There’s every chance that in March 2019 the situation at Pike River will look quite similar to now.

Andrew Little, the Minister for Pike River Re-entry, has Cabinet sign-off to establish a Government agency to oversee all next moves. He and the boss, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, say manned re-entry is their goal, and they’ve made that commitment to the families – in Opposition, and now in Government.

But they also say safety is paramount. And they say the families agree – despite their biggest sticking point with the last Government being a major disagreement about whether it is safe or not.

The Pike family expert said it was possible, the National Government said it wasn’t, due to current health and safety laws literally put in place to prevent another disaster like the West Coast mine explosion that killed those 29 men.

This Government doesn’t expect health and safety laws will need to be amended at all – with Mr Little seeing them as more of a checklist than a barrier. But he also says he won’t support manned re-entry if it’s not safe to go in. And it is ultimately a responsibility sitting on his shoulders if anything goes wrong.

The new Pike River Recovery Agency now has the job now of going through all available information. It has from the day it’s established at the end of January next year, until March 2019. That’s the re-entry date this Government has set itself and gives the commission a little over a year to look through all of the options and make a call.

And what it comes down to is whether the previous National Government was completely forthcoming with all of its information on Pike. The discovery of the 36 hours of footage of the mine’s drift this year suggests perhaps it wasn’t. That’s what cast doubt on the handling of the situation again seven years on, and what saw the issue again become an election one, landing it smack bang in Labour’s plan for the first 100 days.

But if, during their research, this agency’s new small number of staff and a chief executive find that in fact health and safety laws would need to be majorly scaled back, or that National was right, and was forthcoming with its work, this could end up at square one.

The families say they trust this Government, but if Mr Little finds himself in a situation with a responsibility to deny that re-entry, if it isn’t deemed safe, then it does make you wonder, what then? Why wouldn’t the families contest it, with their own expert who says it’s safe, only this time eight years since the death of their loved ones instead of seven?

They have every reason to stick to their guns, if they choose to.

It could be 23 million dollars spent on the inevitable – another report saying no, advice against re-entry, and the Pike River families on a drizzly day at their own memorial, with sad eyes and broken hearts.