Parliament of Victoria | Legislative Council | Second reading debate
28 July 2026
David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan Region):
I rise to speak on the Dangerous Goods Transport Bill 2026 and the Occupational Health and Safety Amendment (Dangerous Goods) Bill 2026 and indicate that Legalise Cannabis will be supporting both of these bills. The Dangerous Goods Act 1985 is outdated and no longer reflects the way chemicals are used, stored and handled throughout the state.
These bills deliver a much-needed overhaul of Victoria’s dangerous goods transport laws. The core intention of these bills is well placed and widely supported. The bills enact key recommendations of the Palmer review following the West Footscray and Campbellfield fires in 2018 and 2019, which exposed shortcomings in oversight, information sharing and visibility for regulators.
In concert these bills establish a modern framework to regulate the movement of dangerous goods throughout the state, strengthen oversight and enforcement and bring the handling of dangerous goods into alignment with contemporary occupational health and safety principles.
I want to start by thanking my recent parliamentary intern Aadi Arya, who wrote an excellent report on hazardous waste management in Victoria. His report, and indeed his analysis of these bills, has greatly helped in preparing my contribution. I should also mention that his report built on the excellent research of Jonah McRae-Palmer, my intern from last year.
Aadi and Jonah’s research highlighted the importance of traceability, information sharing, regulatory coordination and visibility across the entire supply chain from the point where dangerous goods are generated to their transport, storage and eventual disposal. I would recommend their reports to the chamber. To quote Aadi’s report:
… poor visibility can delay intervention until waste has already been unlawfully dumped, stockpiled, burned, mishandled or discharged into the environment, risking severe ecological damage, food-chain transfer, risks to emergency responders, and heightened exposure for communities located near industrial sites, particularly Melbourne’s Western Metropolitan Region.
I would like to commend Ms Watt on her presentation, and I would also like to talk a bit about the 2018 Footscray fire, the largest industrial fire in Victoria since the 1991 Coode Island fire. At around 5 am on 30 August 2018 residents of West Footscray and Tottenham awoke to the sound of explosions and a black plume of smoke.
Fire crews arriving on scene believed the site to be a wood recycling facility but were instead confronted by 44-gallon drums exploding into the air and Stony Creek, which abuts the property, literally ablaze. The massive warehouse held an illegal stockpile of highly flammable and toxic chemicals. Firefighters knew neither which chemicals were present nor their quantities.
The smoke spread across Melbourne’s west, triggering emergency warnings and public health alerts. Residents were told to shelter indoors, and more than 40 schools and childcare centres were closed. The fire burned for days, contaminating kilometres of Stony Creek and causing significant environmental damage.
It took more than 750 Melbourne Fire Brigade personnel over 16 days to contain that blaze. More than 100 injuries were reported by firefighters, some not appearing until weeks or even months later. Several of them continue to experience health problems, and the full extent of the cocktail of chemicals they were exposed to remains largely unknown.
This waste did not magically appear. It did not arise from the operations of the warehouse. This dirty bomb of chemicals was covertly transported there by criminals for financial gain. This criminality was allowed to flourish in a vacuum of regulation, and these bills seek to fill that vacuum.
Focusing on the transport bill, it repeals the Dangerous Goods Act 1985 and creates a dedicated Dangerous Goods Transport Act to regulate the transport of dangerous goods by road, rail and inland waterways. It positions environmental protection as a central pillar of dangerous goods transport regulation and identifies eliminating risk to public safety, property and the environment as an object of the bill. It requires those involved in dangerous goods transport to ensure, as far as reasonably practicable, that transport is without risk to public safety, property or the environment.
Environmental risk is outlined in the aggravated offence provisions and in the WorkSafe Victoria inspectors’ entry, prohibition and intervention powers. These provisions are much needed as the impacts of environmental damage can last for decades and the cost of clean-up post incident can be immense. However, in clause 21, which covers incidents that trigger mandatory notifications to WorkSafe under clause 22, environmental damage is not listed as one of those.
A pollution event may already trigger notification to EPA Victoria under the Environmental Protection Act 2017, but it may not necessarily trigger direct notifications to WorkSafe. Indirectly the environmental damage can impact other workers, so ideally both regulators would be notified as soon as possible. If anyone was trying to imagine how that could be, I would just refer you back to the concept of a blazing Stony Creek coated with burning chemicals. In that way many, many people’s health can be damaged, many workers’ health can be damaged.
I did flag some amendments late in the piece on this. However, I understand that neither the government nor the opposition had adequate time to properly consider them, so we will not be proceeding with them. Hopefully these concerns can be dealt with through other mechanisms or regulations.
Another concern relates to clause 22, which requires incident notification by the consignor, the principal contractor and the driver or the vessel master. However, it does not extend that obligation to the consignee or receiving facility. In some cases it may be that the consignee is the one who first discovers a leak, contamination event or damaged container during unloading. While another party may eventually notify WorkSafe, the person who first identifies the incident may not have a direct statutory obligation to do so.
I will be asking questions on these issues during the committee stage, and I am happy to be advised as to whether these concerns can be dealt with in other ways.
The success of these reforms largely rests on whether WorkSafe will be adequately resourced to administer the scheme and exercise their new step-in powers and whether the reforms improve early detection of risk rather than simply strengthening enforcement after an incident occurs. These issues will be the focus of my questions during committee of the whole.
These reforms are well overdue and most welcome. We also need the federal government to develop a nationally consistent approach to end-to-end supply chain management and traceability of dangerous goods, including stronger information sharing between regulators and better visibility of the movement of hazardous materials across jurisdictions.
I would like to finish by thanking those first responders who protected the community during the West Footscray fire and other fires, recognising that they did so, and continue to do so, at significant personal cost. They deserve more than our gratitude. They deserve laws that protect them in their dangerous work. We need to take every step to prevent similar disasters. Likewise, the community deserves to feel safe as the lines between industrial areas and housing become increasingly blurred, especially in the west.
Time and time again people in my region find themselves living alongside dangerous and polluting industries and are expected to just live with it, to just cop it. This government did not think twice about asking West Footscray residents to live just metres from a massive diesel storage at the NEXTDC data centre.
As the firefighters have alerted us, this centre will not only contain hundreds of thousands of litres of diesel to power generators but will be co-located with hundreds of tonnes of lithium-ion batteries, which are almost impossible to put out. What could possibly go wrong. Imagine living 50 metres from that data centre.
For the residents of West Footscray or Tottenham right next to that centre that is their new reality. Likewise across the west we are seeing the government fast-track the approval of data centres in areas that are in or immediately adjoining residential areas, with no consideration, with no transparency and with no evaluative framework provided to the community.
In fact it has got to the point where this whole process is so opaque, where the government have even refused to release the document that they say would regulate this hazard. It is disgraceful. It is utterly disgraceful. There is no social licence for these data centres. There is no social licence for this government to do these things, and these are entirely compatible with the principles that are identified in this legislation.
These reforms are sorely needed, but so much more work needs to be done to restore the community’s confidence. That said, I commend the bill to the house.
[Bill passed without dissent.]
