Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Bill 2023, which is supported by both Labor and the coalition, is legislation that, if passed, can make anywhere in Australia a nuclear waste dumping ground with no requirement for public consultation, no First Nations input and no warning. The bill allows the defence minister the power to designate anywhere in Australia a high-level nuclear dumping ground, with no public consultation needed. Under this bill, the supposed independent regulator of Defence can be staffed by Defence personnel and report to the Minister for Defence, unlike in other countries where nuclear waste has a truly independent regulator. Under this bill, the same minister would be responsible for the nuclear submarines and for the regulation of nuclear waste, which is a clear conflict of interest.

Australia should not be a dumping ground for nuclear by-products of the US or the UK, and this runs roughshod over not only local communities—who will have no say over whether or not their community becomes a dumping ground for high-level nuclear waste as a result of the AUKUS program—but also First Nations peoples who have a long history of protecting their land from nuclear waste, from Muckaty to Kimba. We have more to say on this in the dissenting report, but it's worth noting that the Greens previously raised concerns that the original version of this bill would have allowed the UK and the US to dump high-level nuclear waste in Australia and, when we raised this issue, we were told that we were fearmongering. Now we find that, in fact, it was entirely correct, so you can forgive us for not particularly trusting this next version of the bill on whether or not we will also see high-level nuclear waste or lower-level nuclear waste from the United States or the UK dumped somewhere in Australia without any recourse to object to that.

Let's be clear about this and what this is doing. This is facilitating the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear sub program, which is ultimately about facilitating the imperial ambitions of the United States in the Asia-Pacific. Let's be very clear about this: it has absolutely nothing to do with Australian security—zero, none, absolutely not at all. In fact, what this program does is make us less safe and drag us into a potential war in Asia. It's incredible, actually, just how subservient Australia and the Labor Party are being to the United States in this instance—spending $368 billion, where we may not actually see any nuclear submarines over the next 30 years. It's an entirely one-sided agreement that hands over Australia's ability to determine its own future to the United States. In fact, United States officials won't even confirm that Australia will have complete control over the deployment of these nuclear submarines.

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