Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Hansard source

In response to Senator Allison’s question, I can assure you that the government’s policy is very clear. We believe that each country should be responsible for its own radioactive waste. Indeed, it was during the period that I was Minister for Industry, Science and Resources that we enacted appropriate legislation to ensure that that was the case—that we will not receive the waste of other countries. We accept our responsibility to look after our waste and we expect every other country to accept responsibility for looking after their waste and not expect Australia to do so. We are opposed to the importation of other countries’ waste, and that is now a matter of law, for which we are responsible. So whatever the House of Reps committee may say on that—and I know that there are others around the world who think that Australia would be a good place to store other countries’ nuclear waste—we reject that proposition.

Our position is quite clear on this matter. Indeed, we have taken our responsibility to store our waste very seriously, unlike other parties in this parliament who have not supported the former Labor policy, enacted by Mr Crean when he was the responsible minister, to make sure that Australia had its own purpose-built low-level radioactive waste repository—a policy that we inherited from the former Labor government and which we have endeavoured to put in place to ensure that Australia does responsibly look after its own low-level radioactive waste, a policy continuously sabotaged by parties on the other side of the chamber in this place and by state Labor governments. So we continue to have the ridiculous situation where Australia’s low-level radioactive waste is stored in basements and safes all over the country, in hospitals and research institutes. It is a ridiculous situation. We do take seriously our responsibilities to look after our own waste. We wish other parties would join us in ensuring that we can do so.