Pike River families ‘heartbroken’ Government pushing ahead with workplace safety reforms
Tuesday, 16 June 2026
Stand with Pike campaigners Sonya Rockhouse and Anna Osborne hope to persuade NZ First to vote against the Government’s workplace safety law reforms.
Osborne, who lost her husband in the 2010 Pike River Mine explosion, and Rockhouse, who lost her son, are planning to protest outside Parliament on Wednesday against proposed law changes they say will worsen New Zealand’s already poor record for deaths and serious injuries at work.
They also hope to meet NZ First leader Winston Peters, who has been very supportive of the families of the miners killed in 2010, to lobby against New Zealand First backing the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill.
A report from the Education and Workforce Select Committee on the bill is expected to be published on Tuesday.
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The select committee held hearings into the bill which saw it come in for heavy criticism by health and safety experts, and Osborne and Rockhouse urged MPs to listen to their concerns.
“We are heartbroken to see the Government persist with this Bill. We believe that it will cost lives. The lessons from the Pike River tragedy have been forgotten,” Osborne said.
Stand with Pike was launching a campaign with the New Zealand Institute of Safety Management (NZISM) “to remind politicians across Parliament of the human cost of bad lawmaking”, Rockhouse said.
“The message of the campaign is simple: Vote this Bill down or send it back to Select Committee for major revision,' she said.
Mike Cosman, NZISM law reform spokesperson, said: “Many across the health and safety system believe it will result in more harm and cost to ACC and employers. New Zealand’s fatality rate is 1.7 times that of Australia and 6.5 times that of the UK. The cost of workplace death and injuries is conservatively estimated at $5.4 billion a year. The bill will increase this cost if passed.”
Development of the bill was led by ACT’s Brooke van Velden, who is the Government’s Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety.
The objectives of the bill are, in order, “to reduce unnecessary compliance costs, increase certainty for businesses and organisations about what they need to do, and support continued reductions in the incidence of workplace fatalities, injuries, and illnesses”.
In her first reading speech for the bill in February, van Velden said New Zealand’s rates of work-related deaths, serious injuries, and illness remained unacceptably high.
She told MPs in her speech: “This bill is a practical and targeted reform of our health and safety laws. It focuses on what matters most: managing critical risks.”
The bill would exempt small New Zealand businesses employing fewer than 20 staff from having a legal duty to manage “non-critical” safety risks, and critics fear that if that became law, it would lead to increases in injuries at work, including back injuries that can ruin workers’ lives.
Critical safety risks are those that could lead to a worker’s death, or lead to them being admitted to hospital as an in-patient.
But that meant the main risks workers faced would no longer be protected against; musculoskeletal risks, and mental health risks, which were the number one and two causes of workplace harm in New Zealand.
“At a basic level workers would no longer have to be provided with safety boots or gloves as hand and foot injuries are not classed as critical. That’s ridiculous,” said Cosman.
“No other country in the world takes this indifferent approach to the health and safety of workers in small businesses,” he said.
“It will cost lives and livelihoods,” he said.
At the first reading, NZ First MP Mark Patterson said the party would back the bill to get it before the select committee for hearings, but he warned: “It’s important that we do listen very carefully to the feedback that’s coming back on the ground, because the intent … of what we’re trying to get out of this is safer workplaces for Kiwis.”
Big businesses have warned the Government that if they go ahead with plans to remove health and safety “red tape” from small businesses, they will only replace it with “blue tape” in their contracts.
Businesses including Woolworths, Downer NZ and Ports of Auckland have written to the Government to say they would not tolerate two-tier health and safety on their sites.
And to avoid that happening, they have signalled they would use their contracts with small businesses to require them to carry on managing non-critical health and safety issues even if the law changes.