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

I thank the minister. I move:

That the Senate take note of the explanation.

That is a very brief explanation for two questions on very similar issues that I gave notice of last December. The briefing with Dr Floyd, the new director-general of ASNO, was only offered about a fortnight ago. That officer has only just recently taken up that position. I recognise that Minister Conroy is outside his portfolio but I find that explanation to be wholly inadequate given that these questions were put on the Notice Paperin December. They are about an issue, one which I will go into some detail on in a moment, that has direct relevance to Australia's security interests and yet these questions have languished, one for 253 days and one for 242 days. That is how long it has taken. I took the opportunity to go back through the Notice Paperand take a look at what else has lapsed, and this is an issue that I think Senator Cormann took up yesterday, and saw that we have questions overdue by a matter of months. The convention in this place is 30 days and for most portfolios you actually get that kind of response; you get an answer approximately 30 days after you put a question on notice. The oldest one, the one that has been lingering the longest, is in the name of Senator Bob Brown, who gave notice on 28 September 2010 of asking about an issue relating to the Australian Political Parties for Democracy Program. That has been lying around for nearly a year. There are questions to Minister Conroy—and it is a bit of a shame that he has left the room—including a question that Senator Brown put on notice on 8 December 2010 relating to the Indonesian unit known as Detachment 88, which has been implicated in horrific human rights abuses in Indonesia. So that has been lying around since 8 December 2010. There are questions of mine to Minister Conroy relating to the Digital Switchover Taskforce, quite detailed questions—about information that it would have been handy for me to know about—that I gave notice of on 13 December 2010. There is a question by Senator Siewert, relating to staffing in the disability services portfolio, that she put on notice in April 2011. There are dozens of questions lying around and no apparent procedure for getting them answered within the right time frame. I did the Minister for Foreign Affairs the courtesy this morning of letting him know that we would be chasing these up, months and months after they were lodged, and he has seen fit to do nothing more than send Minister Conroy along to say, 'Oh, you'll be briefed on those, among other things, in a week's time.' That is really different from the process for questions on notice whereby detailed information is sought and expected to be received. I wonder whether any spokesperson from the govern­ment would care to inform the chamber about what process actually operates behind the scenes for deciding which questions you will just let lapse until they get taken up in the Senate and which will be given a proper answer.

The reason that I have taken this time this afternoon—and I will only speak briefly, because I realise that progress did not get very far this morning on the bill that is before the chamber—relates to Burma's alleged nuclear weapons program. This is an issue in which Australia has a very direct interest. My questions on this subject first arose from some alarming reports that were issued in 2009 by Professor Des Ball from ANU and Phil Thornton, a journalist living on the Thai-Burma border. I had the opportunity to meet with both these two individuals who put the reports together. The cross-party group, known as Australian Parliamentarians for Democracy in Burma, sought a briefing from Professor Ball in 2009, which he provided and for which we are very grateful. He also briefed ASNO, the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office here, in Canberra, and other depart­ments to discuss their findings and their research. I had the good fortune to meet Mr Thornton when I took a trip to the Thai-Burma border very early last year.

What MPs learned at the briefing was that the two authors had interviewed two inform­ants who had come out of Burma. They were not aware of the existence of each other. The defectors described Russian and North Korean collaboration with the Burmese military in an illicit reactor for producing plutonium. The people who follow these issues will be aware that these kinds of reactors are effectively for military use only. There is very, very little point if you do not even have a civil nuclear program in building a plutonium producing reactor. This techno­logy is complex; it is very elaborate; it would take a long time to put together. If there is an illicit nuclear weapons program taking shape in Burma, with the covert or overt support of either the Russian government or the North Korean government, I think it would be in our interests to find out about that and do our part to stop that thing in its tracks before it got too far advanced.

The two informers told virtually identical stories about a clandestine facility that has been under construction for a period of time and that North Korea is assisting the Burmese regime to create a plutonium production facility in a very large underground complex in the regional part of the country. Their descriptions include the location of the facility, its scale, the timetable of construction and the sort of equipment that they are bringing in. The two stories matched perfectly. These were two defectors who had come out of the country and did not know of each other's existence. It would be of huge concern if Burma were embarking on clandestine nuclear activities in contravention of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. I hope I do not have to spell out the reasons why. US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, raised the suspected collaboration at the ASEAN summit in July of last year. Jane's Intelli­gence Review has written it up. The Institute for Science and International Security, which is a Washington DC based think tank, is writing it up. And a report commissioned by the Democratic Voice of Burma said that, while the military may not be successful in their efforts—and of course we wish them every failure—the intent is clear. It said analysis leads to only one conclusion: the technology is for nuclear weapons and not civilian use or nuclear power.

There are doubts. There is ambiguity operating in this kind of environment, obviously. Because the rumours have been going for some time, it was interesting to see quite a reasonable amount of material disclosed as a result of the WikiLeaks document drop of state department archives last year in which this subject is canvassed at length. A 2004 cable provided as part of that large store of material noted that there was no direct evidence of the alleged nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Burma; however, 'rumours of ongoing construction of a nuclear reactor are surprisingly consistent and observations of activity appear to be increasing as are alleged sightings of North Korean technicians inside Burma'. Another classified cable reports: 'North Korean workers are reportedly assembling surface-to-air missiles and constructing an underground facility at a Burmese military site about 315 miles north, north-west of Rangoon. Some 300 North Koreans are working on the secret construction site.' This is what the US State Department is telling itself.

Another cable in 2007 reveals concerns that Burma is exporting uranium to China. The cable describes the suspicious behaviour of authorities when handling a shipment of mixed ore from Burma to China via Singapore in January of that year. They quote: 'Embassy contacts noticed that authorities treated the shipment as highly sensitive and suspect it may have included uranium.' There are a large number of other cables, including one that refers to Australia's former ambassador in Burma, Michelle Chan, whom I had the good fortune to meet and discuss this issue with, trying to verify the accuracy of a report that she received that the regimes of Kim Jong-il and Than Shwe, the Burmese dictator, were engaged in peaceful nuclear cooperation.

The US cables detailed the construction of suspicious underground military facilities alongside the construction of a very large airstrip, as well as suspected shipments of uranium from Burma to China. That is why I have been following the issue and reminding the department and the minister through estimates and the various avenues that we have available to us in here that there is a very serious concern about nuclear weapons proliferation in the region—particularly if you allow yourself to imagine for a moment the idea of nuclear weapons in the hands of a regime such as Burma's, which is already a regional security threat and treats its own population with such an appalling contempt for human rights.

When I asked about this matter at Senate estimates—and I will follow this up with Mr Floyd next week—representatives from ASNO stated that Australia was monitoring developments in Burma—whatever that means. We have a very small diplomatic staff based in Rangoon, so I am not sure what they mean by 'monitoring develop­ments'. The questions on notice that I put to Minister Rudd, for which Minister Conroy has just provided this breathtakingly inadequate explanation, were seeking to clarify what efforts are being undertaken to monitor developments relating to these alleged facilities in Burma. What is it that we are doing? What does monitoring mean in this capacity? What have we done through the various avenues that are available to us? For example, I sought to understand what could be done by the IAEA and by our government in the light of the statement made by the Burmese regime in September of last year at the International Atomic Energy Agency assembly in Vienna. The Burmese junta's statement included a refutation of allegations of a nuclear weapons program. Burma has two obsolete IAEA agreements and has failed to execute the additional protocol. We have nothing more to go on than what they told the IAEA in that forum. The 2010 IAEA report declared that Burma's nuclear material remained in peaceful use, but they stated that they are now investigating allegations that Burma is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. In December 2010, they wrote to the regime and formally requested access for inspectors to visit Burmese nuclear sites and facilities. This is one of the reasons why it is important that we have the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty framework and why it is so dangerous for Australia to potentially circumvent that framework by, for example, trading with India. The IAEA, under the terms of that treaty, has those access rights; it can seek to inspect facilities.

Burma is a signatory to the treaty, such that they are therefore not allowed and not permitted to develop nuclear weapons. That is one of the cornerstones and one of the most obvious points as to why that treaty is in existence. Burma is supposed to provide the IAEA with initial reports of all relevant nuclear material and to allow the agency to verify the reports via inspections. According to a Washington Times report in January, Burma has ignored those letters. They have ignored the request for inspections, so we have nothing more to go on than statements from the regime. They will not need to rely on international nuclear fuel supplies, or the fuel market that Australia services, because they have confirmed deposits of uranium at a number of sites within Burma, and reactor grade uranium was being mined near Lashio in northern Shan state.

Professor Ball and Phil Thornton have stated that cooperation with North Korea and Iran is being pursued under a fuel-for-technology program. The uranium mining occurs in Burma. Many of the shipments will be clandestine and in exchange they are receiving training from Moscow and technical advice and assistance from Iran and North Korea. Why on earth are we walking into a situation like that blindfolded? This is occurring in our region. We are one of the largest suppliers of uranium to civil fuel markets in the world and yet we are just letting this go on behind our backs. I would have thought, given 250 days to consider the context of the questions that I put to the minister, we would have got more than the throwaway line that Senator Conroy just delivered: 'Oh, you'll get a briefing next week.' That is wonderful; I look forward to that briefing. It would have been nice if Minister Rudd had seen fit—and we did tip his office off this morning that we would be bringing this question to the chamber—to give us a certain amount of information.