Justine Elliot (Richmond, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer and Acting Prime Minister. Will the government rule out south-east Queensland and the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales as potential sites for a new nuclear power plant and nuclear waste repository?

Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As I said earlier, the government believes that it is an important debate for Australia to have as to the nuclear industry. This government already has a policy which allows Australian uranium to be mined and exported. The Australian Labor Party supports that in three places. It would be a funny kind of a policy if Australia was prepared to mine uranium and to sell it to other countries but was so opposed to the nuclear industry that it would not allow it in Australia. What the Prime Minister has said is that this is a debate that Australia should have. It is a debate which will be an important debate for the future. I would urge all members to engage themselves in this debate. Those on this side of the House, who believe in Australia and its economic future, will certainly be engaging in a positive debate over the months to come.

Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Minister for Foreign Affairs. Would the minister inform the House of attitudes of countries in our part of the world to nuclear energy? Are there any alternative views?

Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

First, can I thank the honourable member for Boothby. I appreciate his interest in participating in a debate about these issues, which I would hope in this country we could conduct in a sensible way. In answer to the honourable member’s question, there are a lot of countries around the world, including countries which export uranium, countries which have nuclear technology and countries that have nuclear power stations, that have been able to conduct a debate and a discussion about these things in a very sensible and mature way.

In relation to countries in our own region, Japan has 55 nuclear reactors providing 30 per cent of its electricity, three under construction and 12 planned. China has 10 with plans for 40 by 2020. There are six in Taiwan, and the Republic of Korea—South Korea—has 20. Indonesia has plans for four reactors to be built in the period 2017 to 2025, and Vietnam and Thailand are studying the possibilities of nuclear power as well. So I just make the point that there are a lot of countries that think that nuclear power is a real option for generating electricity, at least as a component of their energy mix, and they have been able to have a reasonably mature discussion about this and the value of it.

Talking of alternative views, I noticed in a press release that the Leader of the Opposition put out on 23 May, yesterday, in relation to his opposition to anything the government even chooses to talk about—he just opposes everything, which is I think taking opposition to an absurd extreme—in this case, opposing discussions about nuclear energy, he said:

... there are important national security issues to be considered.

I wondered, I must say, reading that, what it meant. This morning in a doorstop the Leader of the Opposition said:

Nations tend to regard those developing nuclear power for the purposes of power generation as retaining options for weaponising it.

Apparently, according to the Leader of the Opposition, countries like Japan, Vietnam and Thailand should be considered countries which are planning to weaponise nuclear power to build a nuclear weapons capability. The Leader of the Opposition pretends to be—and has sold this message quite hard up there in the press gallery—an expert on national security, foreign policy and defence issues. I call him a charlatan. He is a charlatan on these issues. He is unfamiliar with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and he knows nothing about the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards regime and nothing about the important role a country like Australia can play not in endangering the world but in securing nuclear power generation through our nuclear safeguards agreements. I would have thought the Leader of the Opposition ought to brush up on his so-called expertise in international relations.