Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am not a dope. This is because these people are on their own. They are defenceless. They have nothing other than their own message. I have often thought to myself it is because they do not have any level of representation. You only have to ask yourself: why would someone whose family have owned a farming property for five generations, as we saw at Cape Bridgewater, willingly make up a story to leave their property? We all heard evidence the other day—Senators Day, Madigan, Urquhart and I heard the evidence—from a woman who came to the Barossa Valley with her husband in the hope of a beautiful retirement. She said: 'Look at what is happening to our community. It's being destroyed. It's being turned away. We're having to leave.' I ask the question of people: if they are suffering nothing, if there is only some psychosomatic event, why do they want to walk away from their lifestyle?

In terms of the effects, I did ask the Chief Medical Officer of South Australia in Adelaide the other day whether or not stress or annoyance is an adverse medical condition. He said to me, 'Senator Back, yes, it is.' I said, 'If in turn it leads to sleeplessness, to depression and to an inability to function, is that an adverse medical condition?' He said, 'Yes, it is.' The other day in Melbourne, Dr David Iser gave us evidence of the fact that one of his patients in the room at the time was suffering from a condition. A person writing to me today talks of sleeplessness and severe pain in the ears. Other effects are nasal pressure, tachycardia, burning in the chest, nausea, exhaustion of a morning as a result of the inability to sleep.

Certainly one of the things I am pleased to be able to report is that, as a result of recommendation 4 of the Siewert inquiry in 2011, the Commonwealth government is in fact initiating, for the first time anywhere in the world, genuine independent medical research to see whether there are adverse health effects. It will be coordinated through the NHMRC. Advertisements have opened and closed. The government has committed $2½ million. As Dr Tonin, a member of the Acoustic Group, said, 'If $2½ million is not enough then let us make sure that there is sufficient funding.'

Senator Urquhart was unable to attend the hearing in Cairns, but in Cairns a witness told us that when they did their 2012-13 so-called literature review, these were the keywords that the NHMRC left out of their review: stress, annoyance, heart disease, misophonia, headache, nausea, dizziness, vertigo, sleep disturbance, sleep deprivation. And they also ignored anything that was not in the English language! If one of my undergraduate students ever presented me with a literature review as poor as that one, I would have sent it back to them.

I recommend the interim report to the Senate and I look forward to making further comment.