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

That is quite an extraordinary act to follow for an address-in-reply—you really will be missed, Senator McGauran. The Governor-General’s speech, which this debate addresses and which was some time ago now, I found quite fascinating. It is only my second experience of an address-in-reply in my brief time here, being halfway through the term. I listened to the speech quite intently, partly because it is an expression of what the government is most proud of and because it is an indication of the agenda they are setting for the next couple of years. But I was also listening most acutely to hear what was not in the speech—what the government is doing, what its agenda is and what legislation it pursues that did not make its way into the speech—because I think that will probably tell us a little about what the government is up to that it is not proud of.

So, considering the kind of day that I have had, I am probably going to focus somewhat on the negative. But isn’t it interesting that there was nothing in the speech on the proposal for mandatory filtering of the internet? There was nothing in it on what we witnessed this afternoon, the entrenchment and furthering of the laws of terror. There was nothing in it on data retention, the Attorney-General’s proposal to start logging all the material and traces that people leave behind in web traffic and email and so on. But, most strikingly, there was nothing in the speech, nothing that any of the relevant ministers had sought to put forward, about how we were about to outsource our foreign policy to uranium-mining companies for the short-term interests of the nuclear industry here and overseas.

Australia is on the verge potentially—if people around the country have bulldozers driven over them in the next couple of months and years—of becoming the No. 1 uranium provider in the world. We will be selling uranium at that stage to most of the world’s nuclear weapons states, including places—obviously, most recently, such as Russia and China—with rather a queasy proliferation record. We will be the No. 1 uranium provider, providing jobs, providing tax and royalty revenues and providing the boost to the economy that the government never ceases to spruik. Why wasn’t that in the speech? Is that not something the government is proud of? I found that rather curious.

For the amount of time that Minister Martin Ferguson spends enabling and furthering the interests of this industry, you would have thought he would have managed to get a mention into the Governor-General’s speech—something about how proud the government is that it is taking this step towards becoming the world’s supplier of uranium to nuclear weapons states. But there was not a peep.

There was nothing in there about how the Australian government is pursuing the Howard agenda of a radioactive waste dump in the Northern Territory. It was an issue that played very heavily in the federal election campaign. Certainly in Melbourne it played its part in the huge swing we saw against the minister, the member for Batman, Martin Ferguson. I can tell those folk who did not manage to visit the NT during the election campaign, as I was fortunate enough to do, that in the NT it was in the top three or four issues that were debated. There was nothing in the speech about that. Nor was there anything about the Northern Territory intervention, which is dramatically unpopular in the NT.

There was nothing in there about our support for the United States nuclear weapons umbrella or the fact that Australia, while far from being a de facto nuclear weapons state ourselves, relies on security assurances from our alliance with the United States. Unlike New Zealand, which managed to kick free that prop decades ago, Australia still relies on the United States government’s ability to provoke Armageddon at any particular time and annihilate cities at the throw of a switch for our so-called security. There was nothing about that.

Speaking of outsourcing our foreign policy to multinational uranium-mining companies, it is important to mention the agreement that the Prime Minister announced recently about uranium sales to Russia. This has been coming for some time. Shortly after I arrived here I took my place on the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties, which published a document on uranium sales to Russia. It was not merely a majority report; it was a unanimous report, I believe. It pointed out that certain criteria would need to be observed before any such sales could be contemplated. The government has chosen to simply sidestep that—set it to one side, ignore that risk—in the cause of increasing uranium exports to Russia, for which there was no apparent mention that I could discern in the speech. Perhaps this is something that the Australian government is not so proud of. There were not multiple press releases put out. It was not an announcement that was heralded. It was dropped at a very odd day, very late in the day, too late for the newspapers and so on.

I would like to go back briefly and identify some of the issues that the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties put into the public domain and put forward for the government to consider, just in case there is that small moment or that small pause for hesitation for the Australian government to contemplate whether doing this to our foreign policy is a good idea. And it is a foreign policy issue, not a mining or a resources issue. When you get into the uranium business, you are engaging in foreign policy whether you like it or not, and you are engaging in a very old and very nasty story that is now three generations old about what happens to this material when it leaves Darwin.

There are 32 nuclear power reactors now operating in Russia. Twenty-three of those were constructed prior to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Russian generators are generally licensed for 30 years, but 12 of the current reactors have been operating for more than 30 years. Late in 2000, plans were announced by Russian authorities for lifetime extensions of these 12 first-generation reactors. So the extension period is now envisaged at between 15 and 25 years. So currently operating in Russia are an early generation of nuclear reactors that were designed and built before the Chernobyl explosion and that will be operating for a period of up to 40 or 50 years—that is, longer than most of the operators who will be running the plant have been alive.

By the late 1990s Russian authorities were exporting nuclear reactors and related technology to China and India. India, of course, is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In August this year Russia announced that it would begin the start-up of Iran’s only nuclear power plant. Uranium fuel shipped by Russia into Iran began use at the Bushehr reactor on 21 August despite the fact that Iran refuses to sign up to the Convention on Nuclear Safety, which would make it subject to international monitoring of its atomic safety standards. That is looking at the state of Russia’s peaceful nuclear sector.

The foreign minister will need to stand up here every now and again in this building, as he has done in the past, on the announcement of some kind of grievous breach of international protocol by the Iranian government in starting up this plant or operating uranium centrifuges in apparent contravention of international obligations. The foreign minister will say: ‘Actually, folks, Iran is a grave threat to international security. You don’t mess around when it comes to nuclear weapons.’ But we are potentially about to start, at the behest of Rio Tinto, BHP and their allies in the uranium mining sector, large-scale exports of this bomb fuel to the Russian government.

We have contemplated the state of Russia’s peaceful nuclear sector. The Institute for Political and Military Analysis, which is a Moscow based non-government research organisation, reports that Russia has 3,100 nuclear warheads. The US Department of State claimed in April 2009 that the correct figure is around 3,909. Russia also has a large but unknown number of tactical nuclear weapons. Russia is actively producing and developing new nuclear weapons, manufacturing Topol-M, or SS-27, intercontinental ballistic missiles since 1997. That puts them in direct and fundamental breach of their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to stand these things down and dismantle them once and for all, but the Australian government seems to think it is appropriate that we start shipping this material to them nonetheless. So the very real security and proliferation concerns of uranium deals with Russia were spelled out, in my view, forensically by the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties late in 2008. It was a committee that urged the Australian government not to undertake this same sale. The government has blindly dismissed these warnings. It is an example of short-term profits taking precedence over long-term health and security interests. There is cross-border and internal aggression from the Russian government, there is an ongoing abuse of power and corrosion of democracy in that country, there is persecution and assassination of journalists and critics, including with radioactive material, there is alleged election rigging, there is an ageing nuclear power sector and there is a vast and growing nuclear arsenal. All of these things make a compelling case against uranium sales to Russia, which was probably why it was neglected and did not find its way into the Governor-General’s speech.

Even if we forget the past, as supporters of the deal announced by the Prime Minister at the G20 conference exist, we cannot ignore the future. This is the kind of really blind self-interest at the behest of the uranium mining sector that mars us as a country. It is not enough for the Australian government to step back and say, ‘If we don’t sell this material then other people will’, because quite frankly that is the defence of the heroin dealer. If this trade is bad and toxic and the Labor Party has struggled with this issue for decades then under no circumstances should we condone it on the grounds that if we do not sell this material somebody else will. That is not good enough. I look forward in the next address-in-reply speech to being able to comment on the Governor-General’s acknowledgement that uranium mining is in the process of being phased out in Australia and that this carcinogenic and obsolete trade has no place in a modern and sustainable Australia of which all of us wish to be proud.