Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the National Occupational Respiratory Disease Registry Bill 2023 and the related bill. Silicosis is horrific. It's caused by breathing in silica dust, the kind of dust that's produced by engineered stone. Some of the dust particles are so small that they're invisible. You can't see them, but you can still inhale them. And when you do, they go deep into your lungs and can cause irreversible damage—but not right away. For most people, it takes years. Your lungs gradually become inflamed, then scarred and they develop nodules which prevent you from breathing freely. This can lead to complications like tuberculosis, bronchitis, kidney disease or even lung cancer. There's no cure; in some cases you manage with a mechanical breathing device—inn some cases your lungs harden from scarring so much that they simply can't take in enough oxygen.

Silicosis kills people and it's killing people here right now. We just don't have a good way of monitoring it. This bill establishes a national occupational respiratory disease registry. Its role will be to capture and catalogue information on respiratory diseases caused, or made, worse by work. It will measure the incidence of occupational respiratory diseases and where they took place down to a job's task level, up to a business level and all the way up to an industry level. It will monitor health data long-term.

Measuring what matters is a pretty basic standard for how governments should operate: if it matters to you, measure it. That's because without doing the work of collecting data and interpreting the trends it's telling us, we're left saying how terrible things are and how much worse they're getting, but don't really know what we're doing. Without numbers to back up a gut feeling, we end up flying blind. Without numbers, how are we supposed to tell if what we're doing is working to make things better? We have to measure how bad things are right now so we can see if we're making things better down the line.

But it's not just about measuring progress; it's also about detecting new and emerging threats. If we have baseline data that suddenly spikes in a particular industry in a particular state, this registry will be able to tell us at a granular level if that's a bit of random noise or a genuine threat. If you can catch a problem before it becomes a crisis, you end up saving lives. That is what this bill has the potential to do. It does not sit on its own, though, in a little vacuum. It complements a range of other related measures designed to eliminate occupational respiratory diseases altogether.

I support this initiative. I want it to go further, faster. I foreshadow that I will move an amendment to this bill that expands its function in a way that I think government and the opposition would both support. This amendment is government policy, so I think it is pretty uncontroversial. This amendment is simply copying schedule 2 of the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill and attaching it to this bill. I see no reason why the government should oppose it. After all, they wrote it. I see no reason for the opposition to oppose it, either. They commissioned the taskforce that came up with the recommendation that my amendment enacts. They accepted the recommendation as part of their official government response to the taskforce. It's their policy, too. My amendment simply enacts policy that the government wants to pass urgently and that the coalition supported when it was in government. It's an olive branch to the government. The question is will they take it?

Schedule 2 of the closing loopholes bill amends the Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency Act 2013, as the minister said in his second reading speech, 'to expand the Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency to eliminate silica related diseases in Australia'. Schedule 2 also expands the membership of the current Asbestos Safety and Eradication Council to include appropriate representation from employee and employer representatives and an expert in asbestosis or silica related matters. These are great measures. I have no issue with them. The government and I are on the same page here. I'd happily pass these measures today, which is what I'm hoping the Senate will do. The need for this amendment right now is because the bill from which it has been extracted is not going to pass this year. The government says it's urgent that the industrial relations changes in the closing loopholes bill be passed quickly to ensure the safety of workers. They point to the amendments made by schedule 2 of that bill as an example of why the bill needs to be passed in its entirety this year. They might be right about the bill needing to be passed in its entirety; we try to keep an open mind. But we on the crossbench haven't had time decide whether we agree. On this particular part of the bill, though, we don't need any more time. We agree. We should pass it today.

With my amendment, I'm giving the Senate an opportunity to do just that. The bills that are before us today, one of which I am seeking to amend, create a registry that will support the identification of the industries, occupations, job tasks and workplaces where there is a risk of exposure to respiratory-disease-causing agents. The national registry will require respiratory and occupational physicians to notify diagnoses of occupationally caused silicosis and will allow for the voluntary notification of other occupational respiratory diseases. Again, I think that these measures are great. I personally know someone who has silicosis from working at a factory in Penguin in Tassie. He's a nice young bloke. It's an awful disease, and I think we should do what can to eliminate it. What I'm doing with this amendment my part in doing just that.

It would be staggering if the government decided to vote against its own legislation. They can't say they need more time to consider it, because it's their own words. They can't say they oppose it, because it's their own policy. They can't say that they want to delay it, because we have all been told how important it is that this pass urgently. I imagine they would prefer it was never dealt with at all, and so they might argue that it's not possible to deal with it. They may say that this amendment isn't relevant or that it's not constitutional. What I'd say about constitutionality is that there's substantial precedent for the both the Labor Party and the coalition to increase the number of paid members appointed to panels or councils via amendments made in the Senate. If they think it's not relevant, I'd just say that it's enacting the recommendation made by the taskforce that the previous government commissioned and that this government has adopted. It's literally the recommendation directly underneath the one these bills are enacting. It's the same taskforce looking at the same issue on the same subject. If the government think that's irrelevant, they can make that case.

I want these bills to pass. I want my amendment to pass as well. If the government decide to not pass this bill because of this amendment, it will be because they prefer that neither passes. That is a decision for them to make. I cannot control how the Labor Party feels about this issue. I can only control how I feel about it. I feel like my amendment is worth passing. It's worth passing right now. I feel like the bill it seeks to amend is also worth passing. This is not an attempt to block or delay this bill from becoming law. If my amendment fails, I will support the bill. If my amendment succeeds, I will support the bill. So this bill is guaranteed to pass. The only way it could not is if my amendment were successful and the government decided they would rather do nothing than do more. I hope my amendment is successful. I hope the government decides to do more. I hope they take this opportunity to do it now.