Jenny Ware (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of these two bills, the National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry Bill 2023 and its consequential amendments bill. These bills are in response to the growing incidence of occupational lung disease, which is now becoming quite prevalent particularly in the building and construction industry, and particularly silicosis, a disease we are unfortunately becoming all too familiar with. There are a number of other lung diseases this bill seeks to address as well, and I will refer to those.

These lung diseases are particularly prevalent now in younger Australians, often males employed as stonemasons, particularly in the engineered stone industries. A lot of my electorate of Hughes is employed in the building and construction industry, and as a result I've been approached by constituents to speak on this bill. I also recently met with a new business that has just started up in my electorate. It's called Art of Marble. It's located in Moorebank. The business owner, Jerome Lafforgue, spoke to me very recently about occupational lung diseases and asked me to support his employees and those within this sector.

The National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry Bill 2023 and the National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2023 will create a legislative framework to establish and manage the National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry, delivering on a recommendation of the National Dust Disease Taskforce. I was present today in this place to hear the member for Swan speaking. While I agree overall with the comments that the honourable member made in relation to her investigation of the legislation and the way that she spoke about it, I think it's important to note that the bills have been built on the work of the former coalition government, which first established the National Dust Disease Taskforce in 2019. This taskforce was set up to investigate the growing number of silicosis cases, particularly in individuals working in the engineered stone industry. At that stage, the coalition government committed over $16 million to establish that taskforce and also included funding to address key recommendations from its final report. That is where these bills had their infancy.

This package of legislation builds on a former coalition commitment to address the increased incidence of silicosis and other occupational respiratory dust diseases in Australia. The legislative package overall demonstrates the coalition's support to continually improve occupational safety of Australians. I respectfully disagree with the member for Swan's comments that it is only Labor governments that support the rights of workers and a safe workplace. Coalition governments have been equally if not more supportive, particularly in this space. There has also been tremendous support from business groups within the engineered stone industry, demonstrating that businesses—many of whom are small businesses—similarly prioritise the safety of their employees.

The way that the bills are framed, the national registry will require respiratory and occupational physicians to notify diagnoses of occupationally caused silicosis, including any exposure details, and will allow for voluntary notification of other occupational respiratory diseases. The national registry will also capture respiratory health data to aid the detection of new and emerging threats to workers' respiratory health, prevent further worker exposure, inform incidence trends and assist in targeting and monitoring the effectiveness of interventions and prevention strategies. These were all recommendations that came out of the initial taskforce. The consequential amendments bill then deals with protected information and privacy issues that relate to the freedom of information legislation, and that bill is also supported.

The bills have been through many stakeholders. The scope, design, contents and operation of the national registry have been discussed with representatives from peak medical professional bodies as well as representatives from each of the state and territory governments. Consultation on an exposure draft of the bills with key stakeholders included physicians, other health groups, the states and territories, industry groups, business groups and unions. This was all undertaken last year.

I will move now to the purpose and structure of the bills. The occupational lung diseases that will be covered by the National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry—or the registry, as I will refer to it—are respiratory conditions that, through occupational exposure to a hazard, are associated with specific diseases.

That hazard can come in various forms. It can include dust, microorganisms and gases, and they have been linked to a number of conditions. There are three broad conditions, and they are pneumoconiosis, such as asbestosis, silicosis, and for coal workers' pneumoconiosis, which is often known as black lung disease. It includes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and also lung cancer.

The number of people in Australia who are living with these occupational lung diseases is unknown, although what is known is that the rate is growing. There are several factors that can impact the identification of occupational lung diseases. One of the issues with the diagnosis is that often chronic silicosis and asbestosis may not be diagnosed for many years after the initial exposure, and that's why the work of the task force in these bills is very important. They help to identify and change behaviours within the workplace to ensure that, as far as possible, workers within these industries are not contracting these diseases. What has particularly come to the forefront in recent years has been the re-emergence of silicosis, which is caused by the inhalation of crystalline silica, and this is, as I've pointed out already, seen particularly in the engineered stone sector. There has recently been a big increase in the number of householders who want this stone in their kitchens and their bathrooms, so we need to ensure that this can still be available to them but done in a way that workers working within those industries are not exposed to chronic lung conditions.

I'll turn now to some of the statistics on those diseases, which are not great. The Cancer Council has estimated that approximately 587,000 people had occupational exposure to silica dust in 2011. Based on that figure the Cancer Council estimates that close to 6,000 people will go on to develop lung cancer in their lifetime due to that exposure. Researchers have estimated about one per cent of the Australian adult population in 2016, approximately 10,400 people, will develop lung cancer as a result of exposure to silica dust in their workplace. Clearly, these numbers are alarming, and they indicate something that we need to address.

When the task force was established in July 2019, it provided initial advice to the then minister for health, Professor the Hon. Greg Hunt, in late December of that year. There were various fundings and five early recommendations, and I will deal very briefly with those early recommendations, which are now finding their way into this legislation. The task force said that what was very important was that a prevention strategy was developed and implemented and an initial education campaign was also implemented. The task force also said there needed to be a national approach to capture data information, collection and sharing, and research to better understand accelerated silicosis with an aim to improve prevention and treatment options. This will be through the establishment of this registry because that is what the registry does to adopt the recommendations of that initial task force.

To conclude, the occupational health and safety of Australian workers is of the utmost importance to those on my side of the House and also to those in the business community who employ these workers. The building and construction industry is an extremely large employer throughout our country, and it's a large employer in my electorate. It drives productivity within our country. We have an identifiable occupational risk to those working within the engineered stone industries, particularly in terms of respiratory diseases, which are preventable although not curable.

It is therefore more than appropriate—it is essential—that in this place we do all that we can to address these unknown risks and look at future protection of workers within these sectors. The establishment of the National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry, which is the subject of these bills, will build on the task force's early work and will assist with the prevention of these chronic and dreadful diseases into the future. For all those reasons I commend these bills to the House.

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