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

I have a number of amendments to the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2010 which I wish to speak to and which I addressed very briefly in my speech on the second reading; however, I did not go into a great deal of detail about the way that the Greens would approach the committee stage of this bill. I have said—and we were happy to let it go through on the voices—that we do not support the bill proceeding to the committee stage, and that is because we believe that it is irredeemable: it is a bill based on a false premise and a broken promise, and we genuinely do not believe that it can be greatly improved. However, in the interests of allowing the Senate to undertake its role of scrutiny and improvement of bills, some time ago the Australian Greens went to the trouble of proposing a number of amendments that fall into a couple of key categories.

Before I go into greater detail, I state that broadly the amendments try to improve the legal integrity of the bill as well as to somehow and somewhat constrain and curtail the minister's total and unambiguous discretion in siting decisions. We recognise that this bill relates to siting; that once a decision has been made on location, whether it be Muckaty or somewhere else, a whole range of processes kick into gear, chief among which is the process of environmental assessment under the Commonwealth EPBC Act. That is the central vehicle through which many of these issues will be addressed, but the regulator, ARPANSA, will also be quite centrally involved in establishing the radiation health and safety impacts of the facility, of the transfer of the materials to the facility and of its operation once it is up and running.

So we quite clearly recognise that this debate is effectively about siting and about who gets to decide which of the sites will be subject to those further processes of scrutiny and so on. But the difficulty we have is that, once these processes have been set in train, they will effectively be treated by gov­ernment as a foregone conclusion. Before the minister jumps up to argue that due process will be followed in all instances and so on and that we are basically pre-empting the process of an environmental impact assess­ment and a radiation safety assessment, you do not have to look too much further than the motion put up jointly by Senator Siewert and I on Woodside in the West Kimberley. Woodside are in the middle of applications to flatten 25 or more hectares of bilby habitat in the West Kimberley before the strategic impact assessment of the proposal for a gas plant in the Browse Basin in WA has been approved or even considered. It is well understood by the Western Australian government and by the proponents that that project is going ahead right where it is proposed to be—to the degree that the company is already going ahead and putting bulldozers to the site—before the process of environmental impact assessment has been undertaken and concluded.

It is distressingly common in Australian environmental law that once a decision on a site or location has been made, either by a private proponent or by a government, it is full steam ahead. Investment decisions are made, board approval is given, the processes roll out and bulldozers go to country and start flattening the pace in preparation for site works. Often these are negotiated away or are described as being preparatory or part of the environmental impact assessment process or whatever it might be. But effectively the entire process of the environ­mental impact assessment and radiation safety impact assessment will be thoroughly pre-empted by this minister, if past form is anything at all to go by. As soon as that pin hits the map and the minister has pointed a finger and decided where that site is to be, it will be full steam ahead.

We will pursue the processes that roll out with great diligence and attention to detail, but we know for sure that the government will be basing all further actions on the assumption that that site will go ahead, irrespective of what falls out of the environmental impact assessment process. That is why we need to pay so much care and attention to the process, in the first place, of siting the dump, which this bill quite clearly covers. What guides the discretion of the minister in the first place? On what grounds will the minister be making a decision about what is a site and what is not, what is appropriate for a store or a dump of this kind and what is not? The fact that we know—as we will go through in great detail during the committee stage of this bill—is that there is nothing whatsoever to guide the discretion of this minister. That is what a number of our amendments go to: the legal integrity of the process that allows a minister essentially unfettered discretion to go ahead and put this dump where he wishes and set these processes into motion.

We will probably hear shortly—and probably from Minister Sherry at the table, who has been given the unfortunate task of defending this appalling proposal this afternoon—comments relating to procedural fairness being restored, to rights of appeal being restored, to rights of judicial review being restored. We will go through this in a great deal of detail and point out to the government and to the coalition—whom I presume at some future stage will file in here and vote for the bill; they chose not to do so in the House of Representatives but we can only presume that they will vote for it here in the Senate—that there is no such guidance being placed on the minister's ability simply to point at a map. That is why we will be paying such clear attention to this bill.

It is not good enough, we believe, simply to stand up and wave this proposal through and give dignity to the fiction that the government is repealing the coalition's act, which has been in place from 2005, and replacing it with substantially different legislation. Large parts of the bill that we are debating this afternoon were cut-and-pasted from the Howard-era bill that was introduced at the end of 2005, when I was working for Senator Siewert, and was then amended again at the end of 2006.

Those cut-and-pastes from the earlier bill into the one that we are debating today relate most essentially to preserving the Muckaty nomination. This is even though Labor MPs in opposition during the election campaign, as Senator Minchin quite correctly pointed out yesterday, went on the campaign trail calling Prime Minister Howard's proposal to coercively and quite aggressively dump this material in the Territory an outrage. They called it sordid and shameful and they called quite unambiguously for its repeal.

Then, right after the election, for some mysterious reason that nobody has ever satisfactorily explained—and I asked Senator Sherry what the basis for this was a couple of weeks ago in question time and there was not a satisfactory answer, but perhaps one can be provided today—the decision was made to transfer responsibility for radioactive waste management from the science portfolio, where it has been for decades into the resources and energy portfolio. What sense does it make to take responsibility for the waste products of this industry, which has been regulated for years within the science ministry—and we heard Senator Carr during the election campaign being very clear on his views of the shameful way in which the Howard government engaged in this issue—and transfer it right after the election to Minister Martin Ferguson? As far as I am aware, he made no statements at all on the issue during the election campaign, because it would not have been part of his responsibilities from opposition to have a view on the matter. It is pretty evident to us all what the view is now.

The view now is simply to crash this project through or crash. As I explained at some length in my speech in the second reading debate, this is a proposal and a way of doing business that is prone to failure. It has failed a number of times, not just in Australia, whether it be the Pangea example of 1999 in Western Australia or the rather shameful episode in South Australia, which Senator Minchin addressed in his comments yesterday. The idea of aggressively rolling into a community and telling people that the material is going to go there is a recipe for failure, obviously. When you turn up, the people who live there or who have traditional responsibility for the area have nowhere else to go.

I acknowledge, as Senator Sherry does, that views are divided on the ground, in the area most close to the front line, that communities have been split and families have been pitched against each other. This would happen in any community if somebody in a suburban neighbourhood decided that they were going to give their backyard up for a radioactive waste dump, giving the neighbours no opportunity whatsoever to have a say. Even if you accept the tenure argument that will be run in the Federal Court by the Northern Land Council that the right people have been consulted, imagine being a neighbour and discovering that the decision has been made and that it is a done deal and you are told: 'Sure, we'll go through environmental impact assessment processes and whatnot but you have no rights as a neighbour whatsoever.'

If that is the outcome—and I am not going to reflect on the arguments that will be heard in the Federal Court, hopefully later this year—there will be people from the Barkly region, from all of the families that played a role in the establishment of the Muckaty land trust, who will feel justifiably ripped off by what they heard from the opposition, now government MPs, in the run-up to the 2007 election. They were absolutely unambiguous in their opposition to the way that this debate was conducted.

Before I go into too much detail on the amendments that I propose to move, I will ask my first question. Minster, do you recall me asking a question in question time a month or so ago—I might have inadvertently put the question to Senator Carr but I have been told that it is actually your portfolio responsibility—around what the thinking was after the 2007 election for transferring responsibility for radioactive waste to the Minister for Resources and Energy?