Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Day after day, week after week and year after year in our homes, our workplaces, our towns and our farms, firefighters put their lives and their safety on the line for us. The risk that faces a firefighter when they walk into a building, a structure or a home that is burning, or when they walk into a bushfire the likes of which we saw in Victoria on Black Saturday recently, is very obvious. But what is often less well known is that one of the greatest risks to a firefighter's health and their life comes not from those few moments, minutes or hours when they are fighting a fire but from what happens to them afterwards. That is because in an average home there are around 70,000 synthetic chemicals, and when they burn they produce a toxic cocktail of chemical smoke, with many compounds that we have not even properly identified the health consequences of yet. At the same time as everyone else is fleeing to get out of there, the firefighters put themselves right in the midst of that smoke.

In many parts of Australia we have some of the world's best protective equipment, breathing apparatus and turnout gear that the firefighters wear. But, because they are in an environment where their heart rate is up and they are working hard, of course the material has to be able to breathe—otherwise the firefighter would expire; they would suffocate. In the same way that it lets their body heat out, it lets that toxic chemical smoke in. When it does that, it comes at enormous, almost unpreventable risk to the firefighter.

What we know is that firefighters start in their career, as you would expect, about 20 per cent healthier than the average member of the population. But within five years, studies have shown, they can be almost twice as likely as the average person to contract leukaemia, and the risk of testicular cancer and other forms of cancer is much, much higher than that. It is for that reason that elsewhere around the world governments of conservative and progressive persuasions—in seven out of 10 provinces in Canada and many states in the United States of America—have changed the law so that firefighters who suffer those sorts of cancers are much more easily able to access compensation for themselves and their families.

The reason that is important is that at the moment, when a firefighter goes and seeks compensation for a work related injury for that kind of cancer, they get asked: 'Can you tell us at which specific fire you contracted that cancer?' Of course that is impossible. So many of them are right now suffering and many have died unable to access proper compensation. What the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment (Fair Protection for Firefighters) Bill 2011 will do is reverse the onus of proof so that for certain kinds of cancers where there is strong medical evidence in support it would be presumed that that cancer is work related unless it can be proved otherwise. This will make a world of difference to the people who protect us.

I introduced this bill at the beginning of July, and since then the Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee has spent the intervening time inquiring into the provisions. I am extremely pleased to note that the report, which the Senate received only on Thursday, has as its main recommendation 'that the bill be passed'. In fact it makes four recommendations, each of which will improve and expand the scope of this bill.

If one wanted any reminder about why this was necessary, just think about the fire that we had here in Canberra on Friday. At the same time as police were going around evacuating people from the site and preventing them from attending, firefighters were going the other way, right into the middle of a toxic cocktail of chemicals. That is what they do every day. It is not just chemical factories, as I said, that pose a risk to firefighters; it is what is in every ordinary household.

I would like to close by quoting the Senate committee inquiry report:

The committee recognises that when a person spends their professional career inhaling and absorbing known—and probably some as yet unknown—carcinogens in the course of public service, it is the moral duty of the community to enable them to seek compensation should they fall ill as a consequence.

That is what we here in this House have the power to do and it is what we should do. I am extraordinarily pleased that, as is the case in other parts of the world, this is proceeding with cross-party support. I commend the bill.

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