Leading process safety in New Zealand

Hon Kate Wilkinson, Minister of Labour

2.05pm, Thursday 4 October 2012

Thank you David and thank you all. It's a great pleasure to be here today.

It's always good to see so many leaders of our major businesses, industries, unions and government officials together in one room focusing on health and safety.

I would like to give a very special welcome to our guest speaker today, Judith Hackitt – Chair of the United Kingdom Health and Safety Executive.

Much of the discussion around health and safety in our workplaces centres on the common risks and accidents that workers face. Things like preventing slips, trips and falls, using farm quad bikes safely and guarding machinery. This is clearly very important.

And, for some industries it is actions and processes that will minimise the risk of major accidents or disasters.   We're here today to talk about this aspect of workplace health and safety - process safety.

Process safety failures are thankfully rare, but when they do happen, due to the hazardous nature of the substances and processes involved the consequences can be very severe. They can cause multiple deaths, endanger the public and neighbouring sites and destroy whole plants and entire businesses.

There are plenty of examples of how severe the consequences of these incidents can be.

Pike River is a particularly painful recent example in New Zealand. But that's not unique to New Zealand.

There is the Buncefield incident in the UK, and more recently an explosion and fire at a natural gas plant in Mexico killed 26.

We have a number of hazardous industries and processes here in New Zealand with the potential for things to go badly wrong unless we manage safety carefully.

It goes without saying that we need to do everything we can to guard against failures and the disastrous consequences they can bring.

There are always multiple layers of safety, and no safety measure will ever be fail-proof. The model often used is the swiss cheese model which I am sure you are all familiar with.

Waiting for a disaster is not an option; we need to do much better than that and recognise warning signs. We then need to act on those warning signs to eliminate the risk.

One of the biggest enemies we face is complacency.

Processes and plants can operate for many years without an incident.

Incidents overseas can seem a long way away and without direct relevance to operations here.

It can be easy to think that circumstances will never align and an incident will not happen here because it hasn't before.

The reality is an incident caused by process safety failure could happen tomorrow. It probably won't, the chances are low - but it could happen and does.

Pike River and the Tamahere cool-store disaster both happened here.

Because these incidents are rare, we need to look at other countries' experiences and responses where they have happened.

We need to see what can be learned and applied here so we don't all have to learn the same lessons the hard way.

I am looking forward to hearing from Judith Hackitt about the developments in this area which have been made in the UK and her perspectives on process safety advances internationally.

We need to provide leadership to ensure we are taking the steps we need to take to identify risks, prevent incidents and ensure safety every day.

Following the tragic events at Pike River the Government moved to inject more money and set up the High Hazards Unit and ensure we have process safety experts and a better resourced and more active regulator.

We now have eight specialist Inspectors appointed. That includes three mines inspectors, three petroleum and geothermal inspectors, and two internationally experienced chief inspectors.

The High Hazards Unit has sent some very clear messages.  MBIE is focused on auditing health and safety systems and expects statutory obligations to provide safe working environments to be met in full. Where those systems are found wanting, improvements must be made.

But Government can't do it alone.

This is where I look to you.

The Business Leader's Forum is a fantastic initiative and I'm very pleased you are co-hosting today's event.

I'm pleased to see so many leaders from industry and unions here today along with health and safety professionals and government officials.

You are in a unique position to influence workplace culture for the better and drive change across entire industries.

We all need to work together to provide leadership to improve New Zealand's process safety.

This is our challenge.

Thank you again for the invitation today, I'm very pleased to be here.