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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Wednesday, 25 August 2004) . . Page.. 4214 ..

used widely in the fire service for protective clothing. Indeed, I remember being despatched, as part of my rostered duties when I was in New South Wales, to lift the asbestos suit out of the box, wipe the dust out of the bottom and put the asbestos suit back in the box. One’s job was not completed until that had been done. You were scolded of course if you did not get all the dust out. I look back, with some humour but with some trepidation as well, because there are many people who have been in the same boat in one way or another in relation to asbestos.

In the ACT, as a result of the Mr Fluffy efforts, there were, I think it has been said here, about 1,000 houses where asbestos had to be removed. All of the houses were identified and samples were taken from, I think, all ACT residences at the time. I am not quite sure of the detail of that, but there was a massive amount of information collected in relation to those houses. I know that the fire service had a store of that information so that if the fire service was despatched to any of these houses it would know if it had loose asbestos in it. Indeed it became an issue for the fire service because one or two did catch on fire and of course the fire fighters had to be decontaminated afterwards. There were some industrial issues about proper decontamination and all those sort of things.

It is not new here in the ACT and there are many experienced people around the place who know a little or a lot about how to deal with it. I must say that, when Mrs Cross’s bill in its first iteration turned up, I thought personally that it was incomplete. I think I told her that in a roundabout sort of way. Prior to that of course, the ACT branch of the Labor Party had passed a motion to deal with asbestos in a more comprehensive way.

At the same time we have as a background in the ACT that any asbestos work conducted has to be dealt with as part of building work and therefore needs to have approval. But of course that did not deal with the issue where somebody wants to go and do a little bit of work on Saturday morning around the house. If they were to do so without knowing about it, they might be affected by exposure to asbestos.

There are buildings where this might occur as well, other than residential premises, and that needs to be dealt with. But I do not think we can deal with any of this without some sort of comprehensive look at what is left to be done. The task force which the minister has put together in her proposed amendments will be extremely important, I think, in reaching some sort of finality, if it can ever be reached, in dealing with asbestos out there in the community. Because of the risks associated with the removal of asbestos, there will be asbestos products in our community for a long time into the future. So it is extremely important that we have a vehicle that will protect us as well as possible.

I was thinking, when I thought about speaking on this matter, about some other areas that might usefully be investigated by the task force. We have not touched on the transport industry—motor vehicles, for example. There are many old motor vehicles still hovering around with asbestos materials in their brakes, clutches, gaskets and so on and so forth. Those are issues that are dealt with day by day. I seem to recall seeing reports in the past where young mechanics have been affected by asbestos dust when they have been dealing with brakes, clutches and those sorts of things. There are also lots of friction materials containing asbestos used in industrial machinery. I say those things to emphasise the need for a task force to look in detail at all the risks, whatever they might be, in order that at the end of the day we have a strategy to deal with it to the best extent possible.

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