Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am appalled that Australia has signed up to the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. I have been a critic and an opponent ever since the Prime Minister went to the United States last year to start talking about it, because we all know that it is about selling more uranium into the global nuclear fuel cycle and taking back the waste. As we also know, the reason Canada has not signed up to the GNEP is that Canada does not want to become an international waste dump. The Prime Minister has now set Australia up in the GNEP and we have learned that from the Times of India. It seems as though we have to go to the nuclear states to find out what our own country is involved in around the world.

But I return to the matter of the reference to the committee of the Australia-Russia uranium agreement because I think this is critically important. Less than a week after President Putin left Australia to go home to Russia, we learn that Russia tested the world’s most powerful vacuum bomb last week. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald states:

“Test results of the new airborne weapon have shown its efficiency—

in inverted commas—

and power is commensurate with a nuclear weapon,” Alexander Rushkin, deputy head of Russia’s armed force chief of staff, told Russia’s ... First Channel television.

“You will now see it in action, the bomb which has no match in the world is being tested at a military site.”

It goes on to say:

A vacuum bomb or fuel-air explosive causes widespread devastation.

A typical bomb of that type is dropped or fired, the first explosive charge bursts open the container at a predetermined height and disperses the fuel in a cloud that mixes with oxygen.

A second charge ignites the cloud, which can engulf objects or buildings.

Rushkin goes on to say:

“... I want to stress that the action of this weapon does not contaminate the environment, in contrast to a nuclear one.”

So less than a week after Australia signs on to an agreement with the President of Russia on a nuclear arrangement, the President goes home to welcome the explosion of the world’s most powerful vacuum bomb. These are hardly the activities of a state which is supposedly only interested in peace and disarmament.

We have also reports from Russia about human rights abuses. In particular, I would like to talk about Larissa Arap. I will raise her name in this parliament time and time again because she is a young dissident who finds herself now in a psychiatric facility in Russia, in an asylum reminiscent of the old KGB days. She is a critic of President Putin. As a result, she was put in a psychiatric institution, and there has been a change in the law in Russia to remove the right of sectioned patients to seek independent assessment. There are dozens of incidents now suggesting that Russia’s psychiatric system is rapidly becoming as unsavoury as it used to be in Soviet times. Larissa Arap is a young woman who has been an outspoken critic of the Putin regime, particularly in relation to the crackdown on dissidents, and that is where she finds herself.

I believe at this stage that Larissa is still alive, unlike the demonstrators outside the Angarsk enrichment facility, where one demonstrator was murdered, bashed to death, recently and a number of others were seriously injured. President Putin suggested that it was just the actions of local hooligans and not state endorsed violence. State endorsed violence is occurring all over Russia as we speak. In fact, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the Moscow apartment bombings were the work of the FSB and also that the FSB is supporting fundamentalist Islamic schools in Chechnya to foment the violence there to justify the crackdown. That is what is being said currently about—