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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Wednesday, 25 August 2004) . . Page.. 4216 ..

I recall an incident where my colleagues in Victoria were having a bit of a beef about an asbestos blanket that hung around the front of a turntable ladder at one of the fire stations down there. They wanted it removed and replaced with something else. The president of the board was protesting about their vehemence over this matter. He said, “Come on down; we must go and have a look at this asbestos blanket that you’re talking about.” So he went down and had it lowered down to a level where he could see it. He said, “It doesn’t look very troublesome to me.” He gave it a little bit of a rub and said, “Look, that doesn’t hurt you.”

Our ignorance has been wiped away since then, but such is the nature of the product. It is fairly harmless looking, inert and does not present immediate problems just by running your eye over it. That is the issue that this legislation, I think, deals with. It will involve, I am sure, another re-education program—as if the community has not been educated—and these education programs will be required to be ongoing well into the future because the risk will be around for a long time.

MS TUCKER (9.03): The Greens will be supporting this bill and the amendments by the government. The asbestos issue has been significant in the ACT for a number of years. Canberra is particularly affected by asbestos as its massive expansion through the 1960s into the 1980s coincided with an enormous flood of asbestos-based building products.

I will not go into detail and take a long time describing the awful and insidious nature of asbestos-related diseases, as that has been done quite extensively over recent times, and I think everyone here is fully aware of the issues. Suffice it to say that we cannot take lightly the intensity and dimension of the suffering that asbestos has had and will have on people in our community and on our community as a whole.

It was not long ago that Canberra went through an asbestos removal process that saw a massive process to extract loose asbestos insulation from residential buildings. That was an important public health initiative but it had a negative consequence in that people now think the asbestos problem has been dealt with.

Issues relating to asbestos have come before us at various points since then. I remember my office pursued concerns regarding dumped asbestos products in the yards of rental properties, without a legal requirement for the landlord to safely remove the material. More recently, I wrote to the Minister for Urban Services in regard to the need to put procedures in place to protect people from damage caused by asbestos fibres set loose in work around the house and the notion of a certificate attached to the sale or rental of properties that would alert all residents to the presence and condition of asbestos materials.

People in this room are very well aware of the campaign that Ms Thurbon and Ms Willey as well as other activists have been conducting in regard to asbestos awareness, and I want to commend their work in lobbying on this issue because they have certainly been significant in raising awareness, again in the Legislative Assembly, of the need for something to occur. I think it is fair to say that the government had taken the view that it was engaged in developing a more rigorous approach to dealing with asbestos but the

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