Stirling Griff (SA, Centre Alliance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

[by video link] A few short weeks ago my beautiful wife, Kristin Griff, passed away after a long and distressing battle with an aggressive form of breast cancer. She was not alone. A shocking number of Australians die from cancer each and every year; 50,000 died last year, and there were a further 150,000 who were diagnosed with cancer. These are unimaginable numbers.

Some Australians have a genetic predisposition to cancer, and this is often triggered by environmental factors of some kind. Others, like my wife, Kristin, have no apparent genetic predisposition. When they are diagnosed with cancer, it is usually because they were exposed to an environmental factor, or factors, of some kind. The best-known example is smoking, where an individual ingests a number of potent carcinogens which later develop into lung cancer. A great number of chemicals in our environment are carcinogenic or otherwise harmful. Many are known. Many are not. Just like malignant mesothelioma, it can be 30 to 40 years after exposure before it develops.

My wife, Kristin, was an active, nature-loving and health-conscious person. As an adult, she was careful about what she ingested and what she was exposed to. As a mother, she was just as careful about our family's health. But her childhood was very different. She grew up in a small seaside town and had a childhood that was generally happy and carefree. But now we can look back with fresh eyes and new knowledge and recognise the many risks this carefree childhood exposed her to. I will quote from some notes that she wrote to our daughter and her siblings to allay any fears they might have about them suffering the same fate as her via a genetic flaw: 'I was always wandering around at the depot with dad, the uncles and grandpa, or on the fuel truck for farm deliveries with dad. Bare feet, like most of my childhood prior to school age, from running around barefoot at the depot, except for yellow rubber boots in winter. I used to get in trouble all the time for leaving black smears all over the white enamel inside the bath. Leaded petrochemicals, kerosenes, sump oil, DDT and other farm crop chemical pesticides, many subsequently banned for use. Sheep dip and drenching chemicals. We swam in sheep dip, as many of us country kids did. Kids in the sheep run, to push sheep through. Ant and spider dust, surface powder, hessian sacks of improved seed for crop planting. Dad smoked indoors and in the car every day of my life until I went to Finland at age 16.'

It is staggering what people were exposed to in decades past, but only in hindsight. At the time, these exposures were commonplace. Parents were not believed to be negligent for exposing their children to second-hand smoke or to DDT, as they would be today. The harms were not known at the time. In many cases, it took decades of widespread use before it became clear that certain chemicals were carcinogenic. By then, it was too late for too many.

In the postwar decades, we made great advances in chemical science. In every facet of life, new chemical products were developed and brought quickly to market. Everything from pesticides to toothpaste was improved, again and again. These products rapidly became better, cheaper and more widely used. But our understanding of chemical safety did not advance anywhere near as quickly, and we individuals and government failed to act with care. We assumed products were safe until they were shown to be unsafe. For example, DDT was released to the public in 1945. By the 1950s, it was widely used in Australia to wipe out mosquito populations and to protect crops from insects. But, by the mid-1960s, its harmful effects were becoming widely understood. It was toxic: a danger to human health and ecosystems. In 1972, it was banned in the United States, but it would take another 15 years before Australia followed suit. However, the harm didn't stop then. The toxic effects of DDT are long-lived. More than 30 years on, there are still accumulations in our natural environment which will persist for decades to come. This means there are many Australians living today who were exposed to DDT in their childhood, just like my wife, Kristin, who have toxic accumulations in their body and who are unaware it could ultimately cause the cancer that may take their lives.

The challenge we face today is not regulating and restricting the use of DDT. That battle has been fought and won. The battle today is ensuring that the other chemicals available in Australia safe for the people working with and around the chemicals, safe for the people or animals who may consume or be exposed to the chemicals and, most importantly, safe for our natural environment. We need to ensure that governments act with respect to the precautionary principle—that is, assuming chemicals are harmful and prohibiting them until they are shown to be safe. It can't be enough for a company to assert that its products are harmless. Too often, we see companies using dishonest studies with secret commercial-in-confidence data to evade regulation. Why else would it have taken 15 years for Australia to follow the US in banning DDT? Were governments ignorant of the danger? Of course not! Lobbyists and corporate interests acted to protect their business.

Every one of us in this chamber has had some experience where a rent-seeker has tried to slow down or kill off regulation. Most recently, we have seen it with big tobacco and vaping products, which they want legalised because they are less deadly than their other products. Such companies care nothing for the public and only care for their profits. This is why government must ensure that chemicals are independently evaluated in Australia and, most importantly, re-evaluated over time. We should never rely on a study, as we have with glyphosate, that was over 30 years old. We need to re-evaluate studies over time. The evaluation methods and data must also be made publicly available, so that academics and researchers can verify those results and give the public confidence that their governments are working properly to protect them. Acting today won't stop a single case of cancer this year or next year or the year after, but it could help to prevent thousands of cancer deaths in 2030 and beyond. We can look back at parents in the postwar decades and say they acted responsibly, given the knowledge available at the time. Decades from now, will our children be able to say the same about us?

In the past 18 months, Australia has had slightly less than 40,000 COVID cases and 1,000 deaths. We mobilised our entire health community, locked down cities and states, and closed our borders to protect our community from the threat of COVID. During the same time, we have had more than 220,000 new cancer diagnoses and 75,000 cancer deaths. We don't need COVID policies for cancer, but there are reasonable steps we can take today to protect the community. Radically better chemical regulation and testing is one of those important steps. We owe it to our constituents and to our children to make sure we act today and, this time, we get it right.

Senate adjourned at 20:30