THE PIKE RIVER mine disaster remains one of the darkest chapters in New Zealand’s history. Twenty-nine men went to work on 19 November 2010 and never came home. Their families have carried the grief and the fight for justice for fifteen years, demanding accountability and stronger protections so that no other community suffers such a loss.
Yet when Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse, two of the most prominent advocates for the Pike River families, met Workplace Safety Minister Brooke van Velden on the anniversary of the disaster, they described the meeting as 'a complete waste of time.' Osborne left feeling 'really unhappy' because there were no guarantees that workers would return home safely, while Rockhouse said the minister seemed focused entirely on employers, offering little more than lip service.
This encounter is not an isolated misstep. It is emblematic of van Velden’s broader political project. Her libertarian branding—talk of individual freedom, deregulation, and small government—has always been less about empowering ordinary people and more about shielding corporations from accountability. When confronted with grieving families who have spent fifteen years demanding justice, she defaulted to the same ideological script: prioritising the concerns of employers, minimising the role of the state, and resisting stronger protections for workers. That is not libertarianism in any emancipatory sense; it is anti-working class politics dressed up in the language of 'freedom.'
The Pike River families were not asking for charity or sympathy alone. They were raising concrete concerns about workplace reforms that weaken safety laws and risk another disaster. They were pushing for corporate manslaughter legislation, a measure that would hold negligent companies criminally accountable when workers die due to unsafe conditions. Opposition parties and even New Zealand First have expressed support for such reforms, recognising that without real consequences, corporations will continue to treat safety as optional. Van Velden, however, offered no assurances, no commitments, and no recognition of the families’ demands. Her silence speaks volumes: when forced to choose between workers’ lives and corporate interests, she sides with the latter.
This is the essence of van Velden’s politics. Libertarianism, in her hands, is not about expanding freedom for ordinary people. It is about freeing corporations from regulation, freeing employers from responsibility, and freeing the wealthy from redistribution. For workers, it means less protection, less security, and less justice. The Pike River families saw this clearly in their meeting: she listened, but did not hear; she spoke, but said nothing of substance. It was politics as performance, designed to deflect rather than deliver.
The tragedy is that Pike River should have been the turning point. After the disaster, successive governments strengthened health and safety laws, bolstered WorkSafe, and promised that such a catastrophe would never happen again. Yet van Velden’s reforms threaten to undo that progress, returning us to a regime where employers’ convenience outweighs workers’ survival. Her approach is not neutral; it is a deliberate choice to prioritise profit over people. And it is precisely the kind of politics that makes another Pike River not just possible, but likely.
For the families, the minister’s response was more than unsympathetic—it was a betrayal. They came seeking reassurance that their loved ones’ deaths had not been in vain, that lessons had been learned, that protections would be strengthened. Instead, they were met with indifference and ideological rigidity. Rockhouse described the experience of listening to van Velden focus on employers until she “just couldn’t stand it”. That frustration captures the wider reality: workers and their families are being told, once again, that their lives matter less than corporate convenience.
Van Velden’s politics must be understood in this context. Her libertarianism is not a philosophy of freedom but a smokescreen for a pro-corporate agenda. It is the politics of deregulation, of weakening protections, of shifting responsibility away from employers and onto workers themselves. It is a politics that treats disasters like Pike River as unfortunate accidents rather than systemic failures of corporate negligence. And it is a politics that leaves families grieving, communities vulnerable, and workers exposed.
The Pike River families have fought for fifteen years to keep the memory of their loved ones alive and to demand justice. Their struggle is a reminder that workplace safety is not an abstract issue—it is a matter of life and death. Van Velden’s refusal to engage meaningfully with their concerns shows that her politics are fundamentally at odds with the needs of working people. She may speak the language of liberty, but in practice she defends the liberty of corporations to cut corners, exploit workers, and evade accountability. To add insult to injury, she is a member of a party that polls in single figures.
In the end, the meeting between van Velden and the Pike River families crystallised the truth: libertarian rhetoric cannot disguise anti-worker reality. The families saw through the smokescreen, and so should the country. If New Zealand is to honour the memory of the 29 men who died, it must reject the politics of deregulation and corporate appeasement. It must demand a politics that puts workers’ lives above employers’ profits. Brooke van Velden has shown us what the opposite looks like.
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