Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the contribution of my friend and colleague the member for Macquarie just before me. This National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry Bill 2023 is a bill of great significance and great importance to the health and wellbeing of Australian workers, and it should come as no surprise that this is a bill introduced by a Labor government. I am very pleased therefore to stand in this House and speak in support of the introduction of a new national occupational respiratory disease registry. This is an important bill, as I said, and I would expect it enjoys the support of every single member in this House.

This bill delivers on the recommendations of the National Dust Disease Taskforce to establish this National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry in response to what have been some quite shocking increases in silicosis among Australian workers. Silicosis is an irreversible lung disease, but it is entirely preventable. Tragically it is a disease that is caused by worker exposure to silica dust, and health screening conducted by some jurisdictions in recent years has indicated that nearly one in four of the engineered stone workers who have been in the industry since before 2018 have suffered from silicosis and other silica dust related diseases. That is a most unacceptable statistic, nearly one in four engineered stone workers suffering from some type of exposure to silicosis dust. These are, as I said, entirely preventable diseases and conditions. Not only are they entirely preventable but the deaths are often entirely preventable as well.

I come from a region where respiratory diseases have shockingly high rates of prevalence. We know the devastation that is the black lung disease for coalminers, which has reared its ugly head in some parts of Australia again in more recent times, but we have shockingly high rates of respiratory disease across the board. So I am very fortunate to have some of Australia's most preeminent researchers and specialists in respiratory and lung diseases based in Newcastle, and I do want to give a special acknowledgement to Dr Susan Miles, who was recently awarded a terrific acknowledgement from her exceptional work as a clinician but also as someone with excellence in clinical teaching at the Calvary Mater hospital in Newcastle. She was rightly recognised for her outstanding contributions not just to general medicine more broadly at the mater hospital and, as I said, as an outstanding clinical teacher, but also as a very valued member of that team and at the university, and I know she has worked with many other important researchers to understand what is going on with these new cases of silicosis.

I remember the work that Dr Miles and Dr Geoff Tyler did four years ago which alerted us to a number of new cases of silicosis. They were saying that there were 18 new cases each month coming through. Their role has been as researchers and medical advisory members on what used to be the New South Wales Dust Diseases Authority—I think iCare has taken over that role. These people have been at the forefront of alerting us to the increased prevalence and, of course, what we can do in order to prevent these shocking statistics from continuing to escalate. It was a real challenge that we didn't understand the size of the problem, particularly in New South Wales, so heartfelt thanks and a very big shout-out to people like Dr Susan Miles and Geoff Tyler, who've done incredible work to bring this to our attention and to really alert us to the dangers related to the exposure to manufactured stone products. They have also made clear just how we can improve the diagnostic work there and the need for something more than just X-rays if we are to truly detect the extent of this problem.

The bill before us today establishes the National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry, which will capture information on respiratory diseases that are believed to have been occupationally caused or, indeed, exasperated. The national registry will also capture associated respiratory disease-causing agents that can lead to the disease, and that's obviously really important information as well. The national registry will capture and share data, where appropriate, on a number of things. I want to step us through what that role looks like. Firstly, it will alert us to the incidence of occupational respiratory diseases and their respiratory disease-causing agents; and the last and main exposures, including the place of business or the industry and occupation and the job task at hand. It will capture the respiratory health data that we need to ensure we have a really accurate picture of what is happening.

This is vital information that will aid in detecting new and emerging threats to workers' respiratory health. It will inform incident trends, which obviously we want to know as far in advance as possible. It will help inform actions to be taken to reduce further worker exposure. It supports, as I mentioned earlier, some really important research that we still need to do in this area into occupational respiratory diseases. I know that doctors and specialists in respiratory disease in my region and the Hunter are very keen to ensure that we have the necessary data to support the critical work they need to do on the frontline of this disease. This information will also assist in targeting and monitoring the effectiveness of the interventions and prevention strategies that we deploy.

The bill will require medical specialists in the fields of respiratory and sleep medicine, and occupational and environmental medicine who diagnose certain occupational respiratory diseases to notify of that diagnosis and ensure that the patient and exposure details are also part of the national registry, and they will be doing that via an online portal. This is not, of course, unfamiliar to most of our medical specialists in this field already. They are well equipped to start putting valuable data into this national register. And the bill provides for the minister for health to have the power to make rules prescribing which occupational respiratory diseases require notification, and that is consistent with the recommendations of the National Dust Disease Taskforce. They have asked that initially it be mandatory for only silicosis to be reported. However, this power, which would require further consultation before it is executed—and I want to make that clear—will ensure that the national registry can respond to other threats to workers' respiratory health in the future, and I would think that is important.

It is important that we don't have unfettered powers for ministers. There will be a consultation process there. But we do want our ministers to be able to respond in a speedy manner to new data and information coming through. If there are other threats to workers' respiratory health then we would want to be doing everything we can to get on top of that quick smart. We don't want to see long, drawn-out delays like we saw with asbestos and the awareness raising and necessary legislative responses to those shocking implications for workers who, for too long, continued to work with those dangerous products. We don't want to see a repeat of that. Sadly, in Australia we have a lot of experience in dealing with these respiratory issues for workers, whether it's asbestos related, whether it's coal dust related or, now, on the new frontier of silicosis.

As I said, the bill will allow respiratory and occupational physicians to notify to the national registry information about an individual who has been diagnosed with a non-prescribed occupational respiratory disease where that individual provides consent. The member for Macquarie, who spoke before me, talked about the importance of having consent in all these steps of the process. The bill provides for two categories of information to be notified to the national registry—the minimum notification information as well as the additional notification information. The minimum notification information is that which needs to be supplied to notify the national registry of an occupational respiratory disease. This includes information identifying the individual who has a diagnosed occupational respiratory disease. It requires notification of the respiratory disease itself and details on the exposure, including the last and main points of exposure. These pieces of information are all vitally important in order to get ahead of the spread of this disease and to get better and better at targeting our prevention strategies.

The additional notification information is information that can be supplied where the individual has provided consent. That might include relevant medical test results. It might include demographic and lifestyle information, such as smoking history and employment status, and details of each job where the individual believes they've had an exposure to a respiratory-disease-causing agent. That builds a bigger picture for us all, really. And this bill will enable the disclosure of notifications about an individual made to the national registry, including the respiratory and occupational physicians treating the individual as well as prescribed information to the Commonwealth, states or territories, state and territory health agencies, and work health and safety agencies.

In the short amount of time remaining, I want to say that this bill does not exclude or limit the operation of any existing state or territory laws, and that is important. For those states and territories that already have laws that require the reporting or disclosure of information concerning occupational respiratory diseases, we don't want to see any exclusion or limitation of that. In my home state of New South Wales we have an existing register that requires the mandatory reporting of some occupational respiratory diseases by physicians. This bill will allow for those New South Wales registers to remain intact, but it will make clear that notification of these diseases will occur through the national register so that there is no need for a physician to double-report—they won't have to report to the state register and then the national register; they will only report to the national register. (Time expired)

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