Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

No, I do. I am a big fan. It is just a relief to know that something has been going right.

On the matter of radioactive waste, the Rudd government has been nothing short of a disaster. The government has not delivered in the spirit of or to the letter of very simple commitments that it made in the run-up to the 2007 election. So, in the context of this debate on the Rudd government’s broken promises, I want to return briefly to the heady days of the 2007 election campaign, with Kevin Rudd in opposition castigating the Howard government’s approach to radioactive waste management, which had been, I should say, appalling. But the Rudd opposition at the time—quite senior ALP spokespeople and to a person all of their Northern Territory representatives and candidates in both Houses—made very strong commitments in the area of radioactive waste.

Let us reflect briefly on what the promise was and what the 2007 election platform said. Chapter 5 stated:

Labor is committed to a responsible, mature and international best practice approach to radioactive waste management in Australia.

Accordingly, a Federal Labor Government will:

• not proceed with the development of any of the current sites identified by the Howard Government in the Northern Territory, if no contracts have been entered into for those sites.
• repeal the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act 2005.
• establish a process for identifying suitable sites that is scientific, transparent, accountable, fair and allows access to appeal mechanisms—

this is pretty simple language. If elected, a Rudd government was also to:

• ensure full community consultation in radioactive waste decision-making processes.
• commit to international best practice scientific processes to underpin Australia’s radioactive waste management, including transportation and storage.

I was working as one of the advisers to Senator Rachael Siewert when this legislation was first rammed through the Senate towards the end of 2005, in the same sitting fortnight as the former government’s Work Choices legislation, Welfare to Work legislation, the legislation abolishing compulsory student unionism and, of course, the infamous terror laws, which are all still on the books. They found time to ram through radioactive waste dump legislation as well. Again, the ALP condemned that. They called the legislation—accurately, in my view—extreme, arrogant, heavy-handed, draconian, sorry, sordid, extraordinary and profoundly shameful. Some of these words were put to us by Senator Trish Crossin, Senator Carr and Warren Snowdon, MP. Of course, they were spot on. They took a very clear and unequivocal position on this issue into the closing months of the 2007 election campaign. So that was the promise, and exactly when has it been broken? Indeed, is there a case to say that it has been?

The first thing that happened subsequent to the Rudd government taking office after the 2007 election was that radioactive waste management issues were mysteriously taken out of the science portfolio, where they had been right through the period of the Howard government and well before, and given to Martin Ferguson in the resources and industry portfolio. That is a bizarre decision to make, quite honestly: to transfer radioactive waste management from the science portfolio to the resources portfolio; to give it to somebody with absolutely no expertise, no subtlety and no idea, really, about any of the commitments that had been made by the Rudd government and by its representatives in the Northern Territory and around Australia in the run-up to the election. So it was given to this minister with no background, no expertise and no willingness to follow through with the ALP’s election commitment, and we waited for several months for the government to fulfil that promise. It was pretty simple, really: repeal the legislation and replace it with something scientifically defensible that actually brings the community along, rather than simply ramming something through, as the former government had attempted. We started to get pretty edgy. This was at the time when I took my place in here, and I started testing the ALP on whether they actually would come through with this election commitment. On a couple of occasions we brought motions through here and watched the government vote against the exact same language that was in their policy document in the lead-up to the 2007 election. We were not asking them to do anything, simply to note the language in those policy commitments, but the ALP lined up against the Greens and voted against it. That was interesting.

In 2008, the government-dominated Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts Committee conducted an inquiry into my private senator’s bill to fulfil the ALP’s election commitment for them: a repeal of the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act. That committee did some very good work. It was very collegial. We travelled to Alice Springs, and we had hearings here in Canberra. We heard from the agencies with the lead portfolio responsibility for radioactive waste management, from the industry and from environment groups around the country with a very large membership with a strong interest in these issues. In Alice Springs we heard from some senior traditional owners from around the Territory, because at that time four sites were still under consideration and they were very strongly opposed to the approach of the former government and wanted to know why on earth the ALP had not followed through with their commitment. Senator McEwen, who is with us this afternoon, chaired that committee. We in the Australian Greens had quite a degree of affinity, and we signed on to the majority report. We had some additional comments but the recommendations flowing from that report were quite satisfactory to us in large part in that they said that the government should do what they said they would do when in opposition. The committee came out with a set of recommendations that were not perfect, as far as we were concerned, but that we could live with. We shared common ground at that time on the objective of establishing a consensual process of site selection, which looks to agreed scientific grounds for determining suitability and the centrality of community consultation and support.

So what exactly happened after that? Nothing at all. The first thing that the government did was to ignore the committee’s recommendation that the repeal bill be brought in to this place at the beginning of the first quarter of last year. That did not happen. It took a full year for the minister to get around to serving up what we have before us now. The Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee was given, in the government’s view, 11 working days to inquire into to the government’s repeal bill, which in fact is nothing more than a rather shabby and amateurish cut and paste of what the former government had been proceeding with. At least with the former government you knew where you stood. What we have now with the Rudd government is exactly the same approach with an added dash of hypocrisy, because when they were in opposition they had been castigating senators and MPs on this side of the chamber for doing what they are now quite clearly doing in attempting to ram it through this place. That is indeed a broken election commitment.

Who cares? Who was the Labor Party making this election commitment to in the run-up to the 2007 election? Chiefly, of course, the people on the front line, the people targeted to host, against their will and without their consent, a facility hosting Australia’s most dangerous industrial waste materials—radiotoxic waste, the low-level material that ticks for a period of approximately 300 years, the long-lived intermediate level waste, the old reactor cores and the spent fuel that has been reprocessed overseas and returned to Australia, which is deadly for tens of thousands of years, for periods that will last several ice ages from now. The government are attempting to force this facility on to a cattle station 100 kilometres from Tennant Creek in a direct violation of the commitments that they made in the run-up to that election. For the people who are on the front line, and who are facing this juggernaut now in the name of Martin Ferguson, sitting in an office in Canberra planning this assault on their sovereignty and on their rights to stand up for country and culture, that election promise has been violated. For ALP voters, who during the federal election campaign put their trust in the representatives that the ALP would send to Canberra, the promise has been broken. For anybody who preferenced the ALP, including a large number of Green voters who helped carry the Rudd government into office, the promise has been broken. For environment groups, with tens of thousands of members around Australia who have taken a long interest in this and who have played an enormously important role in galvanising community support around the country for communities on the front line, the promise has been broken and for every Northern Territory citizen who thought the ALP would be able to serve up something better than what we have seen now that promise has been broken.

So now what we see is a 2007 election promise becoming a 2010 election liability. I see it as a very important part of my job in the remaining months, whether or not the Rudd government succeeds in blasting this flawed and disgusting piece of legislation through this place, to make sure that right around the country this is not seen as a Northern Territory issue. When the Senate committee sat in Darwin we had rallies as far away as Hobart, Perth and Melbourne, a very long way from where that Senate committee was hearing evidence from the traditional owners on the front line, from the Northern Territory Chief Minister and from people right on down the line. This is not an issue that is going to go away. This is an election commitment that will haunt the government in this election campaign.