Labour says it will create a new criminal offence of corporate homicide if it wins the 7 November election, with life imprisonment for individuals and fines of up to $10 million for companies whose failures kill someone at work.
The party announced the policy on Friday 18 September, and families of the men killed in the 2010 Pike River Mine disaster, who have campaigned for a charge like this for more than a decade, have welcomed it.
Labour’s workplace relations and safety spokesperson Jan Tinetti said the gap in the law had gone unfilled for too long. “This has been a long time coming. At a time when Kiwis are working hard to make ends meet, they absolutely deserve to come home to their loved ones safe,” she said in Labour’s announcement.
“New Zealand has one of the highest rates of workplace deaths in the developed world, yet companies and industry can’t be held accountable for corporate homicide,” Tinetti said.
Under the proposed law, a person or a company could be found guilty if they had a legal duty of care, exposed someone to a risk of death or serious injury, and that person then died, RNZ reported. An individual could be sentenced to life in prison. A company could be fined up to $10 million.
Tinetti told RNZ the absence of such a charge left employers who cut corners without a real deterrent. “This is a glaring hole that we don’t have as a deterrent for those people, those employers that are not ensuring that there’s strong health and safety provisions in their workplace,” she said.
She pointed to the United Kingdom, which introduced a corporate manslaughter offence in 2008 and has since recorded 30 convictions under it.
Labour was careful to frame the policy as aimed at a minority of employers. “The vast majority of businesses do what’s best for the health and safety of their workers, but this law will introduce consequences for those that don’t,” Tinetti said in the party’s statement.
For the Pike River families, the announcement touches a wound that has never closed. The explosion at the West Coast coal mine on 19 November 2010 killed 29 men, and the Royal Commission that followed found serious failures in the company’s health and safety systems. No individual was ever convicted over the deaths.
Sonya Rockhouse, whose son Ben died in the mine, told RNZ the charge would have changed what happened to the families. “If we had had corporate homicide or corporate manslaughter, we wouldn’t be where we are now,” she said.
“People who are in charge and who knowingly don’t make the workplace safe, they need to be held to account,” Rockhouse said. Anna Osborne, whose husband Milt also died at Pike River, has also campaigned for tougher health and safety laws, including a corporate manslaughter charge.
Tinetti acknowledged the families directly. “We know affected whānau have been waiting a long time for this and we thank them for their tireless advocacy,” she said.
Under current law the most serious offence available is reckless conduct under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, passed in the wake of Pike River. According to WorkSafe, that offence carries a maximum fine of $3 million for a company, or $600,000 and up to five years’ imprisonment for an individual. Manslaughter under the Crimes Act can apply to workplace deaths, but lawyers have long argued it is hard to pin on one person when many people share responsibility for a failure, a point barrister Nigel Hampton KC made to LawNews this week.
The idea is not new for Labour. In 2019 the then Justice Minister Andrew Little said a corporate manslaughter offence was being actively considered, in connection with a commitment to families of those killed when the CTV Building collapsed in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Nothing was passed during Labour’s time in office. In April 2024, Labour MP Camilla Belich put a Crimes (Corporate Homicide) Amendment Bill into the members’ ballot, and Newsroom reported at the time that Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith said such a law was not on the Government’s agenda. The new policy is modelled on that bill.
The Government has taken workplace safety law in a different direction. In July 2026 Parliament passed the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill, the largest overhaul of the 2015 Act, which narrows the focus of duties onto critical risks that can kill or seriously harm people. The changes take effect on 1 April 2027. Pike River families opposed the bill, and Labour has promised to repeal it.
Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden defended that overhaul in response to Friday’s announcement, telling RNZ the changes were commonsense and would increase certainty, ease compliance costs and improve safety.
The two positions set up a clear choice for voters on workplace safety. The Government argues the old rules asked businesses to manage every possible hazard at too high a compliance cost, while Labour argues the real problem is that the worst employers face too little consequence when people die. New Zealand records roughly 60 to 80 work-related deaths a year, LawNews reported, and its rate of fatal injuries has for years run well above those of Australia and the United Kingdom.
Much will depend on how a final bill defines who counts as responsible inside a large organisation. Directors and senior managers will want to know whether the life sentence could reach them for decisions made several layers down, and unions will want to know whether the $10 million fine cap is high enough to worry a large company.
Labour has not said how quickly it would legislate if it forms a government. The election is on Saturday 7 November, with advance voting opening on 26 October. If you are still weighing up where the parties stand on work, wages and safety, you can find out which party matches your views with our voting tool.
Should New Zealand have a corporate homicide offence, and is life in prison the right maximum penalty? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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