Australian SEP Central Committee member Peter Stavropoulos:

Lessons of the workers inquiry

On behalf of the Socialist Equality Party of Australia, Peter Stavropoulos brought greetings to the October 19 meeting. Stavropoulos served as chairman of the workers' inquiry recently organized by the SEP, which investigated the high rates of leukemia and other cancers caused by industrial pollution in the city of Wollongong, south of Sydney, and he spoke on the lessons of this inquiry.

To honor Tom's memory is to understand the essential principles on which he came to base his life-the struggle to establish the truth and the fight for the political independence of the working class.

It is these same principles that constituted the axis of the Workers Inquiry conducted by the Socialist Equality Party of Australia into the high incidence of leukemia and cancer deaths in the industrial city of Wollongong.

The Workers Inquiry was initiated after 19-year-old Melissa Cristiano discovered that not only she had leukemia, but several of her classmates, and one of her teachers did as well. It began to emerge that a whole number of deaths had occurred among youth in a very small geographic area.

The health department ignored Melissa's many requests to carry out an investigation. She persisted, however, against a wall of official silence, joined by families of other leukemia victims. They had become increasingly dissatisfied with the official government line that the extraordinary rate of leukemia deaths was a mystery that could never be solved, that somehow the deaths were merely coincidental and reflected a small cluster of illnesses, not a broad health crisis in the area.

The media was daily pumping out the official government line in order to suppress the growing hostility towards the indifference being displayed by public officials towards the mounting death toll. The Socialist Equality Party decided to intervene. We launched the fight for a workers' inquiry. That is: an investigation that would be carried out independently of the government and all its institutions, an inquiry based solely on the working class. The purpose of the inquiry was to provide a vehicle through which people like Melissa could conduct a struggle to establish the truth.

Our investigation was carried out over a 10-month period leading up to two days of public hearings in July of this year. It became crystal clear that, in order to establish the truth, a political struggle had to be waged against the various government agencies and authorities.

The Workers Inquiry enlisted the support of broad layers of people within the area, including steelworkers, residents, victims and their families, and those in the medical and scientific community who were driven to establish the truth.

Through a scientific examination of the cancer statistics we found that workers living close to the steelworks and cokeworks were ten times more likely to contract leukemia and six times more likely to contract other cancers than those living a mere 12 miles away.

In one class of 16 girls who attended the same school in a suburb very close to the steelworks and a copper smelter, seven subsequently gave birth to children with severe birth defects. Two babies were born without skull caps or brains, two had Downs Syndrome, one had spina bifida, one cystic fibrosis and one suffered ministrokes. One of these students died of bone cancer at the age of 15 and another of a brain tumor in her 30s, while another survived a similar tumor at the age of 11.

For more than 20 years the government, its health department and various other official agencies had figures at their disposal which indicated a severe health crisis. Their refusal to act is a political question. The Labor Party and the trade unions all worked together to cover up and suppress the crisis. They did so in order to protect the corporations whose industrial pollution was responsible for the deaths.

The Workers Inquiry provided the only means through which the concerns and needs of ordinary people could be given conscious expression. What we proved was that the truth can only be established through the independent political activity of the working class itself. This was the central political issue we had to tackle. The inquiry has revealed the enormous capacity that exists in the working class to reshape society and the crucial role of the revolutionary party.