Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Social Inclusion and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Ludlam, the amendments you have proposed to the Uranium Royalty (Northern Territory) Bill 2008 are absolutely outside the scope of the bill. For that reason, the government is opposed to all those amendments. I would like to reiterate that the government’s intention is that the royalty regime applicable to uranium in the Territory be consistent with other minerals, thereby providing certainty for all stakeholders. But you have raised some important questions for me and I would like to respond to some of the issues you have, particularly in this first amendment, and then I presume you will want to go through the others.

The first group of amendments you raised seek to establish a new remediation fund. You have proposed a five per cent remediation royalty stream. I am advised that, at a uranium price of US$30 per pound, the Greens proposal would raise about $59 million over 20 years. At a price of US$36 per pound, approximately $136 million would be raised. While there is much to commend this approach in obtaining funds to secure that the necessary rehabilitation is undertaken, if this amendment were defeated, the regime that is currently in place and operates at the present time means that the Northern Territory actually requires mining operators to submit a security bond that covers 100 per cent of the cost of rehabilitating the site. That security is held by government as cash or a bank guarantee and is updated annually.

I assume that your proposal in this amendment is not that a miner would pay twice for the same rehabilitation, because that would be, I think, quite an outrageous expectation. But, on the basis of this, a real advantage of the Greens amendment is that the payments by the miner would match their cashflow and this would be a great benefit in encouraging the mining operations. If I could be persuaded that there were no disadvantages from an environmental perspective from such an approach, I would support it. However, the problem is that the total monies raised in any point in time may be less than the cost of rehabilitation at that same time. There could be circumstances which would potentially again leave the taxpayer to pick up the cost. Because the current system requires a bond to cover 100 per cent of the estimated cost of rehabilitation associated with that mine, most importantly, this cost is reassessed annually and the required bond is updated. I am advised that the bond currently held for Ranger is actually $146 million. In other words, while the intent is there, what is actually being proposed in practice is a system that may well result in miners potentially contributing less to the true cost of rehabilitation. The Labor government is very clear in its support for uranium mining, but only with the thorough environmental protection processes in place.