Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I wanted to make a few brief remarks about this bill, the Industrial Chemicals Bill 2017. There will be a more lengthy contribution from the Greens, particularly Senator Rhiannon, when it reaches the other place. I want to make a couple of remarks about the issue of animal testing in cosmetics, which is dealt with in this bill. There have been a number of organisations—in particular, the cruelty-free campaign, Animals Australia and the Animals Justice Party but also many others—that have campaigned for some time, with the full support of the Greens, for a ban on cosmetics that have been tested on animals. There are great companies in Australia like the Lush brand and many others that are already cruelty free because they know people in Australia want to be assured their cosmetics haven't been tested on animals. Many, many people have done some very, very good work on that.

There have also been people in this place from across the political spectrum who have also wanted to see that change. On the government back benches some have spoken up, including in this debate, saying that that's a change we need to see. It's a change that the Greens have called for and pursued for quite some time. So, to the extent the government is taking a first step towards addressing that, that is welcome, but, as is often the case with many of the things that come from this government, it's not as good as it seems. It comes bundled up in something that has nothing to do with the issue of animal testing and, in fact, seeks other reforms that could potentially jeopardise those very good reforms. As has been said many times during the debate, there are loopholes in the government's proposal around animal testing. They are loopholes that do need to be fixed. That will be dealt with further when the matter comes to the Senate.

Also of concern is that, as I am briefed by the various people who have been campaigning for that, there is a deal of concern that the government has wrapped up a measure around animal testing in amongst something much, much broader that goes towards changing the way that industrial chemicals more broadly are regulated and in a way that has nothing to do with cosmetics and nothing to do with animal testing. But, under the guise of talking about animal testing, the government may well be attempting to get through a bunch of other changes that might actually mean that people are more at risk from harmful chemicals.

We've heard from some of the other members in this debate the kinds of risks that people currently face when it comes to industry. One of the ones I'm particularly familiar with is the risk that firefighters face. If there was a fire in this building at the moment, most of us would run one way—out—and the firefighters would run in. They run into rooms where things are burning and creating a huge amount of toxic smoke. In your average home, there are tens of thousands of chemicals that have been used to make the plastics that surround your TV set, that go into the couch, that are in the carpet or that are in the paint. When those chemicals burn, we now know that they, in many instances, produce cancer-causing smoke. If you're a firefighter, no matter how good your equipment is, you've got to be able to breathe, and breathing out to let the heat out of your body also means that air comes in.

As a result, even with the best equipment in the world, the best PPE—personal protective equipment—in comes toxic smoke into your system. Firefighters have told me that you could be scrubbing yourself for a couple of days after a big job and still be seeing black gunk coming out of your skin, out of your system. We now know that a lot of that is cancer causing. As a result, firefighters find themselves with much, much higher rates of cancer than their counterparts. Firefighters tend to start in the job being healthier than the average human specimen. After five years, they could find themselves having twice the risk of getting leukaemia, for example. That's the kind of risk we're asking them to face, because they go into environments where they're faced with chemicals. But we also know that they're exposed to industrial chemicals through their training.

We're now seeing some of the consequences of the use of chemicals called PFOS and PFOA at Defence bases. We have also seen them being used in firefighting training areas for some time, most notoriously in Fiskville in Victoria, where a lot of the chemicals that were used, the PFOS and PFOA, as well as others, found their way not just into firefighting systems but into the water, and they have contaminated the ground. Every major airport around Australia has a firefighting base on it, as it should have. The aviation firefighters spend a lot of time training so that they can get to a plane should a tragedy ever befall it or if a plane catches on fire. They have to be able to get there quickly and know exactly what they're doing, so they spend a lot of their time training. Quite like the Defence bases and Fiskville, a lot of the training done at airports uses firefighting foams containing chemicals that were banned elsewhere in the world and that were only relatively recently banned in Australia. The firefighters do a lot of training, using a lot of foam. Those chemicals seep into the ground and then into the watertable.

At the Gold Coast Airport, those chemicals are now finding their way into the water system. The Gold Coast Airport abuts a broadwater, just south of the border, and a creek. We know that the government intends to dig up part of that and extend part of the Gold Coast Airport. Worryingly, we are hearing that these industrial chemicals, which relate to the subject of this bill, are sitting in the soil, potentially having leached into the water. When you dig that up to extend the length of the runway, more of them are going to come out and find their way into the water system. As a result, they will potentially put at risk not only all the people who've worked there but everyone around the area who catches fish and eats it, plus the wildlife in the area and in the waterway itself.

So we've got a very, very long way to go with industrial chemicals in this country. If the government were serious about health and welfare on that front, we'd be using this bill as an opportunity to rein in what is going to be a level of scandal that's going to require a royal commission to deal with Defence sites and airports, and other training grounds, where we've used chemicals that have put people's lives at risk and that are continuing to put people's lives and the environment at risk. Sadly, that nettle isn't being grasped, despite all the warnings, but it is something that is going to come back and rightly bite this place and the governments that have made decisions in the past to allow the significant use of those chemicals.

To come back to the question of cosmetic testing on animals, which is covered in this bill, I want to applaud the groups I mentioned before for their tireless campaigns, resulting in some partial step from the government towards addressing this issue. But we do need to fix it and we do need to ensure the government isn't trying to use that good move and the goodwill of the Australian people, who want to make sure that their cosmetics haven't been tested on animals, to try and get other legislation through. And we need to explore, when the matter goes to the Senate, whether there's a way of making sure we get good bits of legislation without letting through some of those other nasties that the government might be trying to get through and, if we get the good bits, that they actually do the job, by closing the loopholes, and that we don't just allow something to go through that ticks the box under the appearance of it having been done and we never come back to the issue again—and in fact then find that there are loopholes big enough to drive trucks through. That's the approach the Greens will be taking when this bill goes to the Senate.

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