Moroney Sue: Radiation Safety Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Radiation Safety Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 03 November 2015. Volume:709;Page:7646. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): I rise to take a call on the Radiation Safety Bill at its second reading and I am pleased to do so to offer Labour’s support also for this bill. I did not have the benefit of being on the Health Committee and of hearing all of the submissions that previous speakers have referred to. It sounds like it was a very thorough process—albeit technical at times—and has really challenged both the officials and the members hearing the submissions on the bill in order to ensure that they have got this right. It is interesting to note that this bill has support right across the House and therefore I think that is an indication that the select committee has indeed done its work well and has got the technicalities of this bill correct.This appears to be a bill where the Government is responding—one of those few times that this Government is responding—to recognise international best practice and one of the few times that the Government is actually looking at the research and evidence and is making good sound policy and legislation based on research and evidence.I want to encourage the National Government to learn from what it has done here and apply it in a range of other settings. There is a bill that went through this House in the not too distant past where the Government ignored international best practice when it came to safety and it ignored the research and evidence. It went looking for a political solution and ended up telling us that worm farms are more dangerous than cattle farms. So I think this is an example that the Government should learn from about how to do it properly if it really is concerned about safety issues. If it is genuine about it and it wants to make progress on it and it wants to have the full support of this Parliament then actually looking to international best practice learning from it hearing the research and evidence and acting on it properly without the political overlay and the political undermining of genuine safety—that is the way that this Government needs to continue to proceed. And this bill is an example of how it can be done well.The Radiation Safety Bill will repeal and replace the Radiation Protection Act 1965 and having been born just a year prior to that Act I can actually track the technological advances there have been in the course of my lifetime and I think that that probably therefore tells us that it is well and truly time to revisit the way in which we deal with radiation safety because of the changes that have occurred over the course of that period of time—some 50 years since this legislation was originally put in place.I hear the calls from members who were on the select committee to ensure that the public do understand that this is really covering one aspect of radiation—not the entire spectrum. It covers ionising radiation and does not attempt to cover non-ionising radiation. I know that there is a range of views from members on the select committee about whether it ought to have attempted to do that or not. The consensus appears to be that they are different and that they are so different that they are better dealt with in separate regimes and I accept that from those who heard all the evidence. However it appears to be I think unanimous—although I have not heard the National Party members speak on this issue—that there is a need and an urgent need for the non-ionising radiation standards to be updated. They also have not been updated for some period of time. It makes absolute sense to me that if this House is investing its time in updating the ionising radiation safety legislation then it needs to very quickly turn its attention to the non-ionising aspects that are not covered by this bill.So in summary Labour supports this bill. We congratulate the Government on recognising international best practice on addressing the research and the evidence in front of it and we encourage it to do that in all fields with regard to safety.