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

His office or the minister. Has he been on leave since last December, Senator Collins? I do not believe he has been on leave since December. I am not being critical. The foreign minister has done great work on behalf of Australia on nuclear proliferation. This is an issue he knows and cares about. This is not an accusation of not caring about the overall agenda of disarmament of nuclear weapons and ridding the planet of these foul devices. But in this instance we have the potential of a very real security threat unfolding in our region and it is impossible to find out if our government, through any of the avenues that we have available to us, is doing anything about it. So the questions that I will put to Mr Floyd—and if the government would like to shed some light in the interim, that would be wonderful—are: is the Australian govern­ment aware of any of the results of the IAEA's investigations, either through ins­pection or by consideration of other mat­erial? And, how have we used our posit­ion on the board of governors of the IAEA? Our position on the global fuel market is presumably one of the reasons we often hear about remaining with the uranium suppliers is that it gives us leverage in these fora. How are we using it? What are we doing on the board of governors and our mission in Vienna to address the very serious prolifer­ation risks implicit in this potential program?

The implications are so serious because there is no such thing as 'safe hands' for nuclear weapons. It is not that the Burmese regime would put nuclear weapons in unsafe hands but thank goodness they are being maintained by the governments of Russia and the United States. No state whatsoever should have nuclear weapons, but certainly not this brutal and irrational regime who likely seek this capability to hold the international community in complete contempt, as it has done to its own people for 60 years.

The world's leading expert on Burma's economy, Associate Professor Sean Turnell from Macquarie University, has said that revenues earned from the sale of oil and gas have provided the Burmese regime with the financial resources needed to purchase nuclear technology from North Korea. Here is another place where Australia comes in. We have no trade embargo, we have no investment embargo, so Australian investors in the oil and gas industry are currently providing the regime with a revenue stream, in the sense of oil and gas exploration, which they hope to prove up to large scale and viable commercial projects. That lucrative business would have to stop because if Burma was found out to be developing a clandestine nuclear weapons program there would have to be international sanctions, as there are around the regime of North Korea. That would obviously do no good for countries profiteering and, basically, participating in the looting of the country's natural resources. That business would have to stop because sanctions would be imposed. That would bite into Australia's $50-odd million worth of two-way trade with Burma.

Australia has the Safeguards and Nonpro­liferation Office. We have some expertise. We have an embassy in Burma; we have a seat at the UN General Assembly; we have a seat in Geneva at the conference on disarm­ament; we are in Vienna at the IAEA. What have we done? That is all we were seeking and that is all that we were after in the questions that we put to the minister. We need to be taking proactive steps with regard to Burma just as we have done with Iran. There are no right hands for these weapons to be in. The government needs to be seized with the matter and actively engaged to verify and support the inspection efforts of the IAEA and we certainly expect that. The government should answer questions within the specific time that was allotted—that is, 30 days, not 250. I am looking forward, still, to a written response to questions 338 and 364. I thank the chamber.