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