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- Date published:
1:43 pm, March 26th, 2026 - 7 comments
Categories: Brooke van Velden, health and safety, workers' rights -
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The Government is currently in the process of weaking safety standards for workers.
The method is the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill which is currently before the Education and Workforce select committee.
The Bill is the brainchild of Brooke Van Velden and the Act Party.
The bill has two stated purposes.
The first is to increase guidance for employers, presumably at the cost of regulation. Available guidance and support for employers under the Bill would be increased through a strengthening of Approved Codes of Practice (ACOP).
ACOPs will now act as ‘safe harbours’ for compliance, meaning that if a business complies with their sector’s ACOP, they have done enough to meet their health and safety requirements.
The second purpose is to essentially weaken Worksafe’s regulatory powers.
Again according to Van Velden:
A major theme in the feedback we received from businesses was that they don’t know what they need to do to manage their risks and meet their obligations. I also heard concerns about a lack of guidance, regulations not keeping pace with best practice, and uncertainty about WorkSafe’s approach as the regulator arising due to inconsistency and heavy-handedness in punishment.
“This all results in a feeling of fear and uncertainty that leads businesses to take unnecessary actions to protect themselves, creating more costs to the business without actually making workers any safer.
“The Bill will require WorkSafe to move from an approach of expecting everyone to address every possible risk, towards one in which WorkSafe provides guidance on the critical risks a workplace must address to meet their obligations under the Act.
Van Velden’s proposals will establish a safe do minimum standard for employers, rather than require them to do what is right. And lessen prosecutions of employers who provide unsafe work places.
As shown by Pike River workplace safety is not something that should rely on the good will of employers. There should be real repercussions if workers are killed at work and the safety threats were clear or should have been clear.
Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse whose whanau members were killed in the Pike River disaster were given an opportunity to give feedback into the development of the Bill. But they clearly did not enjoy the experience.
From Radio New Zealand:
Pike River families say their meeting with the Workplace Safety Minister was “a complete waste of time”.
Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse sat down with Workplace Safety Minister Brooke van Velden at Parliament on the 15th anniversary of the Pike River disaster.
“I don’t know, I’ve come out of there still feeling really unhappy because there’s just no guarantees that people who go to work are going to return home safely,” Obsorne said.
“She seemed to be focusing all the time on the employers and I sat and listened to it for a little while and then I just couldn’t stand it,” Rockhouse said.
Both women went into the meeting wanting to share their concerns that the minister’s workplace reforms were weakening safety laws and risking another disaster.
Rockhouse said she doesn’t feel reassured.
“She gave a lip service, she listened, but didn’t really say anything. You know, that sort of thing when somebody’s talking but they’re not really saying much? That’s how it felt,” she said.
“I walked out of there thinking man that was just a complete waste of time.”
They also presented to the select committee on the Bill. Given that the original legislation was a response to the deaths of the Pike River miners their views should be given a great deal of weight.
Their submission to the Education and Workforce Select Committee starts with this comment:
After nearly 16 years of fighting for justice for our men, of being given cruel false hope and endless political spin we can tell when what is being said and what is being done doesn’t match up.
Nobody can truly believe that the intention of this legislation is to improve Aotearoa New Zealand’s appalling health and safety record.
We are not technical policy experts – there are many other submitters who can speak to the details of these changes and the likely outcome if they find their way into law as they stand.
In reviewing these proposed changes, we have used only one measure. Would this make people safer at work?
The answer is no.
They were particularly scathing about the proposal for the regulator to become an advisor, pointing out that a regulator’s job is to set and enforce the rules, not to act as a consultant for those it regulates. A regulator otherwise risks complicity in workplace accidents that it is later required to investigate and prosecute.
The legislation is based on the Minister’s friendly chat with a few employers and then drafting changes around their reckons. It is not based on worker safety. And the Pike River families are still waiting for justice.
Van Welden is shifting the goal posts so that they are more aligned with her conception of the value of a human life. Though, as PschoMilt said recently (correctly in my opinion), governments do this often. For example. We don't have an open road speed of 5km/h as a way of having zero road deaths. But nor do we have one of 200kn/h.
What bothers me about Van Welden is not that she is involved in the inevitable act of valuing lives, but that she appears to be valuing the lives of some people, or groups of people, at a lower rate than she might for others.
So if regulators are set to become "consultants", does that mean the "consultancy" could at a later stage be outsourced or even sold off altogether? Whither then oversight of workplace safety?
Those 2016 changes were massive to my industry, and most certainly required every director to sit up very straight and pay attention to the safety stats and escalations in every single board paper. That's been true whether the directors were from the public sector or private sector.
New Zealand has had an atrocious and lazy track record, and the Loss TIMe Injury rates have been a hard thing to bring down, with every new standard practise effectively written in the blood of those who were killed or maimed to learn it.
The legislation should not change. Lives and families and directors in my industry depend on it.
The sooner we bring in corporate manslaughter legislation the better. We would be following Australia, the UK, and Canada. Hardly paragons of socialism.
We havean appalling record in industries such as forestry, and the examples of Pike RIver and Cave Creek SHOULD make this a no-brainer for any caring government.
I worked at a mine close to Pike River and visited the site shortly before the tragedy. There was safety window dressing at Pike and a lack of real interest in it; production came first. The mine that I worked at had a very close-to-death accident resulting in a fractured skull and a dislocated shoulder. There was no inspector of mines to investigate this accident, due to various governments running down the inspectorate, so permission was granted for the on-site company safety officer to investigate; he had no previous mining experience. To loosen our current safety laws to "benefit the economy" should be judged as criminal, callous, and counterproductive.
You (well, all right they) cannot be serious! What was that person doing on the site at all? Or was "safety" just something they did when there were a few hours to spare from their real job?
The work of the safety officer at the mine I mentioned and at Pike River was made up largely of form-filling. Safety meetings were a joke; anything that cost the company was ignored, and the mine manager actually nodded off to sleep in some meetings. When the "safety officer" resigned, the position was unfilled for months before an unqualified mill worker who had limited mine experience was appointed. At this time, Union Reps were allowed limited site access — another troubling aspect. This is what van Velden, who, as I believe, has not had much involvement with industry, wants us to return to.