Good building regulations helped save thousands of lives in last year's Christchurch earthquake, Dunedin North Labour MP Dr David Clark said at the weekend.
Mr Clark was one of the speakers at a commemorative gathering to mark International Workers Memorial Day, at the Market Reserve, Dunedin, on Saturday.
During the event, at the Otago Workers Memorial, several speakers discussed not only the risk of individual deaths in the workplace, but also the much larger-scale toll resulting from the Pike River mine disaster and the Christchurch quake.
Many small white crosses were symbolically placed in the ground, each bearing the name of a person who had died at work in Dunedin or Otago since 1992.
Dr Clark told about 30 peoplegathered that "good" regulations continued to play a role in workplace safety.
"It's about making sure that people are spared injury and death."
He highlighted the value of good, protective regulations by contrasting last year's Christchurch quake death toll with that from a major earthquake in Haiti in 2010.
A total of 185 people died in the magnitude-6.3 quake in Christchurch on February 22 last year, and an estimated 316,000 people died in a magnitude-7 quake near the Haitian capital on January 12, 2010.
Good building standards, designed to protect buildings from earthquakes, had shown their value in Christchurch.
The recent global financial crisis had also highlighted the scale of problems that could result from inadequate regulations, in this case, in the financial sector, he said.
Another speaker, Dunedin South MP Clare Curran, warned the proposed sale of the Hillside Railway Workshops and of other state-owned assets, including power companies, could expose workers in those enterprises to greater safety risks, under new, more profit-driven ownership.
It was a tragic loss for families, workmates and friends when loved ones did not come home at the end of the working day.
Forty-one New Zealanders had died at work last year, and thousands more were seriously injured.
The country's death and injury toll was four times higher than comparable countries, such as the United Kingdom, she said.
Dunedin-based Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei said the Pike River disaster highlighted what could happen without good safety regulations to protect workers.
She also pointed to the high death and injury toll in the agricultural sector.
