Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is timely that the member for Bendigo brings this forward. We are hours from a Four Corners expose of the studied disregard by Rio Tinto of the lives, the health, the environment, the living standards of Brazilian villagers affected by one of their mining enterprises. Quite frankly, this industry has been characterised by a ruthless pursuit of profit at the total disregard for the workers. In 1929, of course, as Lang Hancock started to utilise the Wittenoom deposits, he famously said of the people who died that, 'You have to break a few eggs to make omelettes.' That is a kind of attitude that has characterised employers in this field. It is in an industry where, at one site in 1989, 500 people were assessed as dying from asbestosis. It was thought to have reached 2,000. It was the same industry where, in 2012, the High Court in this country found seven directors of James Hardie group had breached their duties by approving misleading statements released to the stock exchange. They were essentially about compensation.

On the national front, it is worth noting that different medical models point to peak deaths from mesothelioma between 2014 and 2021. It is happening now. The number of mesothelioma cases in the country is expected to reach 18,000, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. I join with the member for Bendigo in expressing concern that this national health crisis was precipitated by employers who knew the whole time that they were killing workers, they were destroying them and their families' livelihoods and they were making sure that people would disappear from those families. It is, indeed, appalling that the government cannot even produce a few speakers to defend their total inaction in allowing the continued importation of this product into Australia. It is all right to talk about free trade agreements and how they are facilitating Chinese enterprise. However, to actually allow a number of producers to bring this product in at the grave danger not only to the workers but to consumers, innocent bystanders and neighbours is appalling. One must question the degree of disinterest by government members in such a serious problem.

It is timely, also, on the local front. I live in the Parramatta municipality. Within a kilometre of my home we recently had a situation where a white tip truck dumped a load on Boundary Road, Chester Hill, sometime between 2 am and 3 am last Thursday. One must say that, at two to three o'clock in the morning, this was deliberate, this was an attempt to avoid vigilance by the general public. It left a trail of building waste containing asbestos material approximately 50 metres long and three metres wide along Boundary Road. I join with the mayor of Parramatta in saying:

I want to be able to parade this person in court. I think the industry just has cowboys and they've got to be controlled.

When this person is found, I certainly hope that he is on the front page of the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald, and gets a lot of TV notoriety.

Further to this matter, the Senior Manager, Waste Compliance at the New South Wales Environmental Protection Authority, Christopher McElwain, said: 'Big companies should be careful in selecting contractors to dispose of hazardous waste. They should only pay the contractors when the waste has been shown to be legally owned.'

It is not just the Parramatta municipality that has been characterised by heavy dumping in previous decades because of the close proximity, at Camellia, of the Wunderlich and James Hardie plants. We know that over many decades they hid this product throughout the municipality of Parramatta—and I put on record at this stage Matt Peacock's groundbreaking 2009 publication Killer company: James Hardie exposed, which partly went into those matters—but it is not only in Parramatta. In Liverpool, suspended Liberal Party councillor Peter Ristevski quite correctly is launching a campaign against the Liberal mayor, Nick Mannoun, and the chief executive officer, Carl Wulff, for their negligence in this matter. The Asbestos Diseases Foundation noted of Mr Mannoun and Liverpool council that they were 'in denial' and said, 'Council is treating this'—that is, the way in which they have allowed dumping, from municipal dumps into the wider society at other sites—'in a laissez-faire manner … they don't see it as a hazard.' The rest of society, I am afraid, understands that it is a hazard.

It is deplorable that near a Serbian social club and at other sites throughout the municipality council employees have been asked to dump these materials. The council, in turn, has not been forward in making sure, on behalf of these people, that a health test is undertaken. The resolution is necessary, it is overdue, and this is a serious national problem. (Time expired)

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