Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this afternoon to speak about the issue of Australia’s radioactive waste. The Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications and the Arts has spent the last few weeks taking evidence on the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act 2005—an act which I propose be repealed. I do not propose to reflect on the deliberations of the committee, because this is a matter that is still under active consideration. This inquiry is taking place against a backdrop of 50 years of radioactive waste which has been shipped overseas for reprocessing or stored at Lucas Heights or at a multitude of sites around the country.

One thing that has been very clear for some time is that a new approach is needed to answer practical and political questions about Australia’s radioactive waste—both the low-level waste, which is scattered at a number of sites around the country and, particularly, what the government classifies as long-lived intermediate-level waste, which will be dangerous for literally tens of thousands of years.

So how should our radioactive waste be stored? Where should it be stored? Should it be transported? Should it be centralised? Perhaps most crucially: are we producing as little of this material as possible? The new approach that I talk about starts with the premise that these questions are not settled. The industry and the government departments that run Australia’s nuclear facilities would like to believe that these are settled issues. They are not. The issue of what to do with these extraordinarily dangerous toxic and corrosive materials over time spans that stretch literally into different geological ages is not settled at all. Australia and the world need to have a debate about these issues—not a discussion behind closed doors but a deliberative, public and inclusive process to answer these questions.

The fact is that, whether we like it or not, we have radioactive waste in this country, and we must responsibly deal with the consequences of decisions that have been made in the past. Whatever we think of those decisions made in the 1950s about nuclear reactors, today we need to make decisions. We have a responsibility based on the information that we have today, but we need to keep very firmly in mind that we are making those decisions on behalf of literally thousands of future generations—people we will never meet who will be saddled with the materials that we have created and with the solutions, as such, that we have designed.

Part of the public confidence problem and part of the reason that radioactive waste dumps and these questions are so hotly contested around the world is that, as is quite widely known, there is no solution yet developed to safely contain these categories of nuclear waste that are so long-lived. All efforts so far to isolate the material permanently have been shown to be flawed in some way, as the material gradually burns or corrodes its way out of whatever engineered storage barrier has been designed to contain it. So shifting waste around the country is simply a way of transferring a problem from one place to another—because it will not go away.

It has been discovered around the world—and certainly in Australia—that there are two ways of dealing with this problem. The Howard government chose the former. The first way of dealing with the problem is to target politically vulnerable communities or nations to become dump sites for radioactive waste. Whether it be in the name of economic development or doing people a favour or ‘doing your bit’, it is immoral and it should not be tolerated. It certainly should not be justified on grounds of scientific necessity. The Howard government tried this first way, which reached its height with the passing of the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act 2005 and the subsequent amendments that were put through this place which were fiercely contested by the crossbenchers and by the then Labor opposition.

One submission that was made to the current inquiry into the bill to repeal this act called the practice ‘radioactive racism’. When a community is so disadvantaged that they would consider becoming a radioactive waste dump site in order to secure health care, transportation, education infrastructure and the kinds of citizenship entitlements that the rest of us take for granted, that is radioactive racism. It is a highly appropriate phrase to use when considering the process used under the Howard government. To formally remove due process, procedural fairness and rights of appeal, to toss away the Aboriginal Land Rights Act and its protections, which were fought for over literally decades—setting all of those aside—and to seriously erode the democratic rights of Territorians is radioactive racism. Making a specific amendment to a piece of legislation to deliberately remove the protections that were offered to Indigenous people in order to impose a nuclear debt is radioactive racism. I cannot think what else to call it.

We have now seen in the Territory that one particular community has been given some hundreds of thousands of dollars by the government for nominating their land for a radioactive waste dump—just the first instalment of several millions of dollars to follow. That is why we need a scientific, transparent, accountable and deliberative strategy to deal with this waste—and that is the second way that I will be speaking of. One of the submissions to the current inquiry called for ‘process not postcode’—meaning that a location should not come first but rather a fair process for arriving at a decision. That is the process that really needs to be triggered when the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act is repealed.

Because these matters are highly controversial, we should perhaps look overseas to see what kinds of solutions are being proposed elsewhere—for example, the United Kingdom’s Committee on Radioactive Waste Management or the process that is underway in Canada to deal specifically with categories of high-level radioactive waste. Perhaps Australia, rather than pursuing the approach taken by the former Howard government, should consider this second way of going about things. Essentially, that would be looking at some form of deliberative arrangement that says that, because these are not settled questions, we will not be satisfied with simply imposing this material on a politically vulnerable community and that we can take an approach that is much more mature than that.

The moment we take radioactive waste and dump it in an isolated hole in the ground, against the will of the people who live there, we lose all future options for dealing with this material. It may be the case down the track that, if it is safely contained where it is being produced, for example, for the time being, we can pursue alternative waste management strategies—perhaps transmutation, nanotechnology or some form of technology that has not yet occurred to us. But if we take the politically expedient option of simply putting it on a truck and dumping it on somebody else’s land, we lose those options.

I would like to conclude by quoting Marlene Bennett, who appeared at the Alice Springs hearing into the inquiry into repealing the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act and whose strong feelings echo my own. She said:

I would just like to question why Martin Ferguson is sitting on this issue like a hen trying to hatch an egg. The people of the Northern Territory elected the Labor Party. We were led to believe that the nuclear waste thing would be all overturned and overruled, and at this moment we are extremely disappointed. How many times do we have to say no? No means no. Come on, Martin, let’s do something about this.

Essentially, all we are asking for is for the ALP to come good on their very clear commitment that they took to the election in 2007.