Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance and Administration (Senator Minchin) to a question without notice asked by Senator Minchin today relating to the export of uranium to China.

My question related to the Howard government’s intention to sign in the very near future an agreement with Premier Wen of China to export Australian uranium to China and an agreement to facilitate Chinese companies mining uranium in Australia, notwithstanding that it is a responsibility of state governments to license such exploration.

The matter I want to talk about today is the big picture issue of the fact that when the Howard government moves to sell uranium to China it is making the world less safe and it must take responsibility for fuelling the nuclear weapons cycle globally. There is no other way to look at it. Let us look at China’s history in relation to nuclear power. First of all, it has an active nuclear weapons program. Nobody can deny that—it is happening right now. Secondly, China has provided missile technology in the past to North Korea, to Libya and to Pakistan and was also implicated in selling technology for weapons into Iran. China’s record is not good in relation to non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Furthermore, only last year somebody senior in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army indicated that if the US moved on Taiwan China would use nuclear weapons. And China’s nuclear weapons are quite capable of reaching Australia. So we have a government that is blind on behalf of BHP Billiton and its associates, and the dollars that might flow in from the export of uranium, to the global ramifications of fuelling the nuclear weapons cycle. Let us go into that. We heard the government say in question time that the highest standards will apply. They will not apply because China is part of the nuclear weapons club and as such its safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency is different from that of other countries. When I say that, I mean China can refuse inspection of its facilities under its existing safeguards agreements, and already Foreign Minister Downer has said that the additional protocol will not apply in relation to China. If that additional protocol did apply then it would at least allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to nominate the sites they wanted to inspect and it would allow them to conduct a wide range of chemical and environmental assay testing. But that is not going to apply in relation to this deal with China.

Furthermore—and this is the thing the Howard government have to answer—they say that they can guarantee that the yellowcake that leaves our shores will go into nuclear power. How can they do that when the Chinese have insisted that all uranium leaving Australia be processed in China and all the processing facilities are in military facilities which they can refuse to have inspected under the current safeguards? That means Australian yellowcake goes in, Chinese yellowcake goes in, it is processed to various levels of intensity and you can have your highly enriched uranium coming out and your uranium processed to such a level that it can fuel nuclear power for civilian purposes. But the point is: you cannot decipher which uranium atoms are from Australia and which are from China or elsewhere. Even if you could, it does not matter because China has already said it has insufficient uranium to have nuclear power and nuclear weapons. It wants both, and so Australian uranium will either be used to displace the uranium currently in the power cycle to allow Chinese uranium to go across to the weapons cycle or, alternatively, simply be used in that way.

Australia has a substantial case to answer and if the Howard government is going to declare that it is interested in the war against terror and that it supports a stronger and more secure global environment then it should not be exporting uranium to China and India which will make the world less safe. We know that there are handbag sized bombs for terrorists and we know that highly enriched uranium is already out there and in fairly insecure storage around the world. Australia fuelling this cycle simply in order to improve its export balance of payments and the returns to companies that have got a clear eye on the game, of which BHP Billiton and its Roxby Downs expansion is one, is not a good reason to be rushing headlong into nuclear. It is not a solution to climate change—that is a furphy. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.