Peter Andren (Calare, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Kingsford Smith for some of his views, with which I certainly align my beliefs. There is something of a ‘groundhog day’ happening here. Just over a year ago I stood here and condemned the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2005 and the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management (Related Amendments) Bill 2005, which overrode any state and territory laws where they would regulate, hinder or prevent any work undertaken to select, build and operate a nuclear waste dump.

Those two bills also allowed the Commonwealth to override its own existing laws originally drafted to afford a minimal degree of environmental and heritage protection as well as the recognition of traditional ownership, including the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and the Native Title Act. Those bills also asserted that the Minister for Education, Science and Training need not accord any procedural fairness to anyone affected by these decisions. They ensured that the parliament cannot disallow any declarations made under it, such as the government’s decision on the preferred nuclear waste dump site or the extinguishment of existing rights and interests. They allowed the minister to dismiss any objections raised by traditional owners of the land who were about to have nuclear waste dumped on their country or, indeed, any objections by other bodies, such as those state and local governments through which waste might be transported across Australia. Those bills made sure that any decisions made by the Commonwealth about the storage of radioactive waste are not subject to judicial review.

Fast forward to June this year and the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment Bill 2006, which rode roughshod over the legal rights of traditional owners, trampling guarantees that informed consent must be given by the owners of their land before anything happens on or to that land. That bill, now law, allows the minister to approve the delegation of a land council’s authority and functions to people who are not the traditional owners of that land, and it allows the creation of a new land council without necessarily the traditional owners’ permission, understanding or knowledge. That bill allows land legally owned by traditional owners to be leased for 99 years to the Northern Territory government, which may then sublease it to any body for any use it pleases.

Just six months later, through this, the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Legislation Amendment Bill 2006, we find the government taking further life and meaning from Indigenous rights while breathing more life into the spectre of nuclear power, with its poisonous legacy. For that is what this is all about: it is the post-Pangaea solution—access Indigenous lands for intermediate waste, with a view to stepping up to full-blown nuclear energy waste; a waste no country on earth has found a site for or method to get rid of.

This bill comes back to finish the job the previous bill started by removing procedural guarantees that had normally been accorded to decisions taken under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, until its emasculation earlier this year. Once, the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977 facilitated examination of processes through which a land council made its decisions on behalf of the traditional owners it was supposed to represent. Under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, this meant ensuring that land councils negotiated with the traditional owners and with those affected by any proposal using traditional or other agreed processes to allow those owners informed collective consent. It insisted that the land councils responded to the views of those Aboriginal peoples who held collective title to their traditional lands.

Today this bill removes from the oversight and protection of the AD(JR) Act the process undertaken in the nomination of a site for a radioactive waste dump, so removing any legal compulsion to ensure the informed and freely given consent of those whose land is being offered, either by an unrepresentative land council or by the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, under the so-called authority of a 99-year lease. In the minister’s second reading speech the eradication of this legal, indeed moral, imperative is swept away as being:

… to prevent politically motivated challenges to a land council nomination.

This is cemented by ensuring that neither decisions by the minister nor nominations by land councils or the Chief Minister need provide procedural fairness—that is in item 4—and by confirming that a ministerial declaration of a site which has been made in breach of the now ineffective safeguards in the existing legislation—section 3B—is immune to those safeguards anyway.

Should we all applaud the government for its generosity when it provides for the future return of Aboriginal land to its original owners, provided it is the same land trust or its successor which originally held the land on behalf of the traditional owners—if some future minister decides to do so at his or her ‘absolute discretion’ and when the facility is no longer needed as a radioactive waste dump and is declared to be safe? Should we all congratulate ourselves on our largesse in providing indemnity to the land trust against any action, claim or demand arising from damage caused by radiation exposure?

That the minister should claim in the first sentence of her second reading speech that this bill provides for the return of a volunteer nuclear waste dump site to its traditional owners is rubbish. This bill is not about guaranteeing the return of a site at some indeterminable time generations down the track. It is about removing any legal, environmental or moral safeguards that would get in the way of the government storing radioactive waste on land owned by Aboriginal people who might not have given their permission freely—or indeed at all—and those who might not even have the language to contemplate the acquisition of land by another body without their permission, or the words to describe a potential poisoning of country through such an insidious thing as radiation, or the concepts to even imagine willing the risk of poisoning country for hundreds of thousands of years after them.

This bill is about the death of Aboriginal rights to and control of their own land. It is about the demise of accountable government and due process. It is all about this government’s push to nuclear power, its short-sighted and dangerously lazy adoption of the nuclear option and its dismissal of serious commitment to alternative energy sources—especially solar, wind and wave—and lack of commitment to encouraging conservation of power instead of profligate consumption by a generation that by and large cares little for tomorrow. This bill is about the glittering prize of rising royalties paid straight to the Commonwealth through the mining of uranium—again, short-term illusory wealth with the waste swept under the carpet or, in this case, under traditional Indigenous lands. The minister says in her second reading speech:

We will not be returning a dirty or polluted site.

No-one on this planet has been able to guarantee that, except this minister. She says that, ‘in the extremely unlikely event that contamination occurs’, ‘the traditional owners will be indemnified’. No-one can guarantee ‘extremely unlikely’, and the minister knows it.

Let me just place on the record some facts. The world’s nuclear sites will require monitoring and protection for centuries after they are closed down. How well did this country monitor asbestos mining and the town sites of those mining communities? Remember Anthony Mundine’s home town of Baryulgil near Grafton, whose largely Aboriginal inhabitants suffered the ravages of asbestos poisoning for 30 years and who are now bearing the health costs? How much did we care to monitor those sites over the years?

You may be able to cover asbestos; you can’t do that to radiation. The global volume of spent fuel is about a quarter of a million tonnes and is growing by 10,000 tonnes annually. No wonder there is the urgency to bury the stuff—especially if we, in our short-sighted greed, are going to mine more of it.

However, despite billions of dollars spent by the nuclear industry and governments around the world, no-one—not even this minister—can come up with a feasible and sustainable solution. You might say we are talking about low-level and intermediate waste in Australia at the moment and in this bill, but this is all about preparing for the waste disposal options of a substantially ramped-up nuclear energy—and, undoubtedly, nuclear weapons—industry.

After nearly 20 years of research, and billions of dollars, the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada is as far away from use as ever. Not one gram of spent fuel has so far been taken to the site from nuclear sites across America. Yet the US pushes on with plans for an expanded nuclear industry.

And, according to Greenpeace, the dilemma does not end with high-level waste. There are numerous examples of disposal sites containing low-level waste which are already leaking radiation into the environment. Drigg in the UK and CSM in Le Hague, France, are said to be two of those sites. There are simply no proven technologies to isolate nuclear waste from the environment.

Whatever the bland spin of the government—that this is about low- and medium-level radioactive waste management—we know the agenda is greatly different. The Ziggy Switkowski report and the Prime Minister’s nuclear enthusiasm betrays that agenda. The Prime Minister and his generation will be dead and gone, but the lasting legacy of nuclear waste will be with us forever. It will be for our kids’ kids to monitor the radiation leakages, long after the last uranium ore has been mined. And uranium is one ore that, if removed from our exports, would hardly register on the GDP radar. The value of uranium exports has been totally overspun by this government, the Labor Party’s resources spokesman and the minerals industry. On top of that, there is the inevitable proliferation of nuclear weapons from exported uranium and the impossibility of any meaningful IAEA safeguards system.

This legislation is about cynical exploitation of land that has been Indigenous for 60,000 years, with a view to contaminating it for at least another 60,000 years. It is the thin edge of yet another Howard wedge, and I totally reject it.

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