Damian Hale (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this very important issue. In this place, we do many things. I do not think that I have so far, in my nearly two years as a parliamentarian, had a more emotional experience than being on this inquiry. When I went to Brisbane, I met with families of people who have died through cancer and people who have kids with disabilities. The responsibility of being a parliamentarian really hit home. I would like to congratulate all the people who came and gave evidence. It was very hard to sit and listen to the stories. I support the member for Cowan’s comments in regard to the women who were at home washing the clothes of these pitch and patch workers. It was gut-wrenching stuff, to be honest, to listen to these stories of the hardship that had come upon these families due to this activity that these workers were carrying out with the F111 program. It really drove home the importance of this inquiry and of what we were doing.

On 21 May 2008, the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, the Hon. Alan Griffin MP, wrote to the Chair of the Joint Standing Committee for Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, Senator Michael Forshaw, noting that one of the election commitments of the Rudd government was to conduct a parliamentary inquiry into the inadequacy of the support for the health needs of the RAAF deseal/reseal workers and their families. It was very important that we brought this issue to a head and were able to address what had been off the agenda for a long time, the needs of this group of people.

Listening to the evidence, as I was saying, was gut wrenching. These guys crawled inside F111 tanks. Often, there was still some fuel inside. When you see movies of when F111s are flying, fuel is coming out of the fuselage. It is very hard to seal them. After a run, the planes would come back. These guys would get in and first pick all the old goo out of them. Then they would re-goo them, basically, and try to seal them as best they could for when the plane was back in the air. The chemicals that they were using to strip the sealant were found to be toxic as well. These people were often sitting in fuel as well as this chemical in order to do this job. We did not have the same sort of OH&S obligations then that we do now. They were not in place. Often, these guys were swimming in this stuff. They were smoking cigarettes as well. As a lot of them said, there was a culture of smoking cigarettes in the workplace. I would suggest that working with kerosene and fuel and smoking is not a really good thing for your health at the best of times. These guys were subject to this. They wore thongs and very little protective clothing and they certainly had no respirators. We have learnt. Thank goodness that we have progressed in the way that we look after our workers now and how we deal with hazardous chemicals.

I would like to commend all members of the committee. There was a lot of care and compassion shown by the committee in these hearings. They were difficult hearings. The chair, the member for Brisbane, did a very good job in bringing this matter to a head. As the member for Cowan alluded to, there is a list of recommendations that have been put forward. I will not go through all of those recommendations. There are about 18 in total.

Certainly for the families of the victims, their kids and the people who are left behind, it does, to some extent, bring a little bit of closure because there has been a parliamentary inquiry and there is a list of recommendations. These people can feel satisfied, to a point, that the government has acted in an appropriate way with regard to this. As I said, it was a very gut-wrenching experience, because we were dealing with the lives of these people.

The committee received over 130 submissions and there were 12 supplementary submissions from organisations and the general public. In all, the committee received 743 pages of submissions. The committee also heard evidence recorded in more than 360 pages of transcript covering six public hearings. It was very thorough. The committee received a private briefing on the nature of the fuel-leak repair work and inspected training facilities, tools used and an F111 airframe.

Inspection of the various fuel storage areas in the F111 provided a very graphic understanding for all of us of the extremely small spaces that were involved in this work. Entry to some fuel tanks would make it difficult for even a small person to enter. I had no chance of getting in there. But certainly, once inside the tank, some work areas were so confined it was difficult to understand how personnel could spend hours at a time in such a cramped and physically unpleasant environment. And they did so with a range of chemicals surrounding them as well. A lot of this work was done in Queensland, where they were subjected to the hot summer conditions.

It was a pleasure to be on this committee. I think it was a very important committee. I fully support the list of recommendations. Once again, I congratulate and thank all the people that gave evidence on this issue. I also thank my colleagues from both sides of this place for the time that they put into considering the evidence and working towards the list of recommendations.

Debate (on motion by Mr Hayes) adjourned.

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