Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to commence my contribution to this debate where the member for Batman concluded his, and that is in reference to the fact that the Australian Participants in British Nuclear Tests (Treatment) Bill 2006 and the related bill refer to those people that served within our defence forces being now regarded as participants and not veterans. I think it is a travesty of justice that these veterans, as I would like to call them—I acknowledge that they are veterans—are being treated as second-class veterans or second-class members of our defence forces. I would also call upon the government to adopt either the UK or the New Zealand model of dealing with veterans who have been involved in or stationed in areas where there has been nuclear testing.

I first became really aware of the issues surrounding our service men and women—but mainly men—being exposed to nuclear testing when I became a member of this federal parliament. I had heard about it before, but I did not understand the extent to which our servicemen and their lives had been impacted upon by this testing. I will start by sharing with the House a story of a dinner I went to. This dinner had veterans from the defence forces who had been at Montebello and Maralinga. They came together each year as a group to celebrate the fact that they, unlike many of the people that they served with, were still alive.

One of the features of that evening was the passing around of a photo of young men, which I found really chilling, to be quite honest. There were different groups, depending on what regiments they were involved in. When they showed me, they said, ‘Out of this group of men, only three or four of us are still alive.’ Then they went on to tell me about the illnesses and diseases these men had suffered—and, I might add, those illnesses were overwhelmingly skewed towards cancers.

I note that in the minister’s media release earlier this year and in the legislation here today he refers to the fact that Australians who took part in the nuclear testing program from 1952 to 1963 can now access health care through the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. He states that that is in recognition of the special needs of nuclear test participants—not veterans, participants.

I would now like to share with the House the story of a constituent of mine. It is a story I have raised on a couple of occasions within the parliament. The gentleman concerned is Mr Albert Martin, who was stationed at Maralinga at the time of the atomic testing by the UK government in the 1950s and the 1960s. He had worked in the RAAF transport division as a mechanical transport driver. He drove jeeps, trains, cranes, and all forms of earthmoving machinery. They had no air conditioning so their cabins were open and the dust was flying around. He was there at the time of the Vixen B tests in 1957. He developed acute myeloid leukaemia, and a person working alongside him doing exactly the same job as his also developed acute myeloid leukaemia—that is, two people with the same illness in the same area at the same time. Unfortunately, the person who worked alongside him died, which was very sad.

Over a number of years, Mr Martin was involved in a compensation battle. One of the real problems he came up against was that he was not entitled to compensation, because the records at the time had been destroyed. These were the types of issues that surrounded men who served in this area. Instead of the government embracing people who served in our defence forces—people to whom we should be grateful, since we owe them a bit more than we do other people because they have been prepared to serve in really adverse circumstances—the government tried to abrogate its responsibility and not give him the assistance you would expect a government to give to its veterans. He has now been very ill for a long period of time, and the stress this has created for him has made things a lot worse. We had to get in there and fight very hard. In the end he settled for what was a less than adequate form of compensation. I am very pleased that under the new legislation Mr Martin will be able to access health care. I am concerned, though, that the new legislation does not provide travel for the veterans who were at Maralinga.

I am even more concerned when I talk about this particular gentleman, because the Department of Veterans’ Affairs sent him for a medical review by Professor Martin Tattersall. The professor shook hands with Mr Martin as he left his office and assured him that his report would see that he would be receiving good and adequate compensation. The sad part of this story is that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs refused to provide the information that was included in Professor Tattersall’s report to Mr Martin at the time. That information was put aside and would not be released. You might ask: why? The answer to that question—and I do not think that I am a conspiracy theorist in any way—is that the department was not prepared to release information that actually supported that my constituent had developed cancer, acute myeloid leukaemia, as a result of being stationed at Maralinga at the time of the Vixen B tests in 1957. I see that as a corrupt act by government, an act that is designed to attack those people who served our country. I know that Senator Brown even put a question on the Notice Paper in relation to this. That got no further than the request from my constituent, the letters from me or any other action that we might take.

I still feel, when I read the findings of this report, that the government has not fully come to terms with, and does not wish to come to terms with and acknowledge, the fact that those men who were at Maralinga were exposed to radiation and that radiation has had an enormous impact on their lives. As well as the cancers that are highlighted here, I have had other constituents come and talk to me about the fact that they have had ongoing problems with rashes since the time that they were stationed there. The report found that there was not a significant difference in the death rate between those at Maralinga and those in the general population compared with a similar cohort. But it is interesting: when you dig a little deeper you find that there is an 18 per cent greater incidence of cancer than in the general population.

I would now like to refer to a report that deals with the issue of nuclear testing and with some of the aspects of other reports. A number of studies of the mortality of atomic bomb explosions have been undertaken world wide. Firstly, I would like to refer to the DL Preston paper entitled ‘Studies of the Mortality of A Bomb Survivors No. 8 Cancer Survivors 1950-1982’. This was published in Radiation Research volume 111, pages 151 to 178 in 1987. The authors are from the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima and Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Centre in Seattle in the US. The study is that of residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were within 2,500 metres of Hiroshima’s hypercentre or within 10,000 metres of Nagasaki’s hypercentre, as well as a sample of Hiroshima survivors who were 2,500 to 2,000 metres from the hypercentres and persons from each city who were not in the city at the time of the bombing or who were at least 10,000 metres from the hypercentre at the time.

Of just over 120,000 members of the cohort as described above, some 39,890 deaths occurred during the period 1950 to 1982. These included 8,112 deaths due to malignant neoplastic diseases and included 222 deaths due to leukaemia. That study has shown that leukaemia, as with all those other types of cancers, relates to the detonating of nuclear devices.

There is also the Darby paper, a summary of mortality and incidence of cancer in men from the United Kingdom who participated in the United Kingdom atmospheric nuclear weapons test and experimental programs. The senior author is Sir Richard Doll, who was a Director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, epidemiological and clinical trials unit of the University of Oxford, as well as the National Radiological Protection Board in the UK. This study notes that some 22,347 men who participated in the United Kingdom nuclear tests and experimental programs in Australia and the Pacific between 1952 and 1967 were identified from the archives in the Ministry of Defence and followed up.

Their mortality and incidence of cancer was compared to those of 22,316 matching controls selected from the same archives. The risk of mortality of the participants related to the controls was 1.01 for all classes and 0.96 for all neoplasms. Thirty-eight causes of death were examined separately. Significant differences in mortality were found for leukaemia, multiple myeloma and other injuries. The bottom line is that all studies have shown that being exposed to radiation increases the risk of cancer for those people—and I could go on. I have more research papers here that highlight time and time again that exposure to radiation actually increases the risk of cancer.

What do we have before us today? Today we have before us legislation to deal with participants—participants!—in British nuclear tests. I actually think that we should hang our heads in shame, because we are not talking about participants here; we are talking about veterans. We are talking about people that were prepared, asked absolutely no questions, to go in there and perform their duty—a duty in which they unknowingly placed themselves in a position where they were exposed to harmful radiation.

Governments of all persuasions have tended to bury their heads in the sand and not accept this fact. Those people are getting second-class treatment; they are not being treated in the same way as other veterans. They were at the forefront of the defence forces here in Australia, yet what we are saying is that they were participants. I do not think they were participants. I think that the government and the minister should do better. What we need to do is embrace them, bite the bullet and say, ‘These men are sicker and so many of them have died because of their involvement at the testing at Maralinga, and their wives and families have suffered as a result of the fact that they have been sicker or that they have lost their lives.’ They should be treated in the same way as those veterans who are classified as being involved in warlike service.

I will conclude my remarks by strongly encouraging the minister to go back and read those submissions that were made. Go through and read them all and look at the human suffering that is involved in those submissions. Listen very carefully and maybe go and talk to some of those veterans. Go to one of those dinners that I went to, where you sit down around the table with those veterans who were involved in the nuclear testing and listen to what they say and embrace their concerns.

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