Australian Council of Trade Unions push for asbestos law overhaul to protect workers from the harmful material

Bruce was a tradie his entire life, a carpenter and a joiner who worked with asbestos almost his entire career. But his wife was one who washed his clothes.

Retired tradie Bruce Inkley says his late wife's death was caused by second-hand asbestos exposure from his work. Picture: Russell Millard

Bruce Inkley worked with asbestos for almost his entire career, but it was his wife, Hellen, who died last year from exposure to the deadly material.

She was one of the 4000 Australians who die each year from asbestos-related diseases – a number the Australian Council of Trade Unions claims could be slashed as it launches a campaign pushing for an urgent overhaul of national asbestos laws.

“She could have got the disease from me. I was a carpenter and joiner, and she washed my clothes,” Mr Inkley told The Advertiser.

The 72-year-old Aberfoyle Park man said Ms Inkley also could have got mesothelioma from being in the storeroom as a kindergarten teacher, from cleaning tiles as a little girl or from sweeping the material after a renovation to their house in 1978.

Ms Inkley was diagnosed with the terminal condition – a lung cancer caused by asbestos exposure – in December 2023.

She died 11 months later, aged 70, just a few months short of the couple’s 50th anniversary.

“I miss her,” Mr Inkley said through tears. “I’d love to have her back.

“She was kind. She was my best friend. She’d help anybody. She loved kids, loved her grandkids. That was one of the things that devastated her, because she wouldn’t see them get married, see them have children.”

Ms Inkley, whose parents were German, had urged her husband not to blame himself, telling him to learn the German phrase “scheisse passiert” – s--t happens.

The pair had two adult children and five grandchildren.

ACTU assistant secretary Liam O’Brien said secondary exposure to asbestos would become more common if the material stayed in workplaces and homes, especially because it grew more dangerous as it degraded.

“We think workers should have rights, like with any other hazard, to seek (asbestos) to be removed and not wait for somebody to be harmed,” he said.

“The big shift we want to see is a move away from this idea that we just manage these products in situ, just leave them there.

“No, we need to get it out of workplaces – that’s the only way in which we’re going to keep people safe. It was never designed to last in situ for as long as it is.”

Last year’s Asbestos National Strategic Plan said up to 28,000 deaths could be stopped by 2100 if more asbestos was removed from buildings.

The plan said at the present rate of removal, asbestos would only be gone from Australia’s built environment by the end of the century, despite diseases linked to the material remaining the nation’s biggest cause of work-related deaths.

The unions’ push – set to be announced at a work, health and safety conference in Adelaide on Friday – seeks to influence a Safe Work Australia review of asbestos laws.