Bernard Banton's Case

Bernie Banton was a passionate and courageous campaigner whose life was taken away from him all in a blink of an eye. Bernard Douglas Banton or as he was known as –Bernie was born in the year 1946 in Sydney. Banton worked as an employee at the Camellia plant of Australian building products giant James Hardie & co Pty Ltd from 1968 to 1974. He was a lathe operator who shaped blocks of asbestos for the use of power stations and pipe sections. Before I go on any further, you might want to know what asbestos actually is to understand the events that happened in this case. According to the Access and Justice 12e legal text book, Asbestos is described as a naturally occurring heat and flame resistant crystalline mineral. It is basically little substances
Originally, Banton’s case was heard in the New South Wales Supreme Court and in 1989, the case was moved to the Dust Diseases Tribunal as this was a more appropriate way of dealing with his case. After Banton was diagnosed with asbestosis, he never gave up on himself as he continued to continuously campaign and bring attention and awareness to the general public about asbestos related diseases. The issues that had arrised in the Banton case was that his boss James Hardie owed not only Banton but his other employees a duty of care. Hardie knew about the dangers of asbestos and let his employees work at his company without access to any protective clothing while on the job and did nothing about this incident. Bantons whole view on this event that occurred in his life was that something needed to be done about this so he took James Hardie to court to fight for his
Just to single out a few people, individuals such as Mr John Booth was awarded 326 thousand dollars’ worth of compensation against Amaca Pty Ltd from the Dust Diseases Tribunal. Mr William Abel built transportable buildings made of asbestos which he manufactured and supplied to James Hardie was awarded 155,967 dollars’ worth of compensation also. Finally the biggest compensation pay out was from Amaca also as Mr Robert Berengo was a painter in the 1960s who caught mesothelioma from hugging his dad and was awarded 2 million dollars’ worth of