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

This shows that you have simply sold the Territory down the drain. I remember a number of previous senators representing the Northern Territory simply being chastised if they did not stand up for the rights of Territory legislation, particularly in respect of internet gambling and the euthanasia debate. I have referred to these in previous debates about this matter. It seems that in this day and age it is okay for people like Mr Tollner and Senator Scullion to simply support and protect their federal Liberal and National Party mates and completely sell out the Territory.

As a face saver, the Northern Land Council came to Senator Scullion’s aid, saying, ‘We might be interested in a dump.’ Senator Scullion, it is interesting that you have again confessed that some of these legislative amendments have been brought about by the request of the Northern Land Council. It is funny that that is not what your minister said in a Stateline interview last Friday night. I will get to that in the minute.

The Central Land Council opposes these amendments but the Northern Land Council does not, so what are we doing here? We have legislation that is driven at the behest of one land council in the Northern Territory because it suits their political agenda. It is a pity, Senator Scullion, that you did not seek to inform yourself about the extensive consultations that the Central Land Council have had on this matter. In fact, only two weeks ago there was a three-day meeting at Finke. While I know you are avid about what has happened during the Northern Land Council’s meetings, you should inform yourself about what has happened at the Central Land Council’s meetings. I note that at a meeting of the Northern Land Council—I do so with all due respect; it is not my intention to criticise it here—only DEST and ANSTO appeared, not the Australian Conservation Foundation or the Medical Association for the Prevention of War or other experts in this field who might provide an alternative view. They were never given the opportunity to brief or to talk to traditional owners about this matter.

Anyway, let us get back to last year when Senator Scullion was able to wriggle around his embarrassment, saying, ‘We’re going to have a dump in the Territory whether we like it or not and if you don’t like the proposed site we’ll amend the bill to let the Northern Territory or a land council propose one for us.’ Of course the bill was amended to allow this to happen. The Northern Land Council said, ‘Okay, we’ll have a look at it but we want some further changes to ensure that traditional owners are in control.’ As government senators noted in their report from the Senate committee of inquiry into the first bill:

It is clear that the NLC’s support for the legislation is conditional on traditional owners retaining a final veto right concerning the location of a waste facility on the basis of sacred site and environmental considerations.

Twelve months on, we now have this bill indicating that traditional owners or affected persons will have no final say on the siting of the dump. What we are doing today is legislating to remove traditional owners’ final veto right. A submission from Katherine Residents Against Nuclear Dump noted:

The implications of this are extraordinary, as it reduces the former rules of nomination to guidelines, allowing Land Councils to nominate land for a Commonwealth dump irrespective of traditional owners’ opposition and concerns, contrary to their usual, statutory obligations under the Land Rights Act.

The bill explicitly says there will be no right to procedural fairness or judicial review. The government’s legislation was to block what it called ‘politically motivated challenges’ to the process, but, as David Ross, the director of the Central Land Council, said in its submission in the last week or so:

I think the real issue here is that Aboriginal people are not interested in the politically motivated challenges; they are interested in their rights and in being consulted about what is to take place or what is not to take place on their land. That is what interests Aboriginal people more than anything else.

The site nomination by the land council will be the end of the process as far as traditional owners are concerned. The Northern Land Council correctly points out that leases granted over Aboriginal land cannot be invalidated on the basis of faulty consultation. However, under this bill, once a site is given up by traditional owners it will be a done deal for those people—before the government does the environmental assessment, or the designs for the facility and the access corridors, or any other work involved in getting the dump off the ground. Traditional owners will be effectively shut out, well before any of those other processes happen. That is why the provisions of this bill are, unlike other agreements, protected from any disputes about faulty consultation by the Land Rights Act.

Under the Land Rights Act, the protection of the agreement occurs at the end of the negotiation process, perhaps a few years down the track when all the details have been negotiated and what is to be done on the land that is to be leased would be well known by the interested parties. But, under this amended bill, once the site is nominated by the land council, and before the government even has a clear idea of what it will do at the site or in any access corridors, there is simply no further redress or say for traditional owners, even though they may find out a whole lot more about the waste facility, its size and its impact on their country.

This bill absolves the government of any responsibility to traditional owners of a site to ensure that they agree with it becoming a radioactive dump site and losing access to it. It also absolves the land council of meeting its responsibilities under the Land Rights Act to act only on the advice of traditional owners.

The Central Land Council in its submission to the inquiry last week asked:

Why are Australia’s most disadvantaged group being denied a basic entitlement to accountable and transparent process merely because of the possibility of “politically motivated challenges”?

It is ironic that after years of the Country Liberal Party accusing land councils of not acting in the interests of traditional owners, here is the very same Country Liberal Party and their coalition partners actually legislating to encourage it.

The Conservation Foundation said in its submission:

The new provisions in the CRWM Amendment (2006) Bill which specify that failure to comply with 3B(1) would not invalidate a nomination by a Land Council—or declaration by the Minister—just as clearly are intended to revoke Traditional Owners existing rights.

It is extraordinary and profoundly shameful that in a matter as controversial and contested as the siting of a nuclear waste dump such long held and procedurally proper processes are being circumvented.

Senator Scullion’s previous amendments to the dump legislation in 2005 made great play of giving traditional owners control of nominating their land for a dump. Now, in the interests of fast-tracking this dump at all costs, traditional owners will be shut out.

The No Waste Alliance in Darwin’s submission noted that the minister, in her second reading speech, has given a personal assurance that:

... should a nomination be made, I will only accept it if satisfied that these criteria have been met.

The submission continued:

Why, then, has the Minister proposed amendments which specifically state that failure to adhere to these criteria would not validate a nomination—or her declaration—of a site for a Commonwealth nuclear waste dump?

If the minister is being honest with traditional owners in the Northern Territory, and if she would only accept a nomination if she were satisfied the criteria had been met, I ask: why then do we need this legislation?

In the face of repeated lies and broken promises by federal politicians on the various parameters of dumping nuclear waste in the Territory, this empty assurance rings as hollow as her colleague Senator Campbell’s ‘categorical assurance’ two days before the last federal election that the Northern Territory would not be used to dump Commonwealth nuclear waste.

This government purports this bill is really about returning the land to traditional owners after hundreds of years, but—if that ever happens—it can be done at the government’s discretion already, without this legislation. What this bill is really about is blocking the rights of traditional owners or others from challenging any nomination of Aboriginal land for a dump site. But to take the government’s claim at face value: how likely is the return of the land in the foreseeable future?

Australia has just opened its new nuclear reactor in Sydney. It will be producing both low level and intermediate level waste for years to come. Trucks will be rolling into the dump for years and years. In Senate estimates, Mr Davoren of DEST Science Group spoke of the best case scenario with even low-level waste. He said:

You deal with radioactive material that, in the case of low-level radioactive material, for instance, might be disposed of to the environment and is regarded as posing a potential hazard for an institutional control period. If the facility is closed in 50 years, you would maintain surveillance over that site for the institutional control period, which might be 200 or 300 years.

Unless there is a great scientific leap forward, I imagine we will still be producing low-level waste in 50 years time, so why would the government close the facility then, when it is going to be monitored for hundreds of years into the future anyway?

That is the low-level waste; the intermediate waste is too dangerous to just be left in the desert to rot, so it will be stored, temporarily, possibly in the desert, so the government says. That is the same as all other intermediate and high-level waste in the world, which is ‘temporarily stored’ because no scientist anywhere in the world has yet devised a means of building a permanent disposal facility.

The reality is that traditional owners will be waiting a very long time—perhaps generations—until Australia finds a cheap, scientific and sound solution to storing intermediate waste and moves it, eventually, off their land. As the Northern Territory local member for the area of Aboriginal land most likely to nominated, the member for Barkly, Minister Elliott McAdam, said in his submission to the Senate inquiry:

The reality is however, that if radioactive waste is buried, the land will never be returned. If there is contamination from the storage of radioactive waste [on the] land it will never be returned and if no other site is ever found to relocate this radioactive waste, the land will never be returned.

Once again the government has used its numbers to ram through legislation and to allow only the most token of Senate inquiries into this important area. I note comments from my other colleagues about the process of dealing with these Commonwealth waste management bills. This is the second time we have dealt with the bill, the second time that the Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations and Education has looked into what is contained in the detail of this bill, and this is the second time we have been denied an opportunity to travel to the Northern Territory to meet local people concerned, to hear from traditional owners and to meet with the people who will be most affected by this radioactive waste dump.

The hearings have been held here in Canberra—and, if it were not bad enough that we did not give people the opportunity to fly down here, the hearing last Monday week was held by teleconference. It was a total abrogation of the right of people in the Northern Territory to attend a Senate inquiry and to take the time that is needed to put to the Senate committee their objections and concerns about this whole process. In its submission to the inquiry, No Waste Alliance Darwin notes that:

The lack of time for written submissions undoubtedly leaves all parties particularly keen to present further oral submissions to the inquiry. It is therefore once again a source of disappointment that the Committee will not be visiting the impacted regions, let alone the major cities, of the Northern Territory.

No justification or rationale has been presented for this unseemly haste; we can only speculate. One clear reason for rushing this Amendment through at high speed must be to evade unwanted scrutiny of its assault on the existing rights held by Traditional land Owners in the Northern Territory. Further, this haste denies impacted communities and electorates not only access to participation in, but also observation of the process.

As I said, this bill compromises the rights of Indigenous people living in the Territory to make decisions based on free, prior and informed consent. It negates the rights of procedural fairness and natural justice by excluding, under the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act, any judicial review process in respect of proposed sites for the location of a Commonwealth radioactive waste facility.

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission provided a submission to the inquiry. On page 6 of the submission they talk about the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. They say that article 29 of that declaration states:

2. States shall take effective measures to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent.

This government’s own draft report on uranium mining, processing and nuclear energy—the Switkowski report—says that it is widely accepted that ‘effective community engagement is a common element in the successful siting of repository investigation sites’. There has been no effective communication in the Northern Territory by the federal government through this process—and, of course, there is no intention to have any effective communication.

But let us cut to the chase. On Stateline last Friday night, Minister Bishop suggested that the need for these provisions is a result of the numerous threats by the Northern Territory government to oppose this government’s actions by any means available, including legal challenges. She is very incorrect. There has never been any suggestion by the Northern Territory government that they would make any legal challenges to oppose this dump. They have never said that. That was an incorrect statement by the Minister on Stateline last Friday night—and I hope that, at some stage, she will have the courage to correct the record in respect of the actions of the Northern Territory government.

But let us be really clear what this is about. This is about ensuring that this government’s proposal to push this dump towards being on Muckaty Station is realised. Let us line up all the dominoes here. Earlier this year the Office of the Registrar of Aboriginal Corporations amended the constitution of the Muckaty Trust Association—with, I might say, some concern from the members of the Muckaty Land Trust, who believed they were not well informed by ORAC prior to that happening. ORAC tightened up their constitution, broadened the representation and ironed out a few rough edges in terms of the way in which the Muckaty trust can be managed.

This is also about the five families who belong to Muckaty Station, three of whom live on adjoining land. Senator Scullion himself said—and I will be interested to see the Hansard at some stage—that this was about ensuring that anyone who was on land adjacent to the Northern Land Council boundaries could provide no objections. That is exactly the political reality of this bill. This bill is about cutting out all the people affected by Muckaty Station, not just some of the traditional owners but a majority of them—not the ones who live within the Northern Land Council boundary but the ones who live within the Central Land Council boundary. I have a copy of a letter that was written by those people to the chairperson of the Northern Land Council, Mr John Daly, back in July. It states:

Dear Mr Daly,

We write to you with deep concern.

In the past, we have trusted the Northern Land Council (NLC) to protect our Homelands …

…            …            …

Mr Daly, why are you talking to David Tollner and Nigel Scullion for us about our country? Why are you helping the Commonwealth Government to take control of our land to build a nuclear waste facility?

…            …            …

Mr Daly, we ask you to stop talking for us. We do not want a nuclear waste facility built on our land.

This bill is exactly about silencing these traditional owners. (Time expired)