Bill Shorten (Maribyrnong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children's Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this morning to talk about asbestos. There is no known safe level for any carcinogen. This means that it is not known at what minimum level of asbestos fibres in breathing space a person will be safe. In fact, there are known cases where trivial or bystander exposure has led to fatal disease. No-one argues that having more asbestos fibres resident in the lungs is better than having less. Whilst anyone could have amounts of asbestos fibres in their lungs right now, no expert in the world can tell me that one extra fibre entering my lung right now will not be the one to kill me. Consequently, every single such fibre must be regarded as guilty until proven innocent. The precautionary principle entails such a presumption of guilt. I would now add the principle of outcome responsibility.

If you by accident step on a dog’s paw, almost instinctively you will say sorry to the dog. If he is injured, you will try to get the dog to a vet or otherwise help them back on their feet. But, given there is so much asbestos around the country in walls, in roofs, in backyard fibro sheds and in the dust blown from long-idle factories, why hasn’t anyone from the industry ever apologised to sick people, to people at risk of asbestosis, particularly those exposed in their younger years who are older now and to governments whose duty it is to police these dangers? By the mid-1960s the harm that asbestos caused was well known but asbestos kept being manufactured. In fact, 80 per cent of all the ACM manufactured around the world was manufactured between 1960 and 2003.

How did they get away with this? They did it in a very cunning way. They used the campaign that generated promotable villains. They said: ‘It’s because you smoke; it’s because you don’t wash; it’s genetic. It’s not white asbestos; it’s that nasty blue asbestos.’ They were brilliantly chosen villains but none of them changed the fact that all asbestos of whatever kind is carcinogenic. Most research now shows that you do not need a high level of long-term exposure to contract asbestosis. A few high-level exposures at home may be enough. ILO statistics show that 100,000 people are dying from an asbestos disease around the world per year. That is in the order of one every five minutes. Some 50 companies in the US have sought legal protection from bankruptcy and there are thousands of legal cases on the books.

We need to move away from the fraudulent risk assessment of ACMs, all of which condemn many people to further exposure, and to move to what I call a prioritised removal program. Whilst to prioritise will mean some risk assessment, the paradigm shift is towards removal and away from maintenance. It is high time we stopped bequeathing this horror as a time bomb from generation to generation. There are children not yet born who will die in agony as a result of our lazy and opportunistic decisions. Politics lacks courage here and industry does not want to know. This is one of the great remaining ugly secrets of the 20th century haunting and stalking our children and us into the 21st. (Time expired).

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