Shane Te Pou – Why Labour’s corporate homicide policy matters

I feel sick to the stomach that I’m writing on this again. I tried to bring it to the public’s attention when I wrote about it in the New Zealand Herald back in June 2025. Nothing changed. If anything, it’s got worse.

This month, two families told the country what crushing effect workplace deaths have had in their whānau.

Whānau, this is a horrible story to have to tell: a three-year-old boy was crushed to death by falling logs while visiting his dad at mahi at Point Lumber in Timaru. Six years later, in November 2022, 23-year-old Ethyn McTier died at the same yard, trapped in an unguarded conveyor belt. This beautiful young man just wanted to do what was right by his family and go to work to earn a crust. He put on his boots and off he went to mahi. He didn’t make it home.

A safety consultant had recommended fitting a guard back in 2017. It still wasn’t there when Ethyn was killed. Less than a year after that, 37-year-old Wes Tomich was pulled into a conveyor belt at Ballance Agri-Nutrients in Mount Maunganui — a hazard a risk assessment had flagged back in 2015. Two months after his funeral, the company’s then-CEO picked up a lifetime achievement award. For fuck sake.

These deaths sit inside a country that still has no corporate manslaughter offence, still has a fatality rate 60% higher than Australia’s, and is still, right now, stripping WorkSafe back from enforcement to “education.” That’s the current chapter. But it isn’t the only one.

Because this isn’t the first time New Zealand has known exactly what was killing its workers and done nothing fast enough. From the 1950s until 1988, sawmills across the country used an estimated 6,000 tonnes of pentachlorophenol, a toxic timber preservative laced with dioxins, to treat wood. Matua Joe Harawira worked with it for 29 years at the Whakatāne mill. He spent the rest of his life fighting for recognition, through the group he co-founded, Sawmill Workers Against Poisons, before he died in 2017. His daughter, Marama Cook, now carries that fight. She says exposure disrupted her whānau’s whakapapa. She’s called it a taniwha, buried in the whenua, that never left.

I’ve written before about how long this country makes its poisoned workers wait for the Crown to even admit what happened, let alone fix it. Recognition is still treated as something to be negotiated, cut as a deal, rather than an obligation owed outright — and every year that recognition is delayed is another year those workers and their whānau carry the cost alone, with no one held responsible for the wait.

So the taniwha is still there. It’s been sitting in that whenua for seventy years, and every government since has walked past it rather than deal with it. That’s the pattern. Not one bad decision, but a habit: know the harm, delay the fix, wait for the people who suffered it to grow old and die before you have to properly answer for it. The only thing that’s changed in seventy years is how long it takes the Crown to admit the harm was real, not whether it eventually gets around to admitting it. I know I’ve written about this so many times, but I know many of the people who were affected, and the hurt is deep.

This is exactly why Labour’s new corporate homicide policy matters. Announced this month, it would let a company face fines of up to $10 million, and an individual life imprisonment, where there was a known duty of care, a known risk of death or serious injury, and someone died anyway. Pike River families, who’ve waited fifteen years for a law like this, have called it fantastic. It’s the first proposal in years that treats “we knew and did nothing” as the serious offence it actually is, rather than a cost of doing business to be settled with a fine and a statement of regret.

A law like this wouldn’t undo what happened to Matua Joe Harawira, or to Ethyn McTier, or to Wes Tomich. But it would change the calculation for the next company deciding whether a guard is worth the cost, or the next government deciding whether a health condition is worth adding to a schedule. Right now, in Aotearoa, the safe bet for a company or a Crown agency is still to wait. Waiting costs them nothing. It costs workers and their whānau everything.

We keep finding new kēhua because we’ve never once been serious about putting the old ones to rest. Labour’s policy is the first real attempt at doing that in a generation. It’s worth backing.

The only real question I have is why it took so long.