The Bundamba MP's plea for help secured a parliamentary committee inquiry into why the disease has re-emerged in Queensland.

The LNP pushed for a Royal Commission, moving a motion to push the Parliament into supporting an inquiry. Labor amended it to a parliamentary inquiry, which it said would move faster.

Ms Miller, who had pushed for a Royal Commission at the recent budget estimates hearings, also backed an inquiry as a first port of call.

Her speech, which brought the parliament to silence, helped bring support to the Labor amendments.

"My father, my grandfathers and my great-grandfathers were all Ipswich underground coalminers," she siad.

"My great-grandfather Kitching died in the extended colliery at Raceview in a coalmining accident. My grandfather, Hugh Kitching, worked at the same colliery as his father. The other miners brought my grandfather out on top and out of the way as an act of kindness so that he would not see his own father, who was dead on a stretcher, brought to the surface.

"My grandfather, James Daniel Pringle, died in 1968. When the doctors performed an autopsy, they found that he had black lung. I ask members to imagine it. His lungs were totally black. My grandfather — yes, my grandfather — died of black lung and that is why this matter is most important to me. It is so close to my heart because it is family. It is about coalminers who are family. It is about our great coal families right throughout Queensland — in Ipswich, the Bowen Basin, Mackay, Rockhampton and Emerald — and it is about workplace health and safety, which is something that I have grown up with since the day I was born because my family history is about death and dying in coalmines. My father, my grandfathers and my great grandfathers went to work, but they did not go to work to die. My grandfather did not go to work to die of black lung.

"As I said, they both died because they were coalminers. That is the real price of mining coal. I thought black lung was gone. I really did. I thought it was over. I thought black lung, or pneumoconiosis, was eradicated in Queensland and Australia and so did the coalminers and their families, so did the CFMEU and so did successive governments. Now we know that the disease is back. Who is responsible? What failures have occurred and why? There obviously has been maladministration in the Department of Mines.

"Let us talk about black lung. It is a terrible, terrible disease. The miners tell me that it is like having a ton of bricks on their chest every day. They cannot breathe properly. They are walking around with oxygen bottles. It is a terrible, terrible way to die. Patients have symptoms of shortness of breath and chronic cough. They have more exposure to coal than anyone knows. They are down the mines, they breath it in and they cannot get the coal out so the coal stays in their lungs and it forms fibrosis. It is just dreadful.

"There has been a cover-up way back to the Bjelke-Petersen government. There has been a systemic failure, there is no doubt about that, and we need to get to the bottom of it. Earlier this week the black lung victims group wrote to the Premier of Queensland. I table that for the parliament.

"I want a royal commission, and I still do, but I also understand that we can get a parliamentary committee up and running quickly. Because of that and my involvement in the industry I really want to get to the bottom of this. So, colleagues, I offer my services as the chair of this committee because I have worked in the mining industry, I am trusted by the industry, I am trusted by coalminers and I am trusted by their families. If this inquiry does not work I will come back in here and I will move for a royal commission myself. "

Parliament resumes on 30 August.

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