Meryl Swanson (Paterson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to bring a human face to this. I actually want to pay tribute to the Attorney-General as he exits the chamber. He was the first person in this hapless government to provide some urgency and action surrounding the PFAS class action that my community had endured for years before they saw any action. It was a mess. The member for Pearce, the Attorney-General, knows that it was a mess. I can take you back to 2015, when my community first learnt that their ground, their bodies and the very water that they drank had been contaminated by perfluoroalkyl substances. These things are commonly known as foams. When they were used, they were used in good conscience by the Defence Force in the hope of putting out plane fires. A plane fire burns at over 800 degrees Celsius. It's not an easy thing to extinguish. When they decided they would use these chemicals that were developed by DuPont and 3M over the years, they anticipated that they would save lives, not knowing that these chemicals, which form very strong carbonate chain bonds, are incredibly difficult to destroy. They are now known and tagged as the forever chemicals.

When my community learned that the forever chemical PFAS was in the ground, in the water and in their blood, they could not believe it. The Newcastle Herald ran a story on 4 September 2015—'Contaminated'. Skull and crossbones littered the front page, and my community panicked. Professional fishers in the Hunter River—the mighty Hunter—were banned from fishing. People were told, 'Don't drink your water, don't eat the eggs from your chickens and, whatever you do, look after yourselves.' It was deemed the red zone; it was a catastrophe.

And from that point forward my community fought. They fought their own government. It was through no fault of their own—they hadn't done anything wrong. It wasn't as if they'd read the bottle and hadn't followed the manufacturer's instructions; it was none of that. They had woken up one morning into a nightmare of a life, where they'd been poisoned by their own government—by the very agency that was tasked with their defence. They had been let down over decades—not just one, two or three months; we're talking about a span of 30 years where this accumulated in the ground. They could not seek justice. They were absolutely determined that they would win.

Do you know what they did? They organised a class action. They were the first group in Australia to do so. They had the wit, the wherewithal and the determination to organise themselves, and they did. They sought a funder. They sought litigation funding to help them fund their class action, because they knew they couldn't go up against the might of the Defence Force and the Australian government. They needed help, they looked seriously for that help and they got that help. It has taken four long years, but just in the last few months, under a mediation, they have been able to negotiate a settlement.

I can say that if it weren't for Dentons, who were formerly Gadens, who ran their defence, and IMF Bentham, who funded them—the litigation funders—that class action would never have got off the ground. Those people spent months, weeks and hours in the homes of our class action members. They worked absolutely tirelessly for my community and they continued to prosecute the case. Right up until the eleventh hour they dragged the Defence lawyers to the mediation table. I stood—not here, but in my regular place—in parliament and asked this very question of the Prime Minister: when are we going to see justice for the people of Williamtown? He looked me in the eye and said, 'The member knows well that we are in mediation at the moment.' It was that mediation through a class action which saw ordinary people get some justice which was so sorely overdue for them. So when I come into the chamber today and hear the member for Bradfield shouting, 'Oh, you're friends of litigation funders,' do you know what? In the instance of my community and PFAS, I am, because without those funders we would not have been able to see justice for the ordinary people.

And I want to speak about some of these ordinary people. One man, who I won't name, was just incredible. He came to me and said: 'Meryl, I saved my whole life to get a few acres. All I wanted to have was a lemon tree, like my grandma had, and half a dozen chooks, and I love to grow my own vegetables. I've worked hard all my life; I've hardly taken a sickie and I've done that: I've been able to buy five acres. I've got a lemon tree, I've got my chooks and I've got my veggies. And now I can't eat the eggs, I can't have juice from those lemons and I can't grow those vegetables. My property is worth nothing. No-one wants to buy it and not a bank will lend a dollar.'

Another story: again, it's about chickens. It's amazing, I know that everyone is getting into chooks at the moment with COVID-19! I was at the regular little shopping centre in Raymond Terrace, and a young girl was sitting there. It was one of the school nights—a Thursday night. She had a bag of chicken food on the table at the food court with her mum and dad. I came up and said: 'How are you going? You've got your chook food.' She said, 'Yeah, I've got my chook food, Meryl.' I said, 'You must love those chickens.' She said: 'Yeah, well, I feed them but we can't eat the eggs and I don't want dad to chop their heads off. But I know it's expensive to feed them.' This was a young girl in primary school, saying to me: 'I've got my chickens, they're still pets. We don't want to kill them but we can't eat their eggs anymore.'

Those are just two tiny examples of how people's lives were fractured. They've been decimated by what we would consider to be a shameful act. But they still couldn't get justice from their own government. We went through Ministers Payne, Pine and Price, and then it got flicked to the Prime Minister's office. Then we had a task force and two inquiries, with very legitimate recommendations. That was all cast aside—all turned asunder. No-one would listen to my community. But let me say that when the lawyers came knocking and the class action kicked off, that government over there sat up very straight and took a lot of notice. They came with their chequebook in the end, because they knew they were facing the scales of Madam Justice, and those scales of justice were tipped well against them in this instance.

So it's the hide of this government to come in here and try to rip the carpet out from under justice and say, 'Oh, we really need to check this out.' My goodness me! The temerity of a government that cannot understand when ordinary people need to the fight. Labor takes up the fight for ordinary people. I've taken up the fight for the ordinary people in my electorate who wanted extraordinary justice.

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