In June this year, Judge Jane Farish found Pike River Coal Ltd guilty of multiple charges and ordered it to pay the families of the men a total of $3.4 million.
But the company is broke and no one has put up their hand to pay, including the mine's founder and major shareholder, New Zealand Oil and Gas.
The author of a just-released book Tragedy at Pike River Mine, journalist Rebecca Macfie, says the families must be paid compensation for the loss of their family members.
"It's hard not to feel that a great injustice has been done on the issue of compensation," she says.
This is backed up by the book's revelations that the Department of Labour failed to enforce safety conditions at the mine, despite numerous warnings that it was unsafe.
But the government last week said it would not be paying compensation to the families as it would "create a precedent".
Today a political battle broke out, with the opposition Labour Party announcing it will pay the families the compensation ordered by Judge Farish if the party takes power in next year's general election.
Mistakes on every level
Ms Macfie's book reveals the vast and complex series of failures made by the mine's management, board and regulator in the lead-up to the 2010 disaster.
The problems at the mine went as far back as its initial development, when little preparatory exploration was done and there was an "inadequate basis of knowledge from which to design and run a coal mine," she says.
And further setbacks, stemming from poor decision making, a lack of geological knowledge and ever-escalating costs, continued to plague the mine.
"There wasn't much that went right with it," Ms Macfie says.
Perhaps the most shocking was the obvious safety risks that management failed to address, including the lack of a second exit in the mine.
Many of the miners had expressed concern over this, but were told it was on the way.
False hope
Following the first explosion at Pike River at 3.44pm on November 19, families of the miners were gathered for briefings with management, including former Pike River Coal boss Peter Whittall.
In her book, Ms Macfie writes that families were given false hope on thse occasions that the men could still be alive, despite comprehensive evidence to suggest the blast was un-survivable.
Information including video footage of the explosion and dangerous gas readings was not communicated with the families, who were instead "encouraged to hope that the men would be sitting there waiting to be rescued".
"They were grossly misled," she says.
Mr Whittall testified at a Royal Commission, which ran from 2011-2012, that he had held genuine belief there was hope and had not been made aware of much of the damning evidence.
The Comission had been "awful eye-opener" for families who finally learned the truth of just how vulnerable their men had been.
"It made the pain and scale of that loss - 29 men in a small community - just so much greater," Ms Macfie says.
Shocked, angry and ashamed
In her 25-year career in journalism, Rebecca Macfie said writing Tragedy at Pike River Mine had been the most difficult task she faced.
As a South Island resident, the story was close to home, and one she believed deserved the public's attention.
"I was so shocked by it," she says. "Shocked and angry and ashamed."
"I knew from the beginning it would be the outcome of a whole series of complex failures. Things like this don't happen because of something one person did."
As the debate over compensation rages on, the tiny West Coast community continues to pick up the pieces of their broken lives.
"It’s still very raw in the community it’s affected," she says.
"Nobody would have let their son go to work there if they knew how unsafe it was."
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