David Bradbury (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer ) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to express my outrage at the very poor treatment that the residents of Western Sydney are receiving from the New South Wales Liberals. We have seen in the last couple of days these devastating cuts to education: $1.7 billion worth of cuts. We all know that this will have a very big impact, especially in places like Western Sydney. The point and the issue I want to discuss today is the breach of promise—the broken promise—by the O'Farrell government, the New South Wales Liberals, and their decision to send radioactive waste to Kemps Creek in Western Sydney. This is waste that comes from the site of a former uranium smelter in Hunters Hill on Sydney's North Shore. To ship it out and to dump it in Western Sydney, in my community, is an outrage. People are angry and they have every reason to be angry.

They are especially angry because Mr O'Farrell gave clear commitments before the election that he would not be sending this waste out to Western Sydney. In fact, I have a letter here dated 25 October 2010, where he referred to the waste and the plan to move the waste out to Kemps Creek as 'utterly unacceptable and dangerous'. He said, 'I think the idea of reclassifying the waste so that it could be accepted at Kemps Creek is appalling.' Now, he is in office and that is exactly what he intends to do. Before the election, what did he have to say? He said that it was a threat to people's safety. That is what he said on Channel Nine News on 17 October 2010. On the same day, on the ABC News, he said, 'It needs to be put in an appropriate facility.'

To rub people's noses in it, the state Liberal member for Mulgoa, who up until Saturday also happened to be a councillor on the Penrith City Council, got up in the council after having run a campaign against this before the state election, where she said such things as:

The people of Western Sydney are not the dumping ground for Sydney, especially this radioactive waste. It is unsafe waste material and should not be dumped in our community.

She got up at a recent council meeting and defended this plan to send it out west. What did she say? She told the people of Western Sydney that the amount of radioactivity in this waste was the same level of radioactivity as you would experience in eating a banana. The member for Mulgoa has gone bananas, but people in our community are rightly livid about this. A recent report issued by Mr O'Farrell's own experts say that this waste, if dumped in Kemps Creek, will need to be monitored for up to 300 years. That does not sound very safe to me. It is being moved because there were cancer clusters that emerged in the area where it currently rests. If it is not unsafe, why do they want to move it? I have established a petition at www.nodumping.org, and I would like to table it. (Time expired)

I seek leave to table the document.

Leave granted.

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