Sunday 28th November , 2010

Q+A’s panel discussions

Points of interest:
- Feickert: “There’s continuous monitoring and there’s continuous monitoring… I would have thought that in that mine you would have started off with a tube system”
- Expert doubts New Zealand has international best practice in mines: “We do and we don’t… At this mine I have my doubts”
- McCarten: Royal Commission needs “workers’ representative… to represent the people who died”
- Feickert: Until the late 1990s New Zealand had mine inspectorate, but the then government decided it was “too expensive”
- Feickert: Whittall cannot be expected to be responsible for mine safety on his own; without government and union inspectors, two legs of the safety stool had been removed
- Feickert: All royal commissions into mine accidents in Britain have led to new legislation

The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can also be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

Q+A is repeated on TVNZ 7 at 9.10pm on Sunday nights and 10.10am and 2.10pm on Mondays .

PANEL DISCUSSION hosted by PAUL HOLMES

In response to John Key interview and Peter Whittall interview

PAUL So many questions, so many answers needed. Time to welcome the panel: Dr Jon Johansson from Victoria University ; Matt McCarten, a candidate recently in the Mana by-election and head of the Unite Union; and we welcome Dave Feickert, an independent mine safety and energy advisor. He’s worked a lot in the UK , does a lot of work at the moment in China , so he knows his mining. So dramatic news this morning, then, it will be a Royal Commission. Here’s what the Prime Minister said.

JOHN KEY – Prime Minister
We are determined to get answers for those families, and that we will leave no stone unturned. So I think a Royal Commission of Inquiry does give the gravitas and does demonstrate the significance of this national tragedy.

PAUL So that is it from the Prime Minister, he’s recommended at Cabinet, Jon Johansson a Royal Commission. A Royal Commission is a commission of immense power. Indeed, its findings of causation cannot, I understand, be questioned. So would you have a positive reaction to that?

JON JOHANSSON – Political Analyst
I think it’s entirely appropriate for a scale of this tragedy, absolutely, although of course it’s also important in terms of how broad or narrow the terms of reference that are written. And I think the composition of the Royal Commission is absolutely central to perceptions that the search is here to find the truth of the matter.

PAUL So presuming he’s talking a High Court judge; we’re talking probably a mining expert, we would be talking perhaps somebody from the mining industry overseas. And Matt, you’d be interested in another important representation.

MATT McCARTEN – Unite Union
Well, what’s not been said is who’s gonna speak for the 29 men who died. We talk about the families, but actually the voice which cries out for the 29 who died.

PAUL Presumably that’s the High Court judge.

MATT No, no, no, it’s not. It needs to have a workers’ representative to represent those workers who died, and also the families who are left behind. All fine having the judge, that’s important, and overseas expert, but actually you need someone who’s right there at the centre saying, ‘We’re here to represent the people who died.’

JON Hear, hear.

PAUL Would you have a view on that?

DAVID FEICKERT – Mine Safety Adviser
Um, I would agree with that. That’s fair.

PAUL Here’s the other thing that I can see happening, it’s bothering me straight away. And so many other inquiries – we’re talking a coronial inquiry, we’re talking a police inquiry, we’re talking a Department of Labour inquiry – you can start to get things becoming a mess, you can start to get doubt in people’s minds about what their answers were to the great question, so in the UK– What I would suggest would happen is the Department of Labour, the police inquiry are merely presented as evidence at the Royal Commission. And that becomes the final determinant.

JON Well, it certainly reduces the wilderness of mirrors that emerges from multipronged approaches looking at different aspects of it and what have you, so yeah.

DAVID There is another important thing here as well, is that all the big Royal Commissions in the UK on mine accidents have led to new legislation. The Mines and Quarries Act of 1954 came out of a Royal Commission of that kind, and it laid the basis for New Zealand ’s health and safety legislational approach in coal mining. It set up the ‘safety triangle’ approach with the mine manager, the government mines inspector and the workers’ safety representative, being three points.

PAUL And that’s the model you’re trying to institute in China , isn’t it?

DAVID Absolutely.

PAUL You told me another interesting thing before, Dave, that the Chinese are closing down their coke mines, their high-quality coking coal mines because they tend to be too dangerous.

DAVID They have just recently closed dozens of small coking coal mines. These are private mines with a terrible safety record. So they’ve closed them on safety grounds and they’ve started importing coal. Pike River and also the Upper Big Branch Mine in the US are exporting there.

PAUL After Pike River , Dave Feickert, would you have worries about mine safety in New Zealand ?

DAVID Uh, well, I do have concerns now, I have to say. Before Pike River I didn’t. That’s why I don’t work here and I work in China . Uh, but we now are in a position where two things are the case which are total opposites of the spectrum. On the one hand, we have mines that don’t have any injury accidents – that’s about as good as it gets in mining, that’s world class; on the other hand, we now this year will have a fatal-accident rate worse than China.

PAUL So you don’t think we have international best practice?

DAVID We do and we don’t, that’s the trouble. At this mine I have my doubts now, and I’m not sure—

JON Can I just ask how is that model developed, the model you’re talking about in China, where you have the mine inspector, the mine owner and what have you, essentially three prongs to the overarching decisions that are made?

DAVID It’s a UK model.

JON How did that not develop in the same fashion in New Zealand ?

DAVID Well, no, we had it, we had it – that’s the point. We had it until the late 1990s, and in the late 1990s the government decided that the mines inspectorate, to be quite blunt, was too expensive. These professional mining engineers with maybe 10 years of mine-manager experience—

PAUL Yes, but what difference would they have made? You’ve got a man like Peter Whittall who seems to be extremely diligent about the care of his people, doesn’t he, he doesn’t want his mine blowing up, he doesn’t want Pike River closed down for a year.

JON Yeah, I know, but he wears different hats. And there’s no doubting his integrity here, but that’s the whole point of the model, right?

DAVID The point of the model is you have a three-legged stool, or a triangle, and the miners are protected within in. If you take away two legs of the stool, what’s gonna happen? Peter Whittall cannot run that mine in a development process by himself. In the past, the chief inspector of mines would have been there regularly to help him sort out his problems as an advisor, like a wise old uncle.

PAUL The big question with this mine, of course, it’s all going to come down to the levels of methane – how they were controlling methane, how they were extracting methane, protecting the workers from methane explosions, and so forth. Now, Whittall said this morning that he had continuous monitoring of methane.

JON It seems to me the doubt – and you’ll know better than I – the doubt is still about what constitutes continuous monitoring. I mean, that’s a label.

MATT Cos he’s very vague about that.

JON That’s right.

PAUL They had something on a loader, but it seems to me if you’ve got the monitor on a loader and you drive the loader a kilometre back towards the entrance to the mine, you’re probably going to have less methane back there. I don’t know, what do you think?

DAVID Well, there are three different types of monitoring for methane. First of all, there’s a hand-held device. In the old days they used to use safety lamps, which are a fairly good indicator. They still use them in the UK . There is a methane cut-off on the machine that shuts the power off when it reaches 1.25%. When it reaches 2% everybody has to get out, they’re withdrawn. That’s the rule, that’s in our legislation, it’s common across the developed countries. And the third thing is continuous monitoring. Now, there’s continuous monitoring and continuous monitoring. They didn’t—

JON Yeah, time-series versus continuous.

DAVID That’s right. They didn’t have a tube-bundle system; they said they were going to install it later. Well, this is one question that will have to be looked at.

PAUL You find this a very serious remark by Mr Whittall, don’t you, that he said, ‘When we get bigger we’ll have continuous monitoring.’

DAVID Well, I would have thought in that mine you would start off with a tube-bundle system.

PAUL Tell me something, if you were mining uphill, which is unique to this mine, does it strike you that the methane would start to gather, but you’d be having to fight it gathering, up at the coal face.

DAVID Uh, well, the trouble with this seam, and if we accept as Peter Whittall said, this moderate gassy seam – I don’t know – but if it is, then methane can come in from all kinds of different places and for different reasons. They went through a fault where methane was leaching into the fault from the coal seam – that was a created problem for them. These things are not impossible to deal with, you know, miners are dealing with them all over the world all the time.

PAUL But have a look at this explosion. We have that CCTV footage just about to come out. This is the first explosion, this is Friday about 3.30 in the afternoon. It is 51 or 52 seconds long. That is the force of the explosion coming out of the front of that mine. Matt, just quickly.

MATT The point you made about going up, common sense would suggest that’s a problem, right? And there was a discussion about they’ve only got one ventilation—There was a discussion about, when they built it, having more than one, and I think you made the point about conservation needs versus safety, and then they found an endangered species of blue duck and decided not to have the extra ventilation. So it just seemed a bit—It’ll come out in the commission, as you say, and we don’t have the serious mining professionals around cos it was going to save money. So out of this inquiry all of the political parties are going to take some heat. It happened under the Shipley Government, that decision; Clarke’s government approved the mine and the way it was set up; and Key’s government is getting the end result of it.

PAUL We will find out if we have endangered human life for the sake of the blue duck, and we will therefore have to assess should we have done that?
Did I get the wrong end of the stick? Young Dan Rockhouse – would the management have known—if he hadn’t made that phone call on his desperate journey out of the mine, would management have known that there’d been an explosion?

DAVID They would have known very shortly after he said that, because that’s when he got blown off his feet. Because the explosion force came through and it hadn’t appeared out the exit or out the ventilation shaft. So maybe they wouldn’t have done.

JON In all of this, especially in the aftermath of the first explosion, I believe if there was anybody that was entitled to see that CCTV footage, Paul, it was undoubtedly the families. And they should have been given that information right from day one, rather than tormented, essentially, for an extra five days. And it would have been their choice if they wanted to maintain hope or what, but it’s their choice, and I think that was a very poor decision to withhold that footage from those families.

PAUL Because that would have given West Coast families an idea—

JON They can make up their own minds, but it’s their minds, their right.

MATT They would have then known that they were already dead.

JON Yeah.

MATT And what we had for five days is continuing a false hope. No one would say the obvious. I think everyone in New Zealand knew they were dead, but they strung it out, strung it out, and those families were given false hope.

PAUL I think as you very gently said one night during the week, that probably the carbon monoxide got the men on the first night anyway but, of course, when we look at that explosion we wonder whether it was the explosion itself.

=================================

In response to Davitt McAteer interview

PAUL What did you make of Davitt McAteer? You were particularly impressed with what he said at the end, I think.

DAVID Well, you asked him exactly the right question: what do we have to do to stop it happening again? And he made the point that a coal mine changes every 24 hours – actually, it changes with every shift, it changes within the shift. And what Australia and the European Union have done is they’ve added to the three-legged stool of the mine manager, the government inspector and the worker safety inspector with a whole programme of risk assessment from beginning to end: before the mine is sunk; all the way through production, every day, day in, day out. And what the guys do when they go to the coal face, when they start their shift, they do a risk assessment – the men do it themselves. They pin the results on the entrance to the face, phone it up to the manager, and that’s how they do it, day in and day out.

PAUL Still, what a week, eh, Matt? And you seem particularly of heavy heart, and I assume that’s not because of losing Mana. But there’s something so—

MATT I was the only one who got more votes than anyone got last time. Um, no, I’m heavy heart because we all know, deep down, there’s always the pursuit of money, and people will cut corners. This wasn’t an accident. You know, all the safety things we’ve got have been watered down over the years to save money, cut corners. Why is a cop making all the decisions about the mine when expert—We haven’t got these experts around any more in charge.

PAUL No, well, this is to do with search-and-rescue legislation, I think.

MATT I know, but what we had is politicians all pushing their way in front of the cameras. I think they’re all amateurs, all thinking it’s chilly and waiting for the big adventure. Once you saw that blast, anyone who knows anything about mining would say, ‘This is over.’

PAUL You said, ‘This wasn’t an accident.’ By that I take it you mean nobody did it deliberately, but it was a disaster—

MATT Why I say it’s not an accident, it was an accident which could have been avoided. You know, the shift when it changed, they were telling the guys going down, the miners themselves were saying, ‘There’s gas smell down the bottom.’ They were telling the shift coming in. And so they already knew themselves that there was a smell and things weren’t right. They still went down there.

PAUL There will be much to be talked about at the Royal Commission. How did the Government handle it, do you think? I mean, once more, there’s Gerry on the ground, safe pair of hands and so forth.

JON I’m with Matt in the sense that, you know, I’ve seen this event be described constantly as a crisis, right? 9/11, that was a crisis. This was a tragedy and a disaster, and I really wonder about having so many government ministers in Greymouth during that week. Yes, Gerry was reassuring. And if he was the point man for the Government, fine. But the problem is it runs the risk of interfering in decision-making on the ground because you’ve got your minister there, standing behind you, second-guessing. And I don’t think for a disaster that that sort of government level of participation is needed, frankly. Because there is the rest of the country to govern, and it’s not like things are bubbling at the moment.

PAUL Still, one thing we can say is we had two very fine communicators to lead us through it this week. Peter Whittall, however he fares in the Royal Commission, did a brilliant job this week, as did the mayor of Grey District , Tony Kokshoorn. Remarkable person. Oh he’s wonderful.

JON Yeah, you bet. I thought that mayor, I mean, there’s your Coast.

PAUL Have we got any other politics happening this coming week? Matt?

MATT Well, what was happening while that was going on is the Government was slipping through all their nasty stuff, like the 90-day bill, attacks on workers, and they bring up the task force about putting the boot into the beneficiaries and the unemployed. They couldn’t help themselves, you know, they see that we’re all distracted and they put the boot in.

PAUL It’s a working group, Matt.

MATT Yeah, right.

PAUL Mr Johansson, other politics you’ve noticed this week?

JON I mean, really, to me, the only significant political event was the report back on the Electoral Referendum Bill, which has actually created quite a fuss on the right, hasn’t it, Matt? Because they’re very unhappy with their government putting caps there on paid level. But in terms of the design of that process, I think the Justice Minister has very much provided a process which I would imagine next year is going to see MMP retained, and so it’ll be killed off the first time and for all time, and so opponents, now the rubber’s going to hit the road and they’re going to have to mobilise in short order.

PAUL What do you think the main question for the Royal Commission is going to be?

DAVID There are two main questions. One – is the system of safety supervision, in law and in practice, sufficient to protect miners in New Zealand ? That’s the first question. And the second question – what was the approximate cause of this accident? We don’t know; there are several different possibilities, and that’s what it’ll have to get down to.

ends

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