If MPs feel need to support a bill they think is bad and will result in deaths, something’s wrong
Sunday, 28 June 2026
OPINION: This week I found myself baulking at having to write a couple of pretty confronting headlines, ostensibly on health and safety, but really about our parliamentary democracy.
I’m torn. I’d rather be writing about why — despite my love of renewable energy — subsidising rooftop solar installations is actually bad policy from the Government.
In short, every dollar spent on subsidised rooftop solar is a dollar that won’t be invested in cheaper and more efficient grid-connected solar farms. Other than adding a little bit of resilience, its public benefits vaporise on close inspection.
But, dammit, I just can’t write Winston Peters says law change will result in deaths, but party won’t block it and the following day NZ First offers 'tepid support' for bill it says will kill workers, at second reading both in big type and let that sit.
Read more:
Winston Peters says law change will result in deaths; party won’t block it
NZ First treads awkward line as H&S bill it says will kill workers returns to Parliament
The idea that a political party would believe (rightly or wrongly) that a law change would result in more people getting killed or maimed in workplace accidents and still vote for it — albeit with the hope it might be able to reverse that at a later date — surely can’t make sense anywhere outside the walls of the Beehive.
Yet that appears to be the situation, with debate on the second reading of the Health and Safety at Work Bill currently adjourned.
If MPs can publicly tell voters a bill will cost lives while simultaneously voting for it, at what point does coalition discipline come at the cost of faith in democracy?
Perhaps I’m naive, but my early schooling in parliamentary democracy taught me to expect something better.
Ian Jardine grew up on the mean streets of Belfast during the height of the Northern Ireland troubles and was a history teacher with an occasionally fiery temper.
“I am talking to yoouu!”, he would bark out in the classroom with his famously crossed eyes, as schoolkids desperately attempted to figure out who the hell he was looking at.
His classes were, however, spellbinding, as he took us back in breathless 40-minute monologues to the days of prime ministers William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli in Victorian England.
These were the days when politicians were just starting to move beyond the feared stereotype Shakespeare set out in Julius Caesar, of the general public as a heaving uneducated mass ripe for rhetorical manipulation by demagogues.
Britain was getting wealthier, and politicians were starting to take note of everyday folk voting according to ethics and principles and not obvious self-interest.
These were quirky times. The pompous, overbearing Gladstone, a left-winger of his day who had a moral sideline in attempting to reform fallen women and self-flagellation, confronted the wily Disraeli, a Jewish-Italian Tory born on the wrong side of the tracks.
Together they sparred in Parliament and fought open rebellions among their own ranks as they sought tactical advantage, including in getting the credit for passing societally defining law changes to expand the electorate.
It was about as far as you could get from the constricted world of party-hopping legislation, tightly worded coalition agreements, and the lame predictability of party votes read out in English or te reo.
Politicians routinely performed extraordinary political contortions, but politics was bold and above all, intensely public.
There was no room for excuses as MPs couldn’t claim not to have agency.
To be fair to NZ First, its MP Mark Patterson delivered a much more incisive and eloquent critique of the Health and Safety at Work Bill than either Labour or the Greens mustered on Wednesday evening.
There is some room for legitimate debate over the probable impacts of the legislation.
Workplace Relations and Safety Minister and ACT Party MP Brooke van Velden is hard to read, but it would be harsh to assume she was actually attempting to cause worse health and safety outcomes as opposed to, say, overbuying into party ideology.
The rationale for the more controversial aspects of the law change appears to boil down to an assumption that business owners have a limited bucket of attention they can give to matters such as health and safety.
If a small business was freed from being worried about the likes of sprained ankles and worker stress, it might have more time to service the dodgy lathe that is threatening to come off its stocks and slice someone in two — or something like that.
The snag is that health and safety professionals appear to be of the view that because safety is something of a mindset, that is not how it plays out in practice, and also that the line between critical and non-critical risks can never be crisp and clear.
Is a fall from a ladder of less than three metres — 2.8m for example — a “critical risk”, for example? Institute of Safety Management chief executive Jeff Sissons says, as the legislation stands, that appears ambiguous.
As Patterson noted in his second-reading speech, health and safety is “essentially a culture issue” so it is important the Government does not send the wrong signal.
Yet the Government appears to have initiated the reform process with a certain viewpoint. The ACT Party campaigned in the 2023 election on health and safety reform and a platform of cutting “red tape” for businesses, after all.
It has gone truly pear-shaped after Peters painted both NZ First and the Government into a corner by specifically calling out an increased risk of deaths.
That can’t easily be put back in the bottle.
This may be dealt with the modern way.
There might be a backroom deal on some amendments, future votes on the legislation may be delayed so the law languishes further down on the order paper — wounded or killed.
Either way, it may be too late to prevent faith in parliamentary processes taking a knock.