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

I rise this afternoon to provide a contribution to this debate and to take note of the answers provided today. We have had an emotive outburst from Senator Ronaldson in relation to being asked: where are the nuclear reactors actually going to go? It is of course a question that this government will evade for time immemorial, particularly between now and the next federal election. The government will not want to identify its full plans in terms of nuclear power. It is a debate that has been generated by a Prime Minister and by a government that is running out of ideas in terms of where it will take this country over the next decade. The government is grasping at straws and has decided once again to pick an issue that is highly irrelevant and that diverts the nation’s attention from this government’s inability to come to grips with what is happening in terms of climate change. It is an attempt by this government to divert attention from why it has been so inadequate in dealing with environmental issues for the last 10 years.

This government is simply proposing that it swaps one set of problems for a dirty power source which no doubt will need a government subsidy to make it affordable. There is no doubt that people will have heard over previous weeks that either this government introduces an emissions tax or charge on its coal fired energy and commits to the Kyoto protocol or we will have taxpayers subsidising outrageously unaffordable nuclear energy. I have heard time and time again in the media that Australians will not be able to afford nuclear power because it is so expensive. But it is a path that this government believes it needs to take us down one year prior to the election. The government’s current strategy on nuclear power also shows that there is a need to bully the Northern Territory into taking its radioactive waste. We might spend a lot of time talking about signing Kyoto or not and about greenhouse gas emissions and taxes versus the nuclear fuel cycle but, at the end of the day, let us have a discussion about where the nuclear waste will go if we enter the nuclear fuel cycle.

We know, quite categorically, that in the last 18 months this government has made a decision to override Northern Territory government laws, to totally ignore the discussion and the wishes of Indigenous traditional owners in the Northern Territory and to simply seek to dump onto the Northern Territory the radioactive waste that is coming back from France and Scotland and the radioactive waste that it now stores at Lucas Heights. For forever and a day people in the Northern Territory will remember Senator Ian Campbell’s infamous line when, two days prior to the last federal election, he said, ‘I give you a categorical assurance that the nuclear waste dump will not be put in the Northern Territory.’ That was a lie. And so was the commitment by the Prime Minister prior to that election that the Northern Territory was not on the nuclear waste dump map—another lie.

People in the Territory have been deceived about the issue of where this country wants to dump waste. We know that there are casks returning from France—there is debate about whether it is 2011 or 2015. We know now that those casks will involve storage of not only uranium but also plutonium because that is what you get at the end cycle when you embark on nuclear energy. Some people might suggest, as the Switkowski report suggests, that Australia could store high, medium, and low-level waste, that we have the place to do it. I know that they are thinking of outback Australia because in their minds no-one lives there, it is nobody’s home. It is somebody’s home when you come to the Territory. If we are going to have a radioactive dump in this country that will be the result of our embarking on a nuclear fuel cycle let us build it in the seat of Bennelong. Why not the seat of Hastings or even the seat of Kalgoorlie? No, we could not do that. They are Liberal held seats and we would not want to get those voters offside. We will just dump it without consultation and without care in the seat of Lingiari. Why is that? Oh, that is only where Indigenous people in this country live and surely they do not care or mind. Not only that, the rest of the country will not care or mind either. (Time expired)