Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to rise today to speak on this report before the Chamber of the inquiry into the management of PFAS contamination in and around Defence bases. This has been a very long journey for both the PFAS affected communities across Australia and this parliament. This is the third inquiry into PFAS contamination. I will come to that. How this parliament and the government responds is now of critical importance. I was representing the people of Williamtown and surrounds when this diabolical issue broke. I remember being here in parliament, waking up to a front page of The Newcastle Herald informing me of this toxic plume in Williamtown and surrounds. There was a very hurried meeting that was generated by the community at the Stockton RSL club at the time. Hundreds and hundreds of people turned up. Regretfully, parliament was sitting, so I wasn't present at that very first meeting, but, of course, I have, for many, many years since, been engaged with this issue—and my friend and colleague the member for Paterson has, subsequently, been a strong champion and advocate here in the Australian parliament for those communities in our region.

I thank the secretariat and all the members who participated in the inquiry. It was a tough inquiry. People have been traumatised and deeply impacted by this contamination and, through no fault of their own, have woken up to circumstances that anyone would find pretty horrendous. When this inquiry was announced, as I mentioned earlier, this was to be the third parliamentary inquiry into the issue, and I know that people in my area and, I suspect, people in other parts of Australia, approached it with an understandably healthy dose of scepticism. They thought, 'Well, we've been here and done this before. Let's hope that something good can come out of this report.'

I have to say that I think that this bipartisan report is an absolutely terrific outcome. It charts a viable pathway forward with some really important recommendations. Indeed, I welcome all nine of the recommendations. The committee recommended that there be a dedicated person, accountable to the Australian parliament, to coordinate a national response to PFAS. That is a critical recommendation. One of the greatest criticisms we heard was that people were having to deal with all sorts of different departments and all different levels of jurisdiction and no-one was really taking responsibility and being that necessary accountable person, which is so critical.

The continued investment into the containment of PFAS plumes and the remediation of contaminated land and water sources is, again, critical when you have a situation like at Williamtown, where this toxic chemical continues to leave the base. Here we are three years down the track and we have not been able to contain that plume. So, clearly, there is more work to be done and more investments to be put towards that. The committee also recommended improvements around the blood-testing regime. Whilst there is still science and research being undertaken in the area of health impacts, there are some known associations that we are beginning to see.

I believe those recommendations will go some way towards helping to alleviate the mental anguish experienced by people who have, through no fault of their own, found themselves trapped in a contaminated space with nowhere to go. They can't sell or move, with the asset becoming rendered worthless, in many cases. There is also burden of guilt that so many people are living with because they just don't know whether they should stay there with their kids, what they are doing there and what the impact is going to be for their grandkids.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 12:58 to 16:00

Prior to the division, I was referring to the nine recommendations that were put forward in this report—and I will try to come back to some of those in a little while. I want to put on the record my sincere thanks to all of the members of PFAS affected communities across Australia who made written submissions to this inquiry or took the time to appear personally to share their lived experience, which was often deeply troubling and sometimes quite traumatic. So I really do pay my respects to those people in Williamtown, Katherine and Oakey who gave the committee a very real and tangible experience of what their lives were like due to the impact of PFAS.

The committee made nine recommendations. As I mentioned earlier, this is a terrific foundation for moving forward on this issue. Of course, the real game-changer in amongst those recommendations is the one that calls for compensation of financial losses—demonstrably quantifiable losses—including the possibility of buybacks. That is something that a number of really increasingly desperate people in some of these affected communities have been pleading for us to consider for a number of years. It was made very evident to me that, whatever recommendations were to come forward from this report, they needed to be flexible. They needed to enable people to make choices, because we have people living in slightly different circumstances—people who may wish to sever all ties and relocate somewhere; and other people who have very longstanding networks in those communities and want to remain but want to ensure that they can do so in a safe way. It's very pleasing that this report has actually put on the table some options that government should consider to make that compensation for financial losses more meaningful for everyone affected. There isn't much time to go through in great detail each of those nine recommendations but I would refer interested people to them.

There is a class action underway and will run its course. Nothing that we have put in this report would get in the way of that, but, in the meantime, people are relying on the government to act. As I said, for the people of Williamtown, it has been more than three years of living in the gravest of circumstances, feeling that they are in limbo, not knowing what the future holds and feeling that they can't leave. Some people feel they can't stay, and yet they're imprisoned on land that they feel is toxic. In the face of such distressing hardship, it is important that we acknowledge the resilience of those communities, because at no point have those residents ever stopped advocating for what they know should be a just outcome for those communities.

Now the government really just has to step up, back the people in and respond to this report, urgently. We cannot kick the can down the road. There is no excuse for inaction. We can't be waiting for elections to come and go. It's a long-term responsibility of the Australian government, regardless of who is in government. People living in PFAS-affected communities should not have to wait for an election to get a just outcome in their lives.

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