By Tarquam McKenna
I have cancer.
Those three words change the way you look at risk. They change the meaning of waiting for a scan. They change how you think about time. And they certainly change how you react when asbestos-containing material is confirmed at building works close to your home.
I have lived with serious cancer for several years. I have undergone treatment and surgery and continue to live with the uncertainty familiar to many people with cancer. So when concerns arose about asbestos during building work near my West Footscray home, I wanted answers to some simple questions: What happened? Was there any risk that I had been exposed? Was I safe?
Instead, I found myself navigating a regulatory maze.
My attempts to understand what had happened involved Maribyrnong City Council, the Victorian Building Authority, WorkSafe Victoria, and the Environment Protection Authority. I also contacted local elected representatives seeking help to understand where responsibility lay and how my concerns could be resolved.
Each body has its own legitimate role and statutory responsibilities. I am not suggesting that any individual agency failed to perform that role. My concern is almost the opposite: a system can have multiple agencies each performing its particular function and still fail the citizen who needs one clear, coordinated answer.
There was certainly no shortage of regulation. There were jurisdictions, procedures, complaint mechanisms, websites, telephone numbers, and explanations about where one agency’s responsibility ended and another’s began.
But I was the person left trying to join the pieces together.
For me, this was not an academic exercise in public administration. I was already living with cancer and trying to establish whether a known carcinogenic hazard near my home had been properly managed. I found the process exhausting and, too often, I did not feel adequately heard.
I am a retired university professor. English is my first language. I spent much of my working life inside large institutions. I know how to research, write formal correspondence, keep records and persist.
If I found this difficult, what happens to somebody who cannot do those things?
What happens to an older resident with limited digital skills, a recent migrant with limited English, someone with a disability, a person working two jobs, or somebody already overwhelmed by illness? In Melbourne’s west, one of Australia’s most culturally and linguistically diverse communities, these are not theoretical questions.
There is also a cost we rarely count. Taxpayers fund regulators, departments, complaint systems, and administrative processes. Citizens then contribute something more: unpaid hours spent researching, telephoning, emailing, repeating their story and trying to determine which authority can actually help.
We have, in effect, shifted part of the work of coordinating government onto the people seeking government’s help.
Australia does not need weaker asbestos protection. Asbestos is precisely the kind of danger that demands strong regulation. But strong regulation should also mean clear responsibility, coordination and a system ordinary people can understand.
The same principle applies to cancer care. Governments now invest heavily in cancer nursing and navigation because they recognise how difficult complex systems can be for patients. Navigation services are valuable, but their very existence raises a harder question: why do we keep designing systems that require sick and vulnerable people to become expert navigators?
Good regulation should not be measured by the number of rules, agencies or complaint mechanisms we create. It should be measured by whether people are protected and whether the system works for the person who needs it.
The answer is not less protection. It is better regulation, clearer accountability, and agencies that work together so citizens do not have to join the pieces themselves.
Cancer has already taken enough of my time.
I should not have to spend more of it navigating four government agencies to find out whether I am safe in my own home.
