Health and safety reforms preserve main principles: Z Energy

The government's Health and Safety Reform Bill has retained the most important principles that underpinned it and will "over time help to shift how we think about health and safety in New Zealand," says Julian Hughes, Z Energy's [NZX: ZEL] general manager for health and safety, who had earlier expressed fears the reforms would be gutted.

A former executive director of the Business Leaders' Health and Safety Forum, created after the 2010 Pike River mine disaster, Mr Hughes was among senior executives who last month questioned the motives behind the delayed report back of the bill from Parliament's industrial relations committee and showed New Zealand "risks forgetting" the poor health and safety record that prompted the most fundamental reforms to health and safety law in the country's history.

Speaking to BusinessDesk today, Mr Hughes said while there had been some "tinkering around the edges" of the bill, his worst fears had not been realised although it remained to be seen how the decision to create distinctions between the obligations of high and low risk businesses would pan out in practice.

Although the bill softened the requirement for companies with fewer than 20 employees to have a health and safety representative, Mr Hughes said the fundamental obligation on all employers to provide a safe, healthy workplace was unchanged.

"This is something there's been a bit of confusion on," he said. "If you are running a plumbing firm with five people, you are still a company officer" as defined by the bill, which was reported back late last Friday.

"If you are a director, owner, business leader all in one go, that's not watered down at all. Our position is that, as opposed to a lot of the reporting last week, this represents the most significant shift in health and safety legislation ever in New Zealand."

The Labour Party withdrew its support for the bill last week, largely because of those changes, saying it effectively relieved employers of their obligations to the health and safety of about 330,000 workers employed in small businesses.

Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly said Prime Minister John Key had broken a promise not to take "one step backward" from the recommendations of an independent health and safety taskforce, which recommended a new approach to health and safety management, modelled on the Australian system, which emphasises the involvement of employees in managing their working environment.

"The bit where I think the select committee has created a slight problem for themselves is the introduction of defining low- and high-risk industries," Mr Hughes said. "How do you decide that?"

While some industries were obviously high risk, such as mining, forestry, or fishing, others were less obvious, he said, citing hairdressing as an industry where harsh chemicals, sharp instruments and posture injuries were all well-documented. It remained to be seen whether farming would be defined as a high-risk industry.

Opposition to the bill as originally formulated was strongest from farmers and small business owners. That prompted delay in the final version of the bill as the cabinet and backbench MPs sought to reassure themselves the new regime would be both workable and not politically suicidal.

(BusinessDesk)