Govt to consider Pike River apology

Families of the 29 men who died in the Pike River Mine were ‘‘horribly badly’’ let down by government, and an apology will be considered, says Andrew Little, Minister responsible for Pike River Re-entry.

In Greymouth to mark the eighth anniversary of the November 19, 2010 disaster, Little yesterday told Radio NZ he was not blaming any one party.

‘‘I’m not attributing it to any one party leading government at any particular point in time.

‘‘The reality is the degrading of our health and safety laws, the degrading of employment rights happened over a period of time.

‘‘We allowed our political culture to develop to the point where workers’ rights became a tradeable commodity.

‘‘It still is to some extent. ‘‘When we allowed that to happen, then we were on that kind of pathway to have disasters like that,’’ Little said.

‘‘It’s not about party political differences on this.

‘‘This happened. It happened because we allowed a political culture to develop where these things were degraded and devalued, and now we’ve got to find a way to make sure that this never happens again,’’ he said.

‘‘There’s no question that on the government side of things, the families have been let down horribly badly, and that ought to be appropriately acknowledged and the best way to do that is through an appropriate apology.’’

Along with the government failures that contributed to the tragedy, there were things that

‘‘There’s no question that on the government side of things, the families have been let down horribly badly, and that ought to be appropriately acknowledged.’’ Minister Responsible for Pike River Re-entry Andrew Little

happened afterward, such as the ‘‘botched’’ prosecution of Pike River boss Peter Whittall.

Little, who was head of what was then the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union, was asked about comments he made in the days immediately after the explosion at the mine.

At the time he said the mine had a good health and safety committee, and it was no different to other mines.

‘‘Yes, and that was the information available at the time, including from some of the union’s own members,’’ Little said yesterday.

He had spent the following summer interviewing miners who had worked at Pike River and ‘‘a quite different story emerged’’. He didn’t resile from anything he said at the time, but the information that became available once people had a chance to open up ‘‘we now have the real facts and they are disturbing’’.