A LABOR senator has launched a scathing attack on deputy opposition leader Julie Bishop for her work as a lead lawyer for the CSR company opposing compensation claims from workers dying of asbestos diseases.
West Australian senator Glenn Sterle said CSR's Wittenoom mine had been dubbed the world's greatest industrial disaster with deaths tipped to exceed the death toll from the Bhopal disaster in India.
CSR finally accepted the moral obligation to pay compensation in 1977.
"Unfortunately that's when the real villains stepped in," he told the Senate in an adjournment debate speech.
"Heartless corporate lawyers who advised CSR management to ignore their emotive moral and humanitarian feelings and build a legal fortification to defeat valid compensation claims."
Senator Sterle, whose father worked at Wittenoom in the 1950s,
said Ms Bishop,
a solicitor from the firm Robinson Cox, later Clayton Utz,
founded CSR's legal fortification the "four dog defence" to stonewall valid claims.
That was used when your dog killed a neighbour's child to death.
In court, the first line of defence was that you never owned a dog or it was always tied up.
The next line of defence was denying you knew the dog was savage.
Failing that, the child provoked the dog and finally, the child died of something else.
"The first dog deployed by CSR's solicitor was to find every basis imaginable to reject compensation brought by the dying victims," he said.
Senator Sterle said Ms Bishop played a key role in CSR moves to deny compensation to dying victims, forcing them to go to trial.
"She and CSR caused extra suffering for people already dying with painful diseases,
causing extra trauma for families of victims as well," she said.
Senator Sterle said in subsequent years Ms Bishop had pleaded that she was simply acting on her client's instructions
and the advice of barristers when she sought to delay justice to dying men.
"She can't shift the blame to her clients," he said.
Senator Sterle said she should feel ashamed of the harm she caused the people of Western Australia.
He said Ms Bishop needed to explain herself after attacking Prime Minister Julia Gillard over her legal work for a union.
In those attacks, Ms Bishop said this went to Ms Gillard's character, ethics and judgment and people deserved to know what sort of person she was
"With those words the deputy leader of the opposition makes a noose for her worn neck," Senator Sterle said.
