THE CLOAK OF SECRECY IS RIPPED FROM ONE OF THE GREATEST CORPORATE SCANDALS IN AUSTRALIA'S HISTORY
James Hardie, the name, like the company, is a lie. The real James Hardie died a long time ago and had almost no connection to the Australian asbestos empire that grew under the Reid family, killing in its wake thousands of unwitting workers and customers.
For more than 20 years, Hardie chairman John Reid oversaw a strategy that ignored the dangers of asbestos and silenced Australia's largest asbestos union and government health authorities, concealing the nation's biggest peacetime disaster. Reid's eventual successor, Meredith Hellicar, defended Hardie's move offshore until public campaigning by asbestos disease sufferers like Bernie Banton forced the company to adequately provide for its victims.
ABC journalist Matt Peacock first warned the public about the dangers of Hardie's asbestos empire in an award-winning radio series in 1977. He has followed the tragic trail for more than 30 years: from the company's factories where workers had asbestos 'snowball' fights, to the mine where Aboriginal children played in the tailings, and into thousands of houses where Hardie's asbestos now threatens home renovators, not just from their fibro walls and ceilings, but from the dust that still lurks under their carpets. His painstaking research, involving newly discovered documents and interviews with over a hundred former Hardie employees and other key figures, reveals in stark detail how the company subverted the institutions designed to protect ordinary citizens, and how a dedicated group of unionists, lawyers and activists finally exposed Hardie's subterfuge,