Rod Kemp (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Don’t get sensitive, Senator Wong, or I might start to speak about some of your issues. In relation to the second part of the motion, it is interesting to note that it is poorly worded and it was not precisely clear what the motion is. If we banned nuclear power plants around the world, emissions of carbon dioxide would be some 2.5 billion tonnes higher per year. The person who is drawing our attention to the important debate of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions wants to ban nuclear power. If you ban that, according to the figures I have, you would increase carbon dioxide emissions by some 2.5 billion tons per year. A remarkable policy and again it shows the unreality of much of this debate and the unreality of the Greens, and, I regret to say, the Democrats, on this. The Labor Party, of course, because of its hopeless divisions in this area which will paralyse it, finds it hard to debate this policy in any sensible and rational way.

Then, of course, the final part of the motion is the alleged prospect of the federal government taking control of uranium reserves from anti-mining states. I explained how carefully Senator Evans walked around this particular minefield for the Labor Party. We did come to the conclusion, when we listened carefully to Senator Evans, that the Labor Party was in favour of an expansion of this industry. It has expanded and we should not apologise. While Hawke and Keating were in office, uranium mining expanded greatly in Australia and we should not hide from that fact. My advice is that the Commonwealth government has no plans to override state bans on uranium mining, and I understand that the legal advice provided suggested that this would probably not be a viable option anyway. Of course, the most effective way for Australians to benefit from surging international demand for uranium mining is—(Time expired)