Victorian Health Minister Jill Hennessy says her department will listen to any recommendations made by the Hazelwood mine fire inquiry board.
At public hearings into the health impacts of the fire in Morwell, the inquiry’s counsel assisting, Peter Rozen, asked the board to make adverse findings against the Department of Health.
Mr Rozen told the inquiry, the department published selective and misleading data about deaths in the Latrobe Valley and said it may have breached the Health Act.
Ms Hennessy said she wants to build trust between her department and the Latrobe Valley community.
“We absolutely intend to initiate changes that arise from any of the recommendations,” she said.
“We think the community deserve to have confidence in how government responds to those sorts of emergencies in the future.
“This is a community that felt neglected and left behind and we’re really conscience of that and we’ve got a big job ahead to address that.
“I’ll make this important point, we reopened the mine fire inquiry because we know the community was not satisfied with what happened during the mine fire.
“We want to get all of the answers and when we’ve got all of those answers we’ll be taking the appropriate action.”
Time for action is now says Voices of the Valley
Community group Voices of the Valley said the Minister did not need to wait until the inquiry report was published in December to make changes.
The group’s president, Wendy Farmer, said the inquiry hearings showed the Government needed to make changes.
“It’s extremely important to our community that any recommendations that are given from this report from the inquiry is taken up that they’re acted on very quickly.”
“They have been legitimate and they have reopened the Hazelwood mine fire inquiry to listen to communities’ concerns,” she said.
“At the same time they should have been looking at the health department right from the start. We had made allegations against the health department very early and they’ve been in office now for eight, nine months.
“It’s extremely important to our community that any recommendations that are given from this report from the inquiry is taken up that they’re acted on very quickly.
“There’s things that the agencies already know they need to do and they could even start considering doing them now, they don’t need to wait for a report to come out in December.”
Push for buffer zone around Hazelwood Mine
Meanwhile, the Asbestos Council of Victoria is calling on the State Government to create a buffer zone around the Hazelwood Mine.
In a written submission to the mine fire inquiry, the council said there needed to be a planning strategy to deal with how close the mine was to the Morwell community.
The council’s chief executive, Vicki Hamilton, said the Government needed to consider buying houses that were across the road from the freeway, as well as the football and bowling club grounds.
She said there needed to be plans in place for future fires.
“We’ve got to start doing something and doing it the correct way,” she said.
“What they should be doing is buying back a certain amount back around the mine fire area, and that is taking part of Morwell and buying it back and making it just reserved.”
Ms Hamilton said the scheme could be run similar to the buyback of homes in the ACT after the Mr Fluffy asbestos scandal.
“If you have a fire in a mine you are going to have a lot of toxins, never mind particles, the toxic chemicals that come off that fire,” she said.
“What are they going to do in the future?
“We do need to have some barriers around this stuff. This is industry mixing with residential, it’s not a good mix, people get sick.”
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