The federal budget has earmarked the Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency for possible abolition.
The agency was established a year ago with a modest three-year grant of $13 million and a further $3 million to develop a national asbestos removal plan. It is tasked with educating people about the presence and dangers of asbestos, and overseeing its removal from government and commercial buildings by 2030.
This is no small task. Asbestos was widely used in Australia – in buildings, in brake linings, as insulation for pipes, in schools and in hospitals. To date nothing has been done to plan for its removal from the built environment.
Renovators come across it frequently without knowing what it is. When I speak to health and safety delegates in unions, most have a story to tell of coming across it on the job. At the beginning of the February school term, children at a primary school in Coburg came into contact with asbestos fibres that were embedded in the carpet of their classroom after holiday renovations. Finance minister Mathias Cormann views educating people to avoid asbestos materials not as a public health information service but a “misused public relations exercise”. He has listed the agency as one of several he regards as “window dressing”.
This is in spite of the fact that 30-40,000 people are anticipated to be diagnosed with asbestos-related conditions in Australia in the next 20 years.
Many of them will be DIY renovators or tradespeople. This is the “third wave” of victims whose exposure to asbestos may have been relatively short – from cutting into in situ asbestos cement sheet in walls or sweeping up after the builders leave.
But that’s all it takes to cause mesothelioma, the untreatable cancer that kills its victims within one year of diagnosis. People with the condition feel as though their lungs are filling with concrete.
Governments knew from at least 1930 that asbestos could cause fatal lung diseases. At that time, a major health study by Merewether and Price was tabled in federal parliament. Yet governments, along with the private sector and manufacturers of asbestos products, continued knowingly to expose people to the deadly material.
It has caused a terrible toll on workers and their families, which will be felt for decades to come.
It is a disgrace that the federal government still refuses to do what needs to be done to remove asbestos from the built environment and protect the next generation from this scourge.
