TRANSKRIPT 🔗
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Speaker 1: To the Canterbury Mornings podcast with John McDonald from Newstalk ZB. For once, Labour has come up with a policy that I think is actually meaningful and could deliver real change. Sonia Rockhouse and Anna Osborne, they'll be loving Labour this morning too. After the party's announcement, they want to hold employers more accountable for workplace deaths. So how about this? Just a couple of hours ago this came through. Labour has just announced that if elected, they will introduce a corporate homicide charge, which would mean if a worker died on the job, their employer could be charged with homicide. And the punishment's pretty hefty. An individual could end up with a life prison sentence and companies could be hit with fines of up to $ 10 million. And you know what I say? About time. Because even though our health and safety laws have been beefed up after Pike River, the punishments dished out generally have not kept up with that intention, have they? And Labour wants to change that. Good on it. The party's workplace relations and safety spokesperson, Jan Tinetti, she says even though New Zealand has one of the highest rates of workplace deaths in the developed world, despite that, employers can't be held as accountable as they should be. And she says Labour wants to deliver... what the Pike River families have been calling for for years, which is the ability to charge employers with homicide. Don't dick around. Throw the book at them. Now, Sonia Rockhouse, who I mentioned before, her son Ben was killed at Pike River. She's saying today that Labour's policy announcement is fantastic news. As much as you can say something is fantastic when it's in relation to losing a family member, as she did, she says, quote, People who are in charge and who knowingly make the workplace unsafe, they need to be held to account. End of quote. Now let's say this went ahead. Labour got its policy through and corporate homicide was a thing. It wouldn't necessarily deliver what the likes of the Pike River families have wanted. We've got to be upfront about that, don't we? Because if we're honest, what they want to see is they want to see the mine boss taken to the cleaners. Just as an aside on that, I'll get back to that. The timing of today's announcement is quite interesting because it was only three weeks ago, you probably saw this, three weeks ago, when the New Zealand Herald reported that Crown prosecutors were considering police recommendations on possible charges relating to Pike River. The Herald said at the time it understood manslaughter charges were among the charges being considered. So where this Labour policy fits in with that, I'm not sure. Either way, I like it. I think it's brilliant. As Sonia Rockhouse from the Pike River Families was saying this morning, just the threat of a life sentence or the threat of a massive fine would be enough for most employers to make sure their health and safety is up to scratch. And as I say, I'm realistic. And I know that if this did come to pass, not all corporate homicide charges would stick because guilt can't always be proven, can it? Which can leave people... feeling somewhat disillusioned. Guilt has to be proven. Sometimes it can't be done. And depending on the situation, a corporate homicide charge could be very, very difficult to prove. So I'm not kidding myself here. I'm not saying that every guilty employer would have the book thrown at them successfully. An example, just think about this, proving that the boss of an outfit actually knew about a particular risk in the workplace is and proving that not only did they know about it, but they didn't do anything about it before someone was killed, that would not be easy to prove. Nevertheless, I think just the ability to lay a corporate homicide charge would move things on from where they are at the moment. So I guess my support.