A scene from the new ABC-TV mini-series, Devil's Dust, with Anthony Hayes as Bernie Banton and Alexandra Schepisi as Karen Banton.
by Mark Phillips
IF MATT Peacock and Bernie Banton had never met, history may have turned out quite different.
Matt Peacock had spent decades at the ABC doggedly investigating the health risks posed by asbestos and whether the James Hardie company had allowed its workers to be exposed to asbestos fibres knowing they were deadly.
By then Peacock was pessimistic after decades of reporting on James Hardie. The company’s spin machine was simply too clever, too powerful, to ever be defeated.
Bernie Banton was an angry man, already dying from an asbestos-related disease and determined to make sure his final days were put to good use bringing those responsible to justice.
The two met when Peacock was researching a
7.30 Report story and the journalist immediately knew Banton was the man who would take the story to the masses.
“He was critical, really,” says Peacock.
“James Hardie had always won the spin war, but when Bernie entered the scene they started losing it.
“I’m pretty certain that if it weren’t for the propaganda war, if it weren’t for the publicity that Bernie generated, legally Hardies was almost home free… But what brought them unstuck was that sheer weight of public pressure and that was really the result of the campaign and the impact that Bernie had on people’s hearts and minds.”
Those snapshots of Banton, gasping for air and breathing oxygen from a portable machine, but speaking with barely repressed fury, are among the defining images of last decade.
Banton, says Peacock of his late friend, “could talk the talk”.
“He had the gift of the gab. He spoke in a language that Australian workers recognised, they could relate to.”
“James Hardie had always won the spin
war, but when Bernie entered the scene
they started losing it.”
This was a turning point in the campaign for justice for James Hardie’s victims, a campaign that shredded James Hardie’s reputation, resulted in the company agreeing to fund hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the victims, and in the directors of James Hardie being stripped of their corporate positions.
The story of how Matt Peacock pursued James Hardie over the decades and the crucial role that Bernie Banton played was first chronicled in Peacock’s book
Killer Company, published in 2009.
It has now been adapted into a two-part TV mini-series,
Devil’s Dust, that screens on the ABC on 11 and 12 November.
Peacock first came across what would become one of Australia’s biggest corporate scandals in 1977. A chance phone call from a James Hardie public relations staffer triggered Peacock’s curiosity, and over the next few decades he would return again and again to the asbestos story, delivering a series of scoops for the ABC.
Peacock picked up the thread again when he returned to Australia after a stint as a foreign correspondent in the 1990s. It was at this stage that he met Banton, who had been exposed to asbestos while working in a James Hardie factory in Sydney in the 1970s.
This made all the difference.
“The journalism alone wasn’t enough,” Peacock says.
“It had to have trade union action and somebody like Bernie Banton and a lot of campaigning. What matters about the journalism is getting all the information out there.”
Devil’s Dust tells the story through the eyes of Peacock (played by Ewen Leslie) and Banton (Anthony Hayes). It also introduces a fictional character, Adam Bourke (Don Hany), a James Hardie spin doctor who has a crisis of conscience.
Peacock says the mini-series is important in explaining the full story of James Hardie to a wider audience.
“I have the occasional cringe moment but in the end I’m really excited about it because it’s going to popularise the subject matter.
“A lot of the actors playing the parts said to me as they were doing it, ‘Oh, we thought we knew the James Hardie story, but when we read the script we realised how much we didn’t know and it’s a lot worse than people think it is’.
“I reckon that’s quite important. There will be a lot of people who’ll see this who’ll say exactly the same thing. They thought they knew the story but they will be shocked by what they’ve seen.”
Peacock agrees with former ACTU Secretary Greg Combet that the
compensation agreement struck with James Hardie in 2006 was probably the best that could be achieved at the time.
Anthony Hayes as Bernie Banton and Ewen Leslie as Matt Peacock in another scene from Devil's Dust.
But he is disappointed at the penalties handed out to James Hardie’s chairperson, Meredith Hellicar, and other directors. In 2009 they were banned for five years from acting as company directors, but as Peacock says, “if they were in Italy, they’d be in jail”.
Experts warn that the number of asbestos deaths in Australia is yet to peak. There was a 10% rise of asbestos-related deaths in the most recent statistics to 660, and there are fears that a whole new generation of Australians have been exposed during home renovations that exposed asbestos sheeting.
“For years and years and years they’ve been predicting a peak in disease incidents and it’s still not happened,” Peacock says.
“So it’s actually worse than even we thought it might be. And who’s to say it’s not going to go on for another 10 or 15 years before it peaks.
“The interesting thing is if you get a small dose, it takes longer to develop as a meso, so the latency period is longer. So you’re seeing people that were exposed as kids now developing [mesothelioma] 40-plus years later.”
Peacock welcomes the recommendations of the recent review of asbestos management in Australia by Geoff Fary, which backed union calls for all asbestos to be removed from buildings by 2030.
The establishment by the Gillard Government of a
new agency to oversee the management and removal of asbestos is a good step, although it has no timetable, he says.
But Peacock says the most pressing priority is to find a cure to mesothelioma.
“I don’t disagree with the idea of ridding the place of asbestos in the end because the whole point of that is we don’t want people who aren’t born yet today, still in 40 or 50 years’ time developing meso because of some exposure to the stuff that’s out there in the built environment.
“But on the other hand there’s also an argument that we should be spending much more money to find a cure because if we do genome research, we can map the genome code for meso. It’s just a matter of throwing money and people at it. Australia already leads the world in a lot of this stuff, and we could do better there.”
This Working Life is a forum for news, analysis and commentary about rights at work and related issues. The opinions presented in This Working Life are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent policies or views of the ACTU.