Ken O'Dowd (Flynn, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Nuclear has two places in this world: one is as a clean energy source and the other is as a weapon of destruction. It is a weapon of destruction that we're here to talk about today, and it's a no-go as far as I'm concerned. I congratulate South Africa for banning the use of nuclear weapons 30 years ago come July this year.

I had the fortune—or misfortune—to go to Kazakhstan in about 2012 with the then Speaker, Harry Jenkins, and Gareth Evans, the former foreign affairs minister. They both could see the perils of nuclear weapons. There were 105 countries that attended that conference in Kazakhstan. I visited a place called Semipalatinsk in north-east Kazakhstan, very close to the Chinese-Russian border, and that told me what devastation nuclear testing has done to that country. I've been to places like Hiroshima and seen the aftermath of what happened in 1945. I haven't been to Nagasaki, but it was a similar event, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed outright and others were affected for many years after. On that trip to Kazakhstan, I noticed that there are still high radiation levels in a lot of areas, whether in the soil, in the agriculture fields or in the rivers. Some rivers today are still blocked from entering other rivers because it would be very toxic if this water went into those streams.

In 1947, 1948 and 1949 Russia and Kazakhstan were part of the USSR. The USSR tested nuclear weapons on Kazakhstan's soil for something like 40 years. From 1948 to 1992 it tested its nuclear weapons. Similar events happened around the world, whether in the Nevada Desert, in Australia at Maralinga or in the atolls controlled by the French. That was when I was only a young lad—a while ago now. In that week in 2012, 105 countries gathered in Kazakhstan, and we learnt the horrors that the people of Semipalatinsk suffered and how they are still suffering. In 1949 the Russians did not tell the Kazakhstanis what they were doing, and when the first explosion went off all the people could see was this great big mushroom across their land. The animals—cattle, horses and dogs—all took off in fright, never to return to their farms. Some Kazakhstanis stopped in their homes—they didn't know what was going on—and others went outside and looked in amazement to see this big mushroom. They didn't know what it was and they weren't told. The sad thing is that about four years later the women of Kazakhstan around Semipalatinsk started to have deformed babies. The foetuses were terrible. They are still on display in a laboratory in Semipalatinsk. I've seen them firsthand, and they'll stick in my mind until the day I die. The people of Semipalatinsk have actually changed the name of their town because it had such a bad name, and they now call it another name very close to Semipalatinsk, but they also call it 'Stinks'. The people came out in their streets in their hundreds, and, as we walked around and talked to them, they were all still crying—actually crying—and saying: 'You must stop nuclear weaponry.'

So that is why I congratulate South Africa—the only country that has voluntarily given up nuclear weapons. Places like Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave them up after they separated themselves from the USSR. Nevertheless, nuclear weapons are still a scourge on our society. We cannot let happen again what happened in Hiroshima or in Nagasaki. We just can't contemplate that ever happening again. And God help us if it does.

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