Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I take a big, deep breath here because I need some oxygen just to understand exactly where the Labor Party are coming from. They have a position which, at best, is duplicitous. They want to profit from uranium mining. They want to profit from the benefit of the medical use of nuclear technology but they do not want to store their waste safely; they want to store it under hospitals, near schools and in residential suburbs. They want to store it in hundreds of locations because it is not safe in a national repository. We have had that debate. They want us to go forward with clean greenhouse-gas-free power generation. They purport to support the coal industry and yet they want to reduce emissions by 60 per cent over the next 50 years. It is a very long bow to draw. It is going to cost billions and billions of dollars. This is once again simply an ill-considered attempt to score political points.

What they do not realise is that they jeopardise the future of Australia if they are not prepared to enter into these debates. The Labor Party unfortunately have to wait for their national meeting or whatever they call it—their love-in, their get-together—and they need to have their policy decided for them by their union bosses. We have already heard today on the radio that one of the senators on the other side of the chamber has said they get instructed by their union bosses and, in fact, are under the control of their union bosses, so we know who is pulling the strings in the Labor Party. I suppose that they are trying to deal themselves into the nuclear debate to ensure that they can do something irrational with it, as they have with so many other industries in the course of the history of this country. I say to the people of South Australia and Australia, let us get into the debate, let us encourage people to explore alternative energy sources, not only for the good of our country but for the good of the people of Australia.