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

Thank you for that answer, Minister. I might load you up with a couple of supplementaries while you are at it since you have the advisers with you. I also take the opportunity to congratulate you on the portfolio reshuffle that happened while I was away and to add that, if you want to check the transcript of the last time that we debated this legislation—it was the third quarter of last year—you will see that we have been protesting very strongly since the 2007 election the rather odd decision to shift the portfolio responsibility for radioactive waste management from the science portfolio across to resources. I think that was a profo­undly strange thing for the incoming Rudd government to have done. Minister, even the way that you have approached the debate this afternoon tells me that this parti­cular matter, which is intractable and has provided huge challenges for govern­ments of both political persuasions for decades, would be a lot better in your hands than in those of the person you are representing. I put that to you as a courtesy. If you were to be working beh­ind the scenes to take back responsibility for this portfolio, we in the Australian Greens would certainly support that approach.

To load you up with a supplementary on the question that you have offered to take back—I am not sure that the minister's advisers would necessarily agree with me, so I do not know that you would need to consult with them at this point—I imagine that we are talking about somewhere between a couple of dozen sites to, at the most, something in the low hundreds. I am interested to know how many of those sites will close. What will actually change if this centralised waste dump happens? How many of the university filing cabinets will have to close, will be stood down or will not be needed anymore?

My understanding is that we are not proposing to change the way that we use radiopharmaceuticals, for engineering or whatever it might be. The government says, sometimes quite flippantly, that we have this stuff stored at all these dodgy locations around the country. That begs the question of why we do that if this material is so unsafe. How many of these sites is it estimated we will be able to decommission or stand down if we get a remote dump out in the bush somewhere?