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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Thursday, 12 February 2004) . . Page.. 338 ..

The Dangerous Substances Bill is focused on positive obligations in the form of safety duties. These duties are contained in chapter 3 of the bill. The bill creates a general safety duty for everyone who handles dangerous substances whether in a commercial or private context. This duty ensures that all reasonable steps are taken when handling a dangerous substance to minimise the harm that substance can cause to other people, property and the environment.

A person using weed killer in their garden will be under a positive obligation to take all reasonable steps to ensure that it is not used in a way that harms the next door neighbour’s children. This means that they will need to read and follow the instructions for use. The government believes that this is an appropriate duty to place on everyone who uses dangerous substances, even those that are freely available to the public. The duty does not make people responsible for side effects of a dangerous substance that they could not know about. The inclusion of the “reasonableness” test in all of the safety duties means that people only need to take those steps to minimise harm from dangerous substances that the ordinary person in their situation could take, according to the current state of knowledge about a dangerous substance.

People will not be held responsible if they use a weed killer that is widely available if it is later discovered that the weed killer has carcinogenic properties that cause the next door neighbour’s children to develop serious illnesses. The bill recognises that our state of knowledge about dangerous chemicals is constantly changing and builds in flexibility to allow new chemicals to be added to the list of dangerous substances as our scientific knowledge develops, without long bureaucratic delays that could put lives at risk.

In most cases the use of dangerous substances will occur in commercial contexts and other duties in the bill only apply when dangerous substances are being used in the course of trade or commerce. For instance, these duties would apply where a business sells or supplies dangerous substances or uses dangerous chemicals in manufacturing processes to produce goods that they sell. These commercial duties include requirements to store, pack and label dangerous substances safely and in accordance with Australian standards; develop, implement and document safety management systems for handling of dangerous substances to make sure that businesses are taking a proper risk management approach to handling dangerous chemicals; and ensure that plant and equipment used for handling dangerous chemicals is properly maintained and appropriate instructions are given to employees and others who are handling dangerous substances so that their health and safety is not compromised.

The bill provides that breaches of safety duties are serious offences. Penalties for breaches are scaled to reflect the seriousness of the breach and its actual or potential consequences. Chapter 4 of the bill establishes a licensing framework for dangerous substances. Handling dangerous substances will not always need to be done under licence. Licences will be required where the risks posed by a dangerous substance to public safety require a high level of government support—there is a lot about dangerous substances in this speech. Explosives are clearly a category of dangerous substance that will need licences for almost all activities, simply due to the high risks explosives pose to security and public safety.

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