Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

that this is a very dangerous legacy for your children and your children’s children in future generations. This Prime Minister is prepared to leave this legacy to his children and to your children, Senator Abetz, and your grandchildren and their grandchildren and so on. That is the current situation in this country. For that reason, we have moved both a second reading amendment and an amendment in this committee stage. I will provide some details of this amendment. It requires that ANSTO ‘not condition, manage or store high level radioactive material except material generated by, or associated with, the operation of the Lucas Heights research laboratories, or any health or medical facility operating within Australia’.

The crux of our amendment is to stop this government from allowing this country to be a dumping ground for the rest of the world’s radioactive waste. In America I think that billions of dollars has already been spent on a facility at Yucca Mountain, but it is still not acceptable to the American people. If Australia were to accept radioactive waste, we would certainly be solving a lot of political and environmental problems around the world for countries that do not want to deal with this waste, even though some might argue they have benefited from having nuclear energy. This amendment will assure Australians that this government has made a decision not to take waste from other countries. There has been an ‘on the one hand, but on the other hand’ approach and we have been told ‘maybe we will and maybe we won’t’, so this is the government’s opportunity. If it supports this amendment then it will be clear to all of us that we are not going to be that waste dump. If it does not support it, then we can assume that the real agenda is to turn this country into a waste dump.

No doubt Aboriginal land will be used, because we heard this evening that the proposal to effectively remove native title from land in the Northern Territory in order to allow the radioactive waste dump to operate there is already underway. We have seen the interests of Indigenous people overlooked. We have seen processes put in place which take away fairness and the reasonable ability of people to object to having a nuclear waste dump on their land. This land is a long way away from major metropolitan areas, so therefore we must assume the waste is dangerous if it has to be taken so far away. But, of course, no consideration is made for the interests of Indigenous people or their title over the land.

Progress reported.