Robert Oakeshott (Lyne, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

My question is also to the Treasurer. Treasurer, can you explain why, in December 2009, your Foreign Investment Review Board chose not to oppose the 70 per cent takeover of Australian owned Energy Metals Ltd by state owned foreign entity China Uranium Development, with this majority takeover involving control of nine uranium project sites covering a total of 4,000 square kilometres? Treasurer, in light of the unresolved energy security debate in this country around an ETS, unresolved home insulation and home solar hot-water plans, rejection last year of a private member’s bill for a national gross feed-in tariff scheme, a heavily distorted and currently flailing renewable energy scheme and an unresolved and inconsistent position on the use of uranium for domestic energy use—yet, perversely, the expanding of mines such as Angela Pamela and Olympic Dam for export demand, and added to this we now seem to be leaving sensitive waste management issues at these nine project sites to an overseas entity—how on earth, without so much as a press release, can you reconcile this majority takeover as being in the national interest when we look to be copping all the bad bits about this deal and receiving none of the good bits, such as the use of uranium to cheapen household electricity bills in our energy-security mix in the future?

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