Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think the minister should listen to Mr Tollner. After all, Mr Tollner is an authority on shooting off his mouth. Just look at the next sentence of Mr Tollner’s speech, when he admitted that he naively believed the minister. If I remember correctly, on Darwin radio just last week, David Tollner referred to Senator Ian Campbell as an ‘itinerant drunk full of Dutch courage’ in reference to his minister on the issue of the culling of crocodiles.

The member for Solomon and Senator Nigel Scullion were sucked into the misleading statements of the minister and passed on this misleading information to the people of the Northern Territory in the lead-up to the Northern Territory election. The message that comes out of this whole sorry saga about the nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory is very clear: no-one can trust the federal cabinet of this Howard government. If government members cannot trust their own cabinet, why should Territorians? Mr Tollner might plead ignorance in this debate, but ignorance is not an excuse for incompetence for the boys from the CLP, who have consistently failed to stand up for the rights of Territorians.

Mr Tollner goes on a bit further. At the Central Council meeting of the CLP a few weeks ago, Mr Tollner pushed for and got up a motion on uranium enrichment. The Country Liberal Party put out a press release on 27 September calling for submissions on uranium enrichment. Mr Tollner was quite excited about this. ‘Let’s look at uranium enrichment,’ he said. I would have to say that the CLP has moved from ignorance to lunacy now. Where has Mr Tollner come up with this idea? Before the last election he stated that he did not want a low-level nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory. He has now had a major shift in his beliefs and he wants to have a look at an enrichment facility. But not in his own electorate, though; he probably has in mind the electorate of Lingiari, which is the only place it would fit.

BHP Billiton, this week, have come out and said that the local uranium enrichment industry is not viable. They said:

... enriching uranium has been dealt a blow by BHP Billiton’s declaration that the industry is unviable.

Although the CLP might be calling for submissions on uranium enrichment, there is no notice of that on their website. Their website is devoid of any closing date for submissions. You would have no idea where to send submissions to the CLP. It is just another opportunity for Mr Tollner to grandstand—to not represent Territorians as he was elected to do—on this issue. (Time expired)