Bernie Banton the man was exactly the same as the bloke you saw on TV, an ordinary fella who worked damn hard at multiple jobs to do the best by his family.
At rallies and press conferences he was deadly serious, full of a quiet and dignified rage, but he also loved a laugh. He never let the fatal betrayal of his former boss take his sense of humour. I know this because I’ve MCed the Asbestos Diseases Foundation’s annual conference a couple of times – always with one of my Chaser mates Julian Morrow or Charles Firth in tow.
And Bernie always had a few joke suggestions for us before we got up on stage, and they were always terrible. "Fellas," he’d say, "Why don’t you do a word play on Hardie’s chairwoman Meredith Hellicar’s name, call her 'Mary-Death'?"
And we’d always nod and laugh, but ‘forget’ to mention it when we got up to do our set. Instead we’d make jokes about how at the last conference someone switched Bernie’s oxygen bottle for a helium tank and how he’d never sounded better. Or pointing out the irony that in John Howard’s Australia, while James Hardie wasn’t punished for poisoning 40,000 of its workers it was charged by ASIC for issuing a poorly worded press release.
Not that we didn’t appreciate Bernie’s help though – writing gags about people dying of asbestos related diseases isn’t easy.
But that was Bernie, he liked to help out. It would have been easy for him, when diagnosed with asbestosis nine years ago, to have focused on his own plight. To simply have wallowed in self pity and shut himself off from the world.
To have given in to the severe bouts of pleurisy, surgical emphesemia, pneumonia, lung biopsies and his left lung pleurodesis – where the organ was dusted with talcum powder to keep it inflated. But he wasn’t that kind of guy. He approached the whole thing with his sardonic wit. With a lopsided grin he’d happily tell the story of the day he was diagnosed with the virulent lung disease asbestosis. "A prognosis like that," he'd say, "takes your breath away."
So instead he decided to be the standard bearer for the greatest fight against a corporate giant in Australian history. Against a company so disgraceful it used legal manoeuvring to cut and run from its responsibilities in Australia and set up shop in the Netherlands.
To abandon the 50,000 Australians experts predict asbestosis will take to the grave when it peaks mid-century. The disease which doesn’t so much crush your lungs as encase them in something akin to concrete, meaning they can’t expand. A disease that will take more Australians than the First World War.
But it wasn’t just for faceless masses he was fighting - to him the fight was personal. His brother, Ted, who got him his start on night shift at James Hardie (during the day he worked as a painter/decorator) has already died of mesophelioma and another brother, Albert, has asbestosis. Of the 137 workmates he left at the James Hardie’s factory at Camellia near Parramatta 30 years ago, only a handful are still alive. Workers from the factory used to hold Christmas reunions at Wentworthville Leagues Club on the first Friday of each December. In 2003, only two people were able to attend.
How could the fight not be personal? After all this was a company that ignored the general acceptance in the scientific community by the 1930s that asbestos was dangerous – and when right on making the stuff and trousering the profits. A company that knew its workers would finish shift covered in white dust and which grudgingly gave them paper masks following pleas from their union.
But it wasn’t just James Hardie Bernie battled against. Witness as he was to the tireless battle unions like the AMWU were waging on an amoral corporate foe on behalf of the victims of asbestos, he became a key campaigner against the Government’s union-busting WorkChoices legislation.
And not because he was a dyed-in-the-wool leftie – this is a man who’d scrimped and saved to send his son to the Kings School, one of the most exclusive private schools in the country.
To him it wasn’t ideological, it was about justice.
He intended to see off John Howard and his WorkChoices legislation with the same dogged determination he’d shown as he sat through years of special commissions, court cases, rallies and public pressure to win a $2 billion fund for the victims of asbestos. It is a great joy to me to know he saw Saturday’s final victory of common sense in an election primarily fought over Industrial Relations laws. And extremely pleased Kevin Rudd acknowledged him in his victory speech.
And I know he was ecstatic, because I telephoned Bernie’s great friend Brian Parker from the CFMEU on Saturday night. In fact the only twinge of sadness I felt on the weekend was that Brian made it clear Bernie’s health was rapidly going down hill.
I’m extremely proud such a man referred to me as a mate. But to me he was more than a mate, he was a hero.
(Special thanks to Jim Marr and Workers Online)
