A scene from <i>Devil's Dust</b>.

A scene from Devil's Dust.

ACCORDING to one insider, James Hardie executives would snarl whenever Bernie Banton's face appeared on television. ''Is he really sick?'' they would jeer.


But anyone close to Bernie knew his oxygen mask was no act. He, like anyone with asbestosis, became increasingly breathless just walking in the street. Stairs were a real struggle. And he did not need to be told he had a high chance of developing the asbestos cancer mesothelioma. Most of his former workmates from Hardie had already died from it when we met in 2004.

Along with fellow sufferers, he placed a high priority on research to find a cure.

The ABC mini-series Devil's Dust includes a scene in a car in which the character Bernie demands I apologise for swearing in front of his wife, Karen, as he races off to a meeting with the Labor Party leader, Mark Latham, where he planned to push for research funding.

The scene is dramatised. It never happened like that. But it is true Bernie rebuked me for swearing in front of Karen. And he was motivated to make politicians promise more money for research.

I remember visiting him during his final weeks, when he proudly pointed out the window from his bed in Sydney's Concord Hospital to the construction site of what is now the Bernie Banton Centre.


At Banton's state funeral, the then opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, eulogised the asbestos campaigner as an ''Aussie hero'' who left the world a better place. A few weeks before, it had been the Coalition's Tony Abbott who had to apologise after he attacked the ailing, wheelchair-bound Banton for demanding Medicare listing for a new mesothelioma drug. Abbott had called it a stunt.

Since then, as foreign minister, Rudd urged the government to lead the world in implementing asbestos bans and assisting victims, particularly in Asia.

What is not widely known is that until 2004 it was legal to import asbestos into Australia. It was Abbott, as health minister, who stopped it.

It was also Abbott who in 2006 increased the budget for asbestos research and treatment to a record level, providing more than $6 million. As a result, the National Research Centre for Asbestos Related Diseases was established in Perth to co-ordinate Australia-wide research into asbestos diseases.

Perth was the natural place to base the centre, as is was the historical heart of the Australian mesothelioma epidemic.

Eleven promising research projects around the country were chosen to receive three years of funding.

Despite the centre's success, the government rejected a bid to move the search for a cancer cure to the next level. Instead, it slashed funds by more than half, which shocked researchers.

As prime minister, Rudd talked the talk but failed to walk the walk. His successor, Julia Gillard - a former partner with the asbestos plaintiff law firm Slater & Gordon - has been no better.

Australia is well-placed in the world quest for a mesothelioma cure. It has the highest per-capita incidence of the disease, thanks to the massive use of asbestos up until the late 1980s. Most of that was due to the Hardie empire, which had factories in every mainland state capital.

Australia is a world leader in asbestos cancer research, according to Professor Bruce Robinson at Perth's Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and director of the research centre.

''We win gold medals in this area,'' he says. ''We are the envy of the world for our research co-ordination.'' The latest area of research is the effort to crack the code for mesothelioma. Since the human genome project, it is possible to map the genome sequence for a particular cancer.


''It's not easy,'' says Robinson. ''There are 6 billion letters in the cancer code for mesothelioma. To crack the code will cost a lot, and it'll need lots of people. But it's most exciting. It's cutting edge.''

The government has already adopted in principle a policy of prioritised removal of asbestos from the built environment, to ensure no more Australians are exposed to asbestos dust that one day will kill them. But already, warns Robert Vojakovic, president of the Asbestos Diseases Society of Australia, asbestos is the nation's ticking time bomb.

''What we need desperately is a cure for this disease,'' he says. ''Even if someone waved a magic wand today and eliminated all asbestos products from the community immediately, there are still at least several million Australians who have had sufficient asbestos exposure to place some of them at risk to develop asbestos cancers or mesothelioma.''

Certainly, the impact of asbestos in Australia has been far worse than many expected.


It turns out the apologists were wrong. Worse, by the late 1970s they knew their public statements were wrong. While researching Killer Company, I came across files of the James Hardie public relations spinners from that era.

At the same time they were reassuring the public that cutting asbestos cement sheets could not give a person asbestos-induced cancer and resisting a push to place warnings on their product, privately there were doubts. A ''potential problem'', wrote Hardie's PR consultant in 1979, was ''mesothelioma among builders and tradesmen whose only readily identifiable contact with asbestos has been by way of working with asbestos cement''.

Challenged years later, he maintained it would have been drawing a long bow in those days to suggest tradesmen were at risk. He did not know at the time that I had been reading his memos.

People like myself and others - in worker health centres, trade unions and scientists - had expressed concern.

A former James Hardie chairman, Meredith Hellicar, once told me the whole asbestos tragedy was ''a big mistake''. It was big, that's true. But it was more a case of turning a blind eye than one of simple ignorance. Australia is suffering the consequences. The task of eliminating asbestos from our environment is huge.

It is located in places most people never suspect, like the electricity boards recently identified by the Electrical Trade Union, or the old Telecom junction boxes on footpaths.

What would Bernie say, if presented with a choice of eliminating the fibre from our environment or finding a cure for mesothelioma? I'm pretty certain he would ask for both.

Matt Peacock is author of Killer Company, the book that inspired the mini-series Devil's Dust, which starts on Sunday on ABC1.