Asbestos — building and demolition regulation
HON ALISON XAMON (East Metropolitan) [8.17 pm]: I rise tonight to bring to the house’s attention the serious concerns that I have about the capacity of our regulatory bodies to appropriately regulate building and demolition services when it comes to asbestos-contaminated buildings and workplaces.
I have been following the issue for some time. Coming from the union movement I am well across many instances in which workers have struggled to have their employers appropriately address asbestos hazards. I have been particularly perturbed by the ongoing dramas experienced by one of my constituents whom I have been assisting in his ongoing struggle to keep himself and his workers safe from asbestos while the regulators, WorkSafe WA and the Building Commission, have failed to adequately enforce the industry codes that should have protected everyone.
I am sure I do not have to remind this Parliament how deadly asbestos is. It is a lethal product that has caused unimaginable loss to families and places pressure on our struggling health system. Exposure to asbestos can cause respiratory diseases and cancers including lung cancer, mesothelioma and asbestosis. There is no cure for these diseases and there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos fibres. The risk of disease is minimised only if occupational and public health regulations relating to asbestos are fully observed.
The nature of asbestos exposure has changed. Mining was phased out in the 1970s and 1980s, and since 2003 the production and sale of asbestos products has been banned. Currently, the main sources of exposure to asbestos fibres are old buildings undergoing renovation or demolition where building maintenance and demolition workers are employed. This is why we now have strict procedures for the handling and disposing of asbestos. In particular, Safe Work Australia has published the Code of Practice for the Management and Control of Asbestos in Workplaces and the Code of Practice for the Safe Removal of Asbestos. Both these codes are applicable through this state’s Occupational Safety and Health Act and these provisions are due to be tightened even further once we see the OSH harmonisation laws—at least, I hope so.
I will relay a little about what has happened to my constituent. My constituent was a tenant of a property in Osborne Park. In March this year, the property agent engaged a builder and asbestos removal company to replace that property’s asbestos-contaminated roof. Throughout that process my constituent documented quite flagrant breaches of the Code of Practice for the Safe Removal of Asbestos, including failure to wear personal protective equipment, the use of broken and cracked vacuum cleaning equipment, failure to display warning signs about the disruption of asbestos materials, asbestos threads left lying on my constituent’s furniture and property, asbestoscontaminated materials left uncovered outside onsite and asbestos materials being carted away on the back of an open trailer. My constituent has since engaged an independent environmental assessment company to assess the site and has had his equipment and works decontaminated and moved to another site at substantial cost to himself, his business and, unfortunately, also to his family. I note that the Department of Environment and Conservation has now declared the property a contaminated site under the Contaminated Sites Act.
In March my constituent reported these breaches to WorkSafe and provided a range of documentation, but rather than consider the removal of the asbestos roofing to be demolition work involving asbestos or asbestos removal work to which particular regulations of the OSH act would apply—in this instance, Occupational Safety and Health Regulations 3.126 and 5.45—the WorkSafe inspector concluded that this was a case of identification and assessment of asbestos hazards at workplaces to which a different regulation applied, in this case regulation 5.43. That meant that, rather than apply the Code of Practice for the Safe Removal of Asbestos, which was exactly what was happening, WorkSafe applied the Code of Practice for the Management and Control of Asbestos in Workplaces. These guidelines simply do not suffice in a situation that is literally as messy as this, yet in response to my questions in Parliament earlier this year, WorkSafe advised that no disciplinary action on these matters had been taken. I have to say that I am very concerned about that response from the regulator; I think that response is wholly inadequate.
I also want to talk about the reports to the Builders’ Registration Board of WA and the Building Commission. It eventually came to my constituent’s attention that the builder directly contracted to remove the asbestos roofing was not registered with the Builders’ Registration Board, as was required for a job of that size. The board also conducted an investigation of the matter and concluded in this instance that a formal warning would be issued to the builder, but no other disciplinary action was or would be taken. This situation occurred during the transition to the new Building Commission, which came into effect on 29 August this year. I note that the new regime has substantially greater powers to fine unregistered builders, but we need to ensure that the will to enforce these provisions is present. Therefore, WorkSafe, the Builders’ Registration Board and the local government authority in this instance effectively all managed to shrug aside responsibility for this mess, despite it being a core part of their business, particularly of WorkSafe. My constituent has had to shoulder the financial burden of protecting his business, staff and customers entirely alone. No prevention was undertaken and it has reached the point, as I mentioned, that DEC has officially declared the property a contaminated site. However, in answer to a question I asked in Parliament yesterday, it was confirmed that even then no-one who will be in the vicinity of that site will necessarily know because there is apparently no requirement for signage. Therefore, the question I have is: why did the government agencies, particularly WorkSafe, not do the job of regulating this particular asbestos job? We know about the dangers of asbestos, we know about the health burden and importantly we also know how to remove asbestos safely, but the government regulators did not insist on this. We only know about this because my constituent was willing to be so public about it and willing to sacrifice so much. He was meticulous in the records he has kept and in the photographs he has taken as well. The question has to be asked: how often is this happening all over Perth? We need to be able to trust our regulatory bodies, but on performances like this, it is pretty much impossible.
As I say, we know asbestos is deadly. We need to ensure that it is being managed with the utmost seriousness. The regulators have simply not done the job that the public could expect of them. I have written to the minister about some of the specifics around this issue previously, but now I would actually urge the minister to take those responsible aside and to look into this issue a little bit more. I am happy to talk to the minister about this in more detail and have some serious words with him about what has gone wrong in this instance and how the regulators could lift their game. I am sure that my constituent would be happy to meet with the minister directly and put a face to the experience. He is a professional small business owner, and he has kept meticulous records. I doubt that his is an isolated case. That worries me, and I think it should worry all of us.