Australia’s ‘forever chemicals’ scandal demands a royal commission

Revelations that the Department of Defence was warned about the “unacceptable” escape of firefighting pollution from its bases, but waited three decades to alert the public, demand decisive action from the Albanese government.

The time for political inaction and bureaucratic blame shifting is over. An independent inquiry examining the contamination crisis that has engulfed communities living around 27 bases nationwide should now surely be a given.

Resident Aunty Jean Carter is among those speaking out about fears of a cancer cluster in the Aboriginal community of Wreck Bay.Credit: Rhett Wyman

To his credit, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese this year became the first Australian leader to express concerns about the health effects of PFAS. He is right to be concerned, and should now take the next steps to get to the bottom of the health and environmental impacts, and discover who knew what and when.

The Herald’s Carrie Fellner has examined this scandal for the better part of a decade, uncovering deeply disturbing evidence of clusters of illness in areas contaminated by per- and poly-fluoroalkyl chemicals known as PFAS, or “forever chemicals”.

A two-year investigation by Fellner, which will feature in an upcoming Stan documentary, last month revealed the devastating sickness and death in Wreck Bay, an Indigenous community on the NSW South Coast located next to a defence base that used toxic firefighting foam. PFAS chemicals have been seeping into the community’s waterways, food supply and sacred sites for decades, with catastrophic consequences for cultural practices, the environment, and potentially, residents’ health.

Wreck Bay is one of 11 communities across Australia to launch class actions against Defence for polluting their land and water. The Commonwealth has so far agreed to pay $366 million to settle the actions. Importantly, these funds only cover damage to property and not harm to health.

Fellner has now obtained a trove of documents that reveal grave warnings about the chemicals were sounded at the highest levels of Defence much earlier than previously reported.

In 1981 Defence’s most senior bureaucrat was warned about the escape of the firefighting foam, known as AFFF, from a naval base towards homes on the NSW South Coast. The documents also show that in 1996, Defence was working to remove the foam chemicals from runoff at the base, so water could be recycled for drinking by its personnel.

These twin revelations directly contradict evidence a Defence witness gave to a parliamentary inquiry in 2018, in which he claimed there was no evidence the foam was particularly dangerous to the environment or human health in 2000, and that Defence did not begin to understand it was an environmental contaminant until 2003, or leaving its sites until “much later” than 2004.

The Herald’s extensive investigation has also shown federal Department of Health officials asked university researchers to remove references about potential community concern over elevated rates of cancer found in towns contaminated with the “forever chemicals”. The department suggested researchers instead “highlight the significance of ‘null findings’ ” and say their study found “no consistent links between PFAS contamination and the health outcomes observed” – a suggestion rightly rejected by the researchers.

Fellner’s dogged reporting suggests a clear and lengthy pattern of behaviour from federal departments which, at its most charitable, could be characterised as indecision, inaction and outright obfuscation.

The Herald has sought to shine a light on this issue for many years now but has stopped short of floating suggestions about how to resolve it. That ends today.

The scale of this scandal, and the clear invested interest of the Commonwealth, points to the need for a royal commission with the power to compel the production of documents and witnesses. The recent revelation about the Department of Health’s involvement in an academic study on PFAS chemicals also demonstrates the need for the scope of any independent inquiry to include all Commonwealth departments – not just Defence.

An inquiry could also consider the design and operation of a national compensation scheme, instead of already damaged communities having to take expensive and emotionally exhausting protracted legal action to obtain some sense of justice for the harms their own governments have inflicted on them.

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