rehabilitation,
compensation and so on. So we're talking something that's a
(03:48):
big problem.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Why why are we so bad at it?
Speaker 2 (03:54):
Well, I'll have to say you can probably tell from
the accent that I will born here, but I've been
here neither Chris. I got here in nineteen eighty and
there are a lot of things that I discovered then,
and on reflection, I think I can see some of
the really good things about New Zealand as well as
(04:16):
some things that get in the way of workplace health
and safety. Because of ACC. Well, I've got to say
I think ACC is one of the most brilliant things
that New Zealand has. Because of ACC, employers don't have
to worry about being sued by workers if they are
injured or worse killed at work. But that means the
(04:40):
low fault liability side opens up employers to not having
to worry too much, not so much about workplace health
and safety. So since fifty plus years it's I think
that's fifty two years now since ACC came in. The
imperative that I grew up with in the UK of
(05:02):
if you're injured at work, you sue and your employer
if they lose a case in court, your employer has
to pay. Those imperatives don't exist so much in New Zealand.
And when we did the deal, when we changed from workers'
compensation to ACC, part of the deal was that New
(05:23):
Zealand would have a strong regulatory system, and so we
got ACC, but we didn't get the strong regulatory system
that led us to eventually the Health and Safety and
Employment Act. Hell of a lot of time was spent
arguing about whether something was a hazard or a significant hazard.
(05:45):
What was the difference perception. One person's significant hazard was
somebody else's just minor hazard. So we got all the
way through to fifteen years ago with Pack River, just
before Pike River. We with hindsight, yes, but it was
pretty obvious to people on the inside. We had a
(06:07):
system where the then Department of Labor Health and Safety
team was under resourced, underfunded. They if they send an
inspector to Pike River, they didn't have enough expenses that
they could claim to stay overnight and actually go to
the mind to see what was wrong or what was right.
(06:28):
So we lost twenty nine men up Pike River, and
the whole series of reports the Royal Commission and people
saying yeah, we need to do better. When we kill
or seriously injure a worker, they suffer, but so does
their family and their far out and their co workers,
(06:49):
and it just it ripples through the economy. We got
work Safe no longer part of what became Ministry of Business,
Innovation and Employment, and we were promised that underpinning the
new Act would be a whole lot of new approaches
(07:10):
to regulatory system, the regulatory system, and that would include
a proof codes of practice, up to date guidance, new regulations,
not more regulations, but new regulations that recognized how things
have changed over the years in the economy and New Zealand. Unfortunately,
(07:33):
most of that never happened. The draft regulations on plant
and equipment were consulted on, extensively, agreed to be jolly good,
well written, up to date, modern, and then there was
this long silence. They just quietly got shelved change of government.
(07:53):
Along that journey, of course, we also had Fakari when
twenty two people died at on for and then others subsequently,
there was a major distraction in there for Work Safe,
doing the investigation and taking the prosecution. It absorbed not
just I think it was about fifteen million dollars in cost,
(08:15):
but also a hell of a lot of time. So
we've got a new government and the Minister would like
to reform the system. But to do what And this
is something I'm writing about at the moment for the
fifteenth anniversary of Pike River. What do we get instead
(08:37):
of what we've got? Well, there's a consensus view that
the Act is perfectly good. In my view, we could
rename the Act from Health and Safety at Work Act
to the Wealth and a Safety at Workout, because what
it's actually doing is talking about how a business should
(08:58):
be managed, how it should be operate rated, including getting directors,
the officers of the business involved in how it is functioning.
They do. Directors do that already most of the time
for the financial side.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
But they have no culpability, do they? And that's the kicker.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Oh they do now? They do now. Section forty four
sets up the duty of due diligence of officers In
New Zealand. We've had a few court cases, including an
important one last year when Maritime New Zealand, one of
the regulartory agentsies prosecuted the ex Chief Executive of Ports
(09:40):
of Auckland. He was convicted and the judge's decision is
or should be, almost mandatory reading for every director in
every business in New Zealand. But I don't know that
we're really getting the message across. I think it's unfor
fortunate that we talk about the law as if it's
(10:03):
a cost for business. It isn't. And what I just said,
if you want to think it through, carefully read the
Act and realize why it should be renamed the Wealth
and Safety at Work Act. It's about how to run
businesses better, more effectively without wasting money on workers who
aren't there because they're sick or injured or worse dead.
(10:26):
Is all of those on costs and the five point
four billion we could eliminate them with effective health and safety.
So that's my big take on what's wrong.
Speaker 5 (10:37):
All right? We have so many one members approved by
Pike Robber. Some of the guys who are down their
mind at the moment are our members. One of our
delegates is down there, so we have a pretty clish
interest yet expect. But also we represent miners generally, and
when it's something like this happens, people forget which mining
company they work for. What they all pull together. This
(10:58):
is a this is a dreadful time or the families
of those guys who are down there, and it's type
for everybody to rally around and provide support. So we're
down here to make sure that that's happening, that the
families are supported, that the other miners are kept in
touch with what's going on, and that people are assisted
to get through this this agonizing time that we wait
(11:18):
to get the rescue BEFO underway. Once that happens, then
obviously the next thing is to ask the questions about
what happened, why happened, and at some point we need
to be involved in that as well.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
That this is do you have any safety concerns at
Pike River?
Speaker 5 (11:34):
Well, we know that Pike River as a company has
The've got an active health and safety committee, the union
is well represented on it. There's been nothing unusual come
out of that that what have led us to the
sort of things that have happened here. So there's nothing
unusual about Pike River or this mine that we've been
particularly concerned about, which is why I think then when
(11:55):
we get through the rescue effort, the questions then need
to be asked. You know, what did happen and why
did it happen and if anything could have been done
to prevent it.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
How has this affected the mining community both here and
generally in.
Speaker 5 (12:07):
You I think listen miners Barren. You know there are
understand there's a shadow goes up every spine because the
underground miners, they know that every day, every time they
go underground, anything like this could happen. It could have
happened to them, So they brought together pretty tightly. We've
had some amazing messages of support, not just from New
(12:28):
Zealand but from around the world, from mining unions around
the world. We've been conveying those messages to our members
down here of support, and I think it's it's that
sort of stuff, that solidarity that helps get the mining
community and their families through an incident like this.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
What are the most crucial lessons for New Zealand and
what should we have learned from the Pike River mine
disaster now if we're looking back fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
On, I think the two big things were it's all
very good to wish for less regulatory interventions, but sometimes
you really do have to have strong intervention. You really
do need to make sure that people understand if they
(13:14):
breach the law negligently, even grossly negligently, then the regulatory agency,
mostly Work Safe, will have the power to take them
to court. I think we need to increase the fins.
I was back in the UK when the British changed
finds to unlimited if it went into the Crown Court,
(13:38):
a bit like sending the case to the High Court
in New Zealand. That puts shockwaves through New zeal As, sorry,
through the British industry. And yes there've been multimillion pound
fines in Britain, but it's pushed businesses to thinking seriously.
So make sure that we've got the right fines and
penalties in place, including a charge of manslaughter. And there
(14:00):
have been a few people in New Zealand who have
grossly negligently allowed the deaths of workers. So we need
the deterrents I think we need I keep looping back
to this. We need to get up, to grow up
and start thinking of the Health and Safety Work Act
as an impediment to business, to start thinking how important
(14:24):
that is for better business. The second thing that we
need is directors and officers. In the legislation, an officer
is a director, the chief executive or somebody else who's
got significant influence in a business. I think a lot
(14:44):
of businesses, big businesses where the directors are now asking questions,
have understood what needs to happen. I'm not sure that
everybody has really got the message. So so there's a
need to get the message over to all directors. How
do we do that? Every year a director has to
(15:08):
tell the company's office that yes, there's still a director
and yes these their contact details. Perfectly simple for a
joined up approach across government for the company's office to
send all such directors an email reminding them, and the
emails written by WorkSafe a reminder of their responsibilities. Under
(15:30):
the Health and Safety Work Act. Every business does a
GST return, so it's all of the contact details are
known to ID and they could also send an email
on behalf of work Safe, so there's no breach of
the Privacy Act here. They could send an email from
(15:52):
work Safe to all businesses reminding them of their responsibilities,
and then there's no excuse. Nobody can say, but I
didn't know. I didn't know you had an email that
told you, and the the one through I r D
could because the I r D knows the sort of
business are involved in. It could point the direction, point
(16:14):
you in the direction of better more informed advice on
the work safe website. So what else could we cover?
What else do we need to do? I think that
would if my wish list, you know, if if Father
Christmas was a real person and was in the in
(16:35):
the game of delivering my wish list for Christmas, that
those things would be it. I'm not sure whether the
minister is listening. I don't think the minister has read
the report that several of us wrote that the Public
Health Communications Center published last week. She said that she
(16:56):
hasn't read it. Will this government listen? Will they realize
that we're killing too many people at work, We're making
too many people sick because of work, and it's costing
US five and a half billion a year.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Do you think that they're more they're more preoccupied with
cutting red tape.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Yeah, but sometimes red tape is there for a reason.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Quite right. And when you were talking before, actually I
don't know why I thought of it, but I thought
about seat belts. When seat belts came a mandatory wearing
of seat belts, there were people there were riots, and
you know, not riots in the street, but I remember,
you know, doing vox There were vox pops on television
and like, what do you think about wearing seat belts?
Speaker 4 (17:45):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Well, I think it's ridiculous, and like, what do you feel? Well,
they're so uncomfortable. But there's now, years later, solid research
to suggest that if you're wearing a seat belt, you
are x times less likely to die. And that gives
me the impression of yes. Sometimes the fire alarms at
work a bit annoying to leave my desk, go downstairs,
(18:09):
get ticked off by the fire warden, come back up,
knowing that it's a fire drill. But in the end
it's all going to make sense, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
The minimum that it does is make you aware of
this being an aspect of workplace health and safety. It's
a fire drill, but it's health and safety. I want
to get to something that before. Maybe you do road cones.
Why on earth do we have so many road cones?
Originally the idea was that you marked out places that
(18:43):
people should not drive. Why wouldn't you want to drive there? Well,
because there's a road worker doing something improving the road,
repairing the road, putting in new pipes, whatever it is,
and it's not very nice to run over people who
are working on the road, so we divert the traffic
round road cones and sometimes we put somebody with one
(19:05):
of those lollipop signs or better still, traffic lights. Do
we have too many road cones? Yeah, we went too
mad with them at one stage. I think it's about
three years ago now the industry started to think about
how to improve high safety, the work on the road safety,
(19:26):
and that they've gone too far with road cones are
just something that you wave around, a sort of shroud
waving thing. We weren't doing it well enough. So we've
now arrived at a point where there's a risk based
approach to highway working. It's going to take time and
(19:47):
money to introduce that and make it safer for everybody
on the roads and to have fewer road cones but
also better temporary traffic management on the roads. Was that
because the Minister got grumpy about road cones and introduced
the hotline to report road cones? Now, the industry was
(20:10):
doing it already, and I think what the Minister needs
to do is pay attention to that as an object
lesson and how to encourage business to do it. Itself.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
Two years after one of New Zealand's worst mining disasters,
a reporter has revealed it could have been prevented. Twenty
nine miners died in an explosion at the Pike with
a coal mine. Investigators found there were twenty one warnings
of excess meeting gas in the weeks before it happened
that were either not noticed or ignored. The report does
not say what sparked the explosion, but suggests it could
(20:45):
have been an electrical fault. The miners are thought to
have died almost instantly. The bigger picture the investigators described
is damning. They say there was a production before safety
culture at the mine, an unsuitable ventilation shaft, only one exit,
and no planning for a coal mining emergency. And even
though the mining company was young and inexperienced, the Department
(21:07):
of Labour allowed it to operate without adequate monitoring.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Did you have enough staff for health and safety?
Speaker 2 (21:13):
No good? You ask for more staff is constantly.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
The Minister for Labor, Kate Wilkinson, has stepped down.
Speaker 4 (21:23):
The The Partner of Labor for which she was the Minister,
could have potentially prevented these mean losing their lives. It's
possible that if they had done their job better, it's
possible that ase men might not have died.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
The Pike River Company has long since gone bankrupt and
is not defending itself against nine labor violations. The former
chief executive, Peter Whistle, is pleading not guilty to twelve
health and safety violations, and an Australian contractor has been
fined for providing a faulty meeting detector. The families of
those who died have called for the Pike River management
(21:59):
to face criminal tis chargers. That's unlikely to happen, but
the inquiry has recommended major improvements in workplace safety regulation
to prevent similar disasters in the future. Kroen I Malone
ol Jazeera.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
You mentioned before about corporate manslaughter charges. Now we don't
have them here in New Zealand. Both the UK and
Australia have added that corporate manslaughter for recklessness causing death
at work? What is it and why should we.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Well, you've almost hit the nail on the had there.
Corporate man's slaughter would be a charge that somebody grossly
negligently did not do something or did something. So I'm
thinking of something that an email that came in yesterday
(22:53):
from work Safe. I think I get pretty much all
of their emails, and some of them I read, some
of them might glance at and delete. This one was
about a case where somebody was delivering building materials to
a site with a machine that could lift and take
them through. Unfortunately, they lifted too high and hit overhead
(23:17):
power lines and the operator of the plant, the mobile plant,
was killed. I don't want to anticipate what the investigation
has shown on what works they would want to do.
But if I now generalize from that, if you know
that workers are going to be operating machinery in the
(23:40):
vicinity of overhead power lines eleven thousand volt power lines,
and you don't do things to anticipate the risk of
hitting those power lines or simply coming too close to them,
and the power line is discharging and killing the worker,
if you don't anticipate that, when we know it's one
(24:02):
of these stupid everybody knows if they work in the sector,
that that will kill if you don't anticipate that. In
my book, that's gross negligence, and that's language that I
grew up on originally in the UK before I came
to New Zealand simple negligence. Now maybe not the manslaughter charge.
(24:24):
It simple negligence where somebody strained their back because they
tried to lift something that was too heavy. That's one
of the biggest costs to the country musculos collegial disorders.
But gross negligence is relatively rare. It's relatively rare, but
an awful lot of the cases that work Safe takes.
(24:47):
And I've read the district court decisions of probably two
or three hundred out of the one thousand since the
Health and Safety at Work pack came in, and there
couple of one hundred that I think would have been
gross negligence where a manslaughter charge could have been taken.
What does it mean in practice? If somebody is prosecuted
(25:10):
in Australia or the UK, the prosecutor has to prove
what I call gross negligence. They have to prove that somebody,
there's a lovely old English legal work, that there was
a contumious disregard for the safety of the worker, it
was beyond disgraceful. If they convinced the court that that's
(25:34):
the case, then there could be a prison sentence or
there could be a very large fine for corporate manslaughter,
and that would be different from in the UK the
unlimited fines that exist under the Health and Safety Workout,
the British Health and Safety Workout. Is it needed? I
(25:58):
think it is needed here in New Zealand because we
have had cases where a corporate manslaughter of charge should
have been laid but couldn't. There's another bit of legislation
that's missing, and that's disqualification of directors. You can disqualified
directors in the UK. I'm not sure about Australia, but
(26:21):
certainly in the UK if they have again, if they
as a director have done something that caused death or
serious injury, disqualify them for five years. But again the
prosecutor has to prove to the court that's needed. This
is an awful lot of me wanting to sound like
a nasty chap. It's probably because forty odd years ago
(26:45):
I worked as a regular cheap person. I was an
inspector in the UK. I think we can do better
with encouragement and getting businesses to understand that we're talking
about improved profitability. But there are some people in New
Zealand who really should be taken out of being directors
(27:07):
because they have been recidivists. And I won't name anybody
in a podcast like this, but there are recidivists and
they should be disqualified as directors, and in some circumstances
may be convicted of a manslaughter charge.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Thanks for joining us, Chris, my pleasure.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Thank you for the time this morning.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at enzidherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is
produced by Jane Ye and Richard Martin, who is also
our editor. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front Page
on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune
(27:58):
in tomorrow for another look by behind the Headlines.
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