Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will be on task shortly, but just let me reinforce what the member for Robertson has just said. Health care is in the DNA of the Australian Labor Party. We recognise that healthy people are productive people. We recognise that there is an equity issue about health care. And Australia has led the world in equitable access to healthcare. We've heard about the Leader of the Opposition and what he did to health care. Basically, he wanted to destroy bulk-billing, to destroy people's ability to equitably access health care and to make sure that only the wealthy could afford equitable access to health care in Australia. It is not just the Leader of the Opposition; don't forget what Jeff Kennett did to the Victorian health system decades ago—an absolute tragedy. Unfortunately we now have the Liberal Party in a similar position; they want to cut health care. It really concerns me that we still have no health policy coming from the Leader of the Opposition or his health spokesperson. They've agreed to follow our women's healthcare plan but only after much prodding. There is nothing coming forward initiating healthcare policy. It is very poor.

Going back to this bill, this is a very important bill. First of all, let me congratulate the government on banning the use of engineered stone in Australia. That was a really important change. It's something that was long overdue. Our government did that very quickly to make sure that Australian workers go home healthy every day—yet another thing we've done to promote equitable access to health care, and that's on an occupational basis. This bill is a follow-on from that to prevent the importation of engineered stone where it could have been used without any oversight. This is a very important follow-on from that initial banning of the use of engineered stone.

If I can take a step back, I'll tell you my experience as a young resident. We used to go into the respiratory wards, when I did a respiratory term, and we'd see people who were pretty fit, middle-aged men. These were people that were used to manual labour either as coalminers or as industrial workers. They were fit, very strong men, and they were basically suffocating from an entirely preventable lung disease. Silicosis is preventable, yet we were seeing numbers of previously healthy, strong men dying from this disease—and it's a slow death. It's not a good death, if any death is good; it's a slow, suffocating death—with them often carrying around their oxygen cylinders—from a preventable cause.

Australia led the world in the prevention of silicosis and related diseases in coalminers and industrial workers. We had the Dust Diseases Board, which was important, to make sure that workers were protected from developing coalminers' lung or silicosis and other complications of lung disease like asbestos and mesothelioma. Initially the major concern was asbestos but it was recognised that silicosis could develop in many different coalmines and others from the unregulated inhalation of silica dust—sometimes with coal dust but sometimes with asbestos as well.

The Dust Diseases Board was a huge innovation, and my cousin, Julian Lee, a respiratory physician at the Woolcock Institute at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, was one of the leading physicians on the Dust Diseases Board. He always felt that governments had been very late in introducing regulations to prevent the development of this terrible lung disease—not just asbestosis but silicosis. There were large numbers of people in the coalmining industry and other mining industries and the tunnelling industry—and in industrial uses and, more lately, in the use of stone for benchtops et cetera—that had been exposed to silica dust.

I remember meeting in my office a couple of years ago a well-known rugby league football player and industrial worker, Ray, who developed silicosis. He was a big, strong, muscular guy but breathing in grunting respirations—that's how they breathe.

They breathe to try and keep their little air sacs open so they can get oxygen that they need into their lungs, and it's really terrifying to see these previously fit and healthy strong men basically suffocating in front of your eyes. I believe that subsequently he has gone on to now needing home oxygen, a really terrible end result from what was an entirely preventable disease. The silicosis occurs because the silica dust you can't see and you can't feel, so people without knowledge are inhaling it into their lungs. These tiny little silica particles are gobbled up by the little protective cells we all have in our lungs called macrophages, but once they enter those macrophages the silica itself sets up an inflammatory process. That inflammatory process then leads to the immune system attacking it, causing scarring. What happens is that scarring gradually shrinks the elastic ability of the little lung tissues to open up with every breath and get that oxygen out of the air we breathe, and gradually the lungs get stiffer and stiffer, the little air sacs get destroyed and people find it more and more difficult to breathe. They help themselves by giving themselves end-airway pressure by the grunting respirations that keep the air sacs open, but unfortunately, people can develop this without recognising it, because our lungs have an ability to compensate.

They can often at presentation already have untreatable chronic lung disease, and there are no really effective treatments other than supportive treatments. Use of steroids or use of drugs, such as those used in asthma, to open up the airways have a very limited effect, and very quickly people with silicosis become oxygen dependent. You can see them. They're otherwise healthy looking blokes, grunting respiration, walking around with tubes in their nose delivering the oxygen they often carry in a backpack or a trolley to help them move around. Eventually they will die of respiratory failure if they don't get a heart and lung transplant. Even with that, results can be difficult because, as we've already heard, the complications of silicosis include things like heart disease and autoimmune disease because the inflammatory process releases proteins into the blood that cause your body's own immune system to attack other organs, so people can have renal kidney failure and they can have other autoimmune disorders. It is a tragic complication of the disease of silicosis that not just the lungs are affected, and people die when they really should have many more years to live.

The Labor Party believes people should have the opportunity of going to work and coming home healthy, hence our moves initially to ban the importation of engineered stone and now to seize engineered stone at the border and to dispose of it quickly without it getting into the system, where it could be used dishonestly otherwise. This legislation is very important, but it's also a continuum of Labor looking after people and looking after workers in particular. As a physician, these are dreadful diseases that could have been prevented. We're still seeing people in this day and age suffering from silicosis, and that just should not be happening. Engineered stone is a particular danger because of the very high concentrations of silica in engineered stone, sometimes up to 80 per cent, whereas natural stone, even though it's not without risk, has usually 20 per cent or lower silica. It's very important that we don't use engineered stone. Unfortunately, as my cousin Julian Lee thought about asbestos diseases and coalminer's lung and silicosis, we are late in doing it. It should have been done years ago. We're very lucky that we've got a Labor government who's prepared to act on this quite dreadful disease and make sure that workers go to work and come home healthy.

We've prohibited other imports before—vapes being one of them. That's a particular interest of mine. We should've banned the importation of vapes years and years ago. We've had to introduce legislation to prevent the use and importation of vapes, and we're now doing the same thing with engineered stone, which is very important. It's part of a suite of public health measures that Labor is committed to. This Customs Amendment (Expedited Seizure and Disposal of Engineered Stone) Bill is a really key component of that.

It's important that we have this bill because other seized products have to be kept and stored for a while as the legal process needs to happen so they can be destroyed. But engineered stone is very heavy. It's difficult to store; it's difficult to manage. This bill now gives the government and the authorities the ability to immediately remove any possibility of the engineered stone getting to market. Immediate destruction is the best answer for this, and this bill ensures that this will happen. It's yet another public health measure, as I've said, that prevents workers from becoming unwell and makes sure that they can go home safely every day.

Some people have previously suggested that more needs to be done to educate workers about the dangers of engineered stone and that more needs to be done to make sure that workers wear masks and gloves et cetera. But, in a workplace that may only be small or is isolated, it's very difficult to make sure that 100 per cent of the safety measures are undertaken, and so the best result is going to be what has happened—that is, the banning of the use of engineered stone altogether and the destruction of any engineered stone that gets to Australia. It means that we are able to destroy it immediately before any possibility of use, legal or otherwise, and that it can be destroyed very quickly.

I commend this bill to the House. There is, of course, more to be done. We certainly need to be doing more in terms of educating miners and workers about the dangers of inhaling particles, not just silica but also particles from other forms of mining. We've done our very best to make sure people are protected from the dangers of asbestos disease, but it's important to note that we still have quite a significant amount of asbestos in our housing stock. People need to be made aware of the dangers of asbestosis and inhalation of asbestos, not just in our working community but for homeowners, and Labor is committed to doing that. This needs to be done together with people who are involved in the tunnelling industry, as my eldest son is. There are dangers such as dust inhalation in tunnelling situations, particularly if attention to protective equipment is not followed.

So there's much more to be done for public health measures. This bill and the one previously that banned the use of engineered stone are fantastic protections for Australian workers. Only Labor has been able to do this. The previous government ignored the problem, and it's very important that our good work in public health continues.

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