Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister representing the Prime Minister. On 6 July the Prime Minister told ABC radio:

I am not going to have this country used as some kind of repository for other people’s nuclear problems … waste problems.

On 19 July Minister Campbell told Mr Laurie Oakes on the Sunday program:

The Prime Minister has made it quite clear that we won’t be storing other people’s waste in Australia.

Minister, today the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry and Resources report on Australia’s uranium says ‘a waste management industry could be of immense economic value to the nation’, suggesting a ‘role for Australia in the back-end of the fuel cycle’. It also wants Australia to adopt a licensing and regulatory framework to establish a fuel cycle service in Australia—in other words, to store other countries’ nuclear waste. Can the minister tell the chamber exactly what is the policy of the coalition government on the storage of the nuclear waste of other countries?