Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the amendments be agreed to.

The government supports Senate amendment (1). The government agrees that a national radioactive waste management facility should not become an international waste repository. It has been the position of successive Australian governments that Australia will not accept other countries' radioactive waste. We want to make that clear. Countries that benefit from the use of Australian uranium for electricity generation should expect to make their own arrangements to manage and ultimately dispose of the resulting nuclear waste. This amendment, which was passed unanimously by the Senate, restricts access to a national radioactive waste management facility to waste that originates from use of radioactive materials and nuclear activities in Australia. In particular, it permits waste arising from overseas reprocessing of Australian research reactor fuel to be accepted at the facility.

The amendment complements controls under the Customs (Prohibited Imports) Regulations and the prohibition already in the bill of acceptance of high-level waste, preventing the facility from accepting used power reactor fuel. In practice, there will be no international interest in an Australian waste management facility. Such facilities already operate at a multitude of sites around the world.

In regard to Senate amendment (2): naturally, the government supports this amendment as well. The National Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2010 currently provides that the minister may declare a volunteered site as the site for a radioactive waste management facility. Clause 17 provides that the minister may revoke a declaration to acquire a site for the facility. This provision reverses a decision to select a site in the event that the site fails to meet regulatory approvals. In its current draft, the bill does not allow the same revocation to also be made for the all-weather road access to the site. This oversight was originally identified in the Parliamentary Library Bills Digest No. 52, 2010-2011 at page 13. There is no policy justification that would require the Commonwealth to continue a declaration for road access to a site that would not be the location for the facility. Therefore, the proposed amendment addresses this minor oversight. In the event that an acquired site and road did not meet regulatory approvals under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 or the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act 1998, the amendment has the effect of allowing the minister to revoke a decision to select a road for the purposes of the facility.

In relation to the final amendment, the government supports the opposition amendment. The opposition amendment establishes a fund for the host state or territory where a facility is located. Moneys paid into the fund will be used to enhance medical services in that state or territory. In his speech in support of the amendment, Senator Scullion spoke about steering away from the not-in-my-backyard mentality when it comes to establishing a facility in Australia. The volunteer provisions in the bill as well as this amendment support this approach.

Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the amendments proposed by the Australian Greens and agreed to by the Senate on the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2010. As members may recall, I referred this bill to the Standing Committee on Climate Change, Environment and the Arts on 21 October 2010; however, the committee chose not to take any evidence or hear witness statements other than from the proponent and issued a report on the basis of one departmental briefing.

Without going through and examining its merits and gaps, this bill is an utterly deficient legal framework to deal with the most toxic and long-lived hazardous waste material in this nation. This fatally flawed bill that allows for nuclear waste to be imposed on Muckaty Station in the Northern Territory on an unwilling Aboriginal community was at least improved in one very small regard: the prohibition against Australia importing radioactive waste from other countries has been tightened up through a Greens' amendment which added 'that is of domestic origin' to the definition of a controlled material—that is, the nuclear waste that will go into this facility must be of domestic origin and the facility cannot be used to house international waste. Some have said that that was never the intention, but it is worth recalling that in this debate in this place the member for Lyons advocated that Australia should:

… offer a little patch of Australia to store nuclear waste …

because:

… taking others’ waste could be an industry in itself …

This amendment ensures that no little patch of Australia becomes toxic with foreign waste.

This proposal for Australia to accept foreign waste does in fact have a long history. The head of the World Nuclear Association has advocated it, as has Hugh Morgan. Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke peddled the idea in 2005 and again recently at the 2011 US-Australia friendship society dinner. In 2005, the minister, the member for Batman, Mr Ferguson, agreed with Bob Hawke saying:

In scientific terms Bob Hawke is right … Australia internationally could be regarded as a good place to actually bury it deep in the ground.

Former foreign minister Alexander Downer has repeatedly called for higher-level nuclear waste to be dumped in Australia, most recently in April of last year, saying that it would have enormous economic benefits. He was echoing the 3 June 2007 resolution of the Federal Council of the Liberal Party supporting the establishment of a foreign nuclear waste dump in Australia. I am pleased that, at the very least, despite the fact that this bill remains a very deficient legal framework, this Greens' amendment ensures that this will not happen.

Members may also recall that in 1998 a corporate video leaked to the media revealed the existence of an international consortium, Pangea Resources, which was secretly lobbying to establish a high-level nuclear waste dump in Australia. That company now calls itself Arius and is still lobbying to build a nuclear dump here. Savory Basin in the Pilbara was one of their chosen locations in 2003, but they also targeted South Australian and Central Australian locations. The approach taken by that consortium recognised that no form of engineered barrier could conceivably contain this thermally hot, corrosive, chemically toxic and radioactive material for tens of thousands of years. The plan was defeated but it has not gone away entirely.

Why do these voices and corporations continue to make this call and why were we pressing so hard for this amendment? Because nuclear waste has grown to the level of a real crisis for the nuclear industry. Over almost three decades, one proposal followed another to cope with the waste either stemming from the IAEA itself or from groups of governments, the EU or even private groups. All have failed on a combination of legal, political, technical and ethical factors.

The Yucca Mountain proposal is a case in point; it was aborted after US$9 billion was spent. The US now has approximately 57,700 tonnes of nuclear waste looking for a home. The alarm about Australia becoming the world's nuclear waste repository is not unfounded. It is what some on both sides of the House, current members, and former members want. The Greens' amendment ensures that the national radioactive waste dump does not become what was envisaged by Pangea, Mr Hawke and Mr Downer.

Ian Macfarlane (Groom, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Energy and Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support this legislation and, for us on this side of the House, it is very much groundhog day again. This legislation should have been passed years ago and it was due to political obstruction that it was not. The irony of today is that those proposing this bill are the ones who opposed us when we tried to pass this legislation, but I am not going to dwell on the past.

The reality is that radioactive waste is real and part of modern life. It is part of the consequence of modern medicine, and we in Australia need to be mature enough to accept that, along with saving people's lives, particularly through radiation oncology, of which I have been a fortunate recipient, we have a product to deal with. We need to deal with it in such a way that the waste is then stored in a secure, safe environment, and, were it not for the political obstruction, this facility would have been built by now and would be receiving the waste that has been generated in Australia from medical treatment, medical research and general research.

We were opposed every step of the way by people who now support this bill, and I welcome their support. I welcome the realisation that Australia has entered into a place where we can be quite proud that we can not only save lives and further mankind but we are able to store the by-product of that development.

Frightening people with lies and mistruths is not the way to advance a nation, and this debate has been riddled—and I do not accuse the government of this; I accuse others—with people who have been prepared to compromise honesty on the basis of political gain. Again, I think that is despicable. In supporting the passage of this bill I also congratulate the government on accepting the proposal from Senator Nigel Scullion that the Northern Territory receive a financial grant out of this process and that the state governments pay to have storage at this facility. The problem has partly been that state governments have opposed this process, saying, 'Not in my backyard.' But when it is in someone else's backyard they fall over themselves to gain access to the facility. It is good to see that there is justice after all.

One of the great concerns I have always had about nuclear waste is not how to store it but how not to store it. It is worthy in this debate to remind people that nuclear waste is currently stored in shipping containers in the middle of hospital car parks. If you think that is safe and if you think it has been worthwhile holding this legislation for that then you are a hypocrite and you have no real grasp on reality. Australia currently has over 4,000 cubic metres of low radiation nuclear waste and about 600 cubic metres of intermediate waste. It is about time we put it somewhere safe. I congratulate all the people involved in the passage of this bill and look forward to the finalisation of an issue that should have been finalised a decade ago.

Question agreed to.