Dust Diseases

The Hon. R.B. MARTIN (15:38): I would like to take this opportunity to speak about a topic that is very important to me, and that is the topic of dust diseases. In the late 1960s, the government closed the Osborne power station and engaged a company to demolish the site. As we would hope companies would do today, they wanted to not just demolish the site but they wanted to recycle, reuse, scrap and sell as much of the metal from the premises as they could.

They engaged about 10 young men, aged in their late teens and early 20s, to do the work. Most were from the Port Adelaide area, and from a low socio-economic area. They jumped at the opportunity to have a well-paying job as there were not many around, and for these young men from around the area a well-paying job was something they were not used to, and they were not inclined to raise any matters of safety if doing so could cause them to lose their job.

So after pulling apart a lot of the machinery that had been used in the power station it came time to tackle one of the more difficult tasks, and that was to make sure that the steam pipes that were throughout the site could be scrapped and resold. What they needed to do was to get rid of all the thick, white material that was attached to these steam pipes. The material was used to insulate the pipes and was so well adhered to the pipes that the young men needed power saws and hammers to chip off the white fibrous material.

But what these young men did not know at the time, and what no-one told them, was that the white material covering these pipes was asbestos. And for at least one of these workers this short-term job would have lifetime consequences, and that person was my father, Brian Martin. He tells the story that when knocking off what he now knows to have been asbestos from the pipes there was so much asbestos dust in the air that it looked like it was snowing. For some of the workers the dust became so bad that they threw bolts that they found lying on the floor through the upper windows to try to get some air circulating.

Fast forward 30 years and my father is diagnosed with asbestosis. It was both bad luck in that he had got one of the barbed asbestos fibres in his lungs but also good luck in that it had not turned cancerous. It had, however, caused some damage to his lungs and at that stage he had lost about 25 per cent of his lung capacity, but with most dust diseases there is no chance of it getting better and these health issues would need to be managed for the rest of his life.

Over the past six months, another 10 years after the original diagnosis, the damage has now gone from 25 per cent to about 75 per cent loss of his lung capacity and he is now permanently on oxygen. What has always troubled my family is at the time there was a lot of information out there about the hazards of asbestos with cases of asbestosis and other dust disease issues dating back to the late 1800s in England.

It is a true tragedy that my father's experience, and that of tens of thousands of other Australians, could have been avoided if governments had acted faster to address the risk posed by asbestos. Despite there being overwhelming scientific evidence in Australia from as early as the 1930s that asbestos was carcinogenic, and the primary cause of asbestosis and mesothelioma, Australia did not move to completely ban asbestos until December 2003.

While there are no official figures on how many people die in Australia each year from causes associated with asbestos-related diseases, it is estimated that there are over 4,000 deaths per year directly attributable to asbestos exposure, and this is a figure that should shock us all. It is with this figure in mind that I raise the dangers of a more modern dust disease, silicosis. A report released in 2019, the Safe Work Australia Occupational Lung Diseases Report, identified an increasing number of cases of an accelerated and rapidly progressive form of silicosis emerging among engineered stone workers.

In response to concerns about this rise in silicosis, the National Dust Disease Taskforce was convened to examine the re-emergence of silicosis as an occupational dust disease. The taskforce identified that modern-day silicosis is primarily caused by the inhalation of the silica generated when cutting, grinding or polishing engineered stone materials that are now so often used when renovating kitchens.

The final report found that an astonishing one in four stone workers are now suffering from silicosis or other silica-related dust diseases. It found that the laws and regulations have failed to adequately protect the health of workers and it requires urgent reform. It notes that, like asbestos, the health effects of silica exposure can take many years to develop, so there are a number of people already at risk although they do not yet know it.

Before time expires, I would just like to say that we cannot sit idly by and place another generation of young workers at risk, and I am glad that this government is taking action and has committed funds to assist with the education and awareness of dust diseases.