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

by leave—I rise to acknowledge that on Sunday we passed an important anniversary, the 10th anniversary of the horrific attacks on New York City and the aircraft that were flown into the twin towers and the Pentagon and one that crashed on its way to its intended target. We pause to reflect on the extraordinary violence unleashed on the people of the United States and on citizens from countries all around the world in those attacks. I also acknowledge that 11 September this year was the six-month anniversary of the disaster on the Pacific coast of north-east Japan in which one of the most powerful earthquakes in the country's history, followed by a 15 metre tsunami, caused horrific loss of life, wrecking the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power complex. This is an appropriate time to pause and remember the extraordinary loss of life and the ongoing disaster that has been caused there.

I had the enormous good fortune before I departed for Canberra to spend Sunday, 11 September at Seven Mile Camp on the outskirts of Alice Springs at a meeting of the Australian Nuclear Free Alliance—ANFA. It was an appropriate place and such wonderful company in which to spend that anniversary and consider the violence unleashed in those two events. I spent my time there in the company of a number of people: Uncle Kevin Buzzacott, who has spent the latter part of his life fighting nuclear dispossession of the land of his people by the Olympic Dam uranium mine at Roxby Downs in central South Australia; Mitch, whose sense of humour and fierce wit and passion for her people leave an indelible trace on the memory of anybody who spends time with her; the indestructible Barb Shaw, who has unfortunately spent far too much of her time having to fight the negative impacts of the Northern Territory intervention that was so unwisely carried forward by this government; and Aunty Isabel and Bunny Naparrula, who travelled down from Tennant Creek to speak to that group of people about this Commonwealth government's shameful proposal to continue the Howard government's radioactive dispossession of their people with the proposed imposition of a radioactive waste dump which would collect the Commonwealth obligated nuclear material which principally resides at the moment at Lucas Heights in central South Australia—though there is also a certain amount at overseas reprocessing sites in France. They do not want that material there, and they have led an extraordinary campaign, which I have been privileged to be a part of, to prevent that material being dumped in a shed on a cattle station on their traditional land so that the Commonwealth government can wash its hands of it and walk away.

ANFA has been going since 1997. It was formed in Alice Springs in response to the Howard government's unleashing of the uranium sector to vastly more disappointing results than I imagine they were anticipating and in particular in response to the challenge of the proposed Jabiluka mine in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. ANFA, which was formed as the Alliance Against Uranium, has stayed very strong since then. That ANFA meeting was an amazing gathering of people whom you might consider some of the most marginalised and disadvantaged in the country. Aboriginal communities, activists, elders and some of the new leaders coming through gather once a year—this is the fourth one that I have had the extreme good fortune to attend—to share their stories of dispossession and of that e campaigns that they have waged and in many cases won against foreign and domestic uranium mining companies and against the extraordinarily misguided ambitions of successive Commonwealth governments in seeking to leave this toxic time capsule of radioactive waste on their country.

We were very fortunate to host at that meeting a couple of guests from overseas—people with quite intimate experiences of the nuclear industry and of uranium mining. One of them was Ammon Russell, who is a representative of the Navajo Nation in the United States. They have had intimate experience with uranium mining. The Navajo Nation encompasses some parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, and their area was a key target for uranium mining in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when there were more than 1,000 uranium mines on the Navajo lands alone. The Navajo people suffered the immediate impacts of unventilated mines and of the fact that there were then no occupational health and safety measures whatsoever. In fact, in 1962 the first publication of a statistical correlation between cancer and uranium mining was published by the US public health service as a result of the enormous impacts suffered by the Navajo people, particularly the miners and their families who were mining that material so that the United States government could produce the nuclear weapons that fuelled their part in the Cold War.

As of 2009, the federal government in the United States had funded nearly 22,000 people a sum of just under $1½ billion in reparations for the colossal harm that was caused. I do not know how you compensate people for the loss of the lives of families, for the children born sick or deformed and for the lives cut short. Nonetheless, the US government has been writing out cheques to the tune of $1.4 billion for the damage caused. In 2008, a five-year cleanup plan of the Navajo lands was proposed and implemented by the US EPA, which estimated that 30 per cent of all Navajo still lack uncontaminated drinking water. It is an experience that is familiar to Aboriginal people here in Australia. Ammon's words were keenly listened to by the people sitting around the campfire and around the circle at Seven Mile because the experience here, while it is different in some important respects, still bears a huge resemblance to what the Navajo suffered. The forced dispossession, the lies of the government who said that this activity was safe, the promise of jobs that either never eventuated or turned out to be lethal when they arrived and the walking away and the washing of the hands and the erasing of the history of the dispossession of these people seemed very similar.

It was wonderful to spend time in the company of Aboriginal people here in Australia who have given up their lives to fight the impacts of the actions of household industry names here. These companies include BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Cameco and Mitsubishi, which attempted to establish mines in Western Australia. Many Australians have shares in these companies, and many of us probably invest indirectly in them through our superannuation; but they have an extraordinarily dark story, and it is important that it be told. Another guest who we were very fortunate to host at Seven Mile was Andre Lariviere, of the French network to phase out the nuclear industry—a network of 900 groups in France. We tend to think of the French as being the happy atomic country or as Andre puts it, the nation of the happy atom. It is not the case. It has not been the case for a long period of time. A recent poll—I am quoting from a Reuters article of April this year—carried out in late March, subsequent to the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, found the 57 per cent of respondents were generally in favour of dropping nuclear energy, with 20 per cent strongly in favour of the idea. So the footprint of the nuclear industry in France has taken on this profoundly anti-democratic side in that most of us here in Australia probably think the French are pretty happy with their clean, green nuclear industry generating 70 or 80 per cent of their electricity. It is absolutely not the case.

The French government will ignore that poll, as polls here in Australia about nuclear power and uranium mining have been ignored, because it is inconvenient. But the French have just suffered another accident, a blast at a reprocessing facility in the south of France that has killed one worker and put a number of others in hospital. There does not appear to have been a significant radioactive release, although you always have to take government officials' proclamations with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, an explosion at a reprocessing plant dealing with plutonium and some of the material that has now showered the north-east part of Japan is still a cause for serious concern. I suspect it will not improve the polling numbers the next time a poll is taken in France.

The French are absolutely not alone in opposing nuclear power by various margins. In Japan, 82 per cent of Japanese favoured building more plants in Japan, or maintaining existing ones. That was a poll that was taken in 2005. Subsequent to the Fukushima disaster, somewhere between 41 per cent and 54 per cent of the Japanese people now support scrapping or reducing the numbers of nuclear power plants. The outgoing Prime Minister Kan said he would abolish nuclear energy in Japan and that they would phase it out. That is a commitment that has been somewhat weakly endorsed by the incoming Prime Minister, Mr Noda. It will be very interesting to see how the democratic aspirations of the people of Japan now play out in the light of the permanent radioactive nightmare that has been unleashed in the Tohoku region of Japan.

If we take a very quick trip around the world, a Washington Post/ABCpoll in April 2011 found that 64 per cent of Americans oppose the construction of new reactors, so there are no surprises why the industry is at an absolute standstill there. Support for nuclear power was similar or much lower in countries as varied as Chile at 12 per cent, Thailand at 16½ per cent, Australia at 34 per cent, and the United Kingdom at 35 per cent support. That, I think, is a problem that has dogged the nuclear industry right from the beginning but to read some of the things they say you would think perhaps they have an image problem. To the Australian Uranium Association, to the World Nuclear Association and to people active in the uranium industry who think that you will simply be able to sail on through this disaster and that the fundamentals of the industry are strong—as we often hear—my message is that you do not have an image problem, you do not have a messaging problem: you have a reality problem. You have a leukaemia problem and a lung cancer problem. It is not something that is going to be fixed with another glossy fact sheet. People do not like this industry, not because they misunderstand it but because they understand it perfectly well. That is going to be very difficult to fix with little video clips on websites and new fact sheets.

To quote some of the main spokespeople for the industry in the aftermath of the disaster on Fukushima—and some of the language certainly changed once it became apparent just how serious it was—the language ranged from a 'sideshow'—Mr John Borshoff from Paladin Energy, who is never short of a few things to say about the nuclear industry, called it a sideshow. Later he said that it was a 'kick in the teeth' for the industry but that the impact on the industry 'will be minimal' and it will 'make the technology even safer than its enviable record'. Even our Prime Minister Julia Gillard said:

What is happening in Japan doesn't have any impact on my thinking about uranium exports. We export uranium and we will continue to export uranium.

How bad does it need to get to shake this extraordinary faith? Mr Ian Hore-Lacy, formerly of the Uranium Institute in Australia—he now works for the World Nuclear Association, WNA—says of the epic accident in a piece that he put up on 13 April:

The epic accident is certainly a scar on the public perception of nuclear power, especially in the short term.

'A scar on the public perception', as though we are just seeing it wrong and the industry has some kind of image problem—that all it needs to do is fix up people's perception of it and everything will be okay. It shows the magnitude of the disconnect, the dissonance, that exists in the minds of the strongest advocates of the industry. All they need to do is somehow just fix up the image of the industry and everything is going to be fine. I think we will be hearing a lot more of that on the part of the nuclear industry and its supporters in government. The Australian Uranium Association says more facts and better public education will help address nuclear fears that Fukushima has helped fan, as though that accident has somehow caused unnecessary alarm and some kind of radiation phobia.

Mr Zigmund Switkowski, even though he has been let off the hook and is no longer directly undermining Australian government policy while on the payroll—at least we are no longer paying him to undermine the Australian government's policy which, I think, may still be bipartisan policy, that we should not have nuclear reactors in Australia—is still at it, still spruiking nuclear power, saying that with appropriate safeguards it should be considered a viable source of greenhouse-friendly baseload power for energy-hungry economies. There are all the myths there, condensed and rolled into one little sentence. That is handy. The markets, on the other hand, are taking a different tack and that is very interesting; although to people deeply embedded in the industry, there is probably no disaster severe enough to shake their faith. If the spectre of the fallout sprayed across Western Europe and right across the Northern Hemisphere in 1986 from Chernobyl did not shake the faith and if the depopulation of part of Tohoku prefecture with permanent radioactive contamination did not shake the faith, perhaps the faith of investors will be shaken, firstly, by the demolition of TEPCO's balance sheet and, secondly, by the fact that the world uranium price has crashed from its peaks in 2007. UBS said, in an April summary:

At Fukushima, four reactors have been out of control for weeks—

We will now call that six months—

… casting doubt on whether even an advanced economy can master nuclear safety. We believe the Fukushima accident was the most serious ever for the credibility of nuclear power.

The market of course is bearing that out. The uranium spot price on 6 September was back down to US$48.85 a pound, so prices have dropped by about a third. The Merrill Lynch uranium equity index was down 19 per cent over the past month—and this is well after the Fukushima disaster, when people have been given time to absorb the sheer magnitude of that disaster. Shares in ERA, one of Australia's most prominent uranium miners in Kakadu at Ranger, were down 13 per cent in the last month and 73 per cent in the last year.

So even though Mr Martin Ferguson, from the confines of his safe office way down in Melbourne—a long way from the impact areas of these mines—may think this is a fantastic idea, investors are deserting the sector. The company has posted a $122 million half-year net loss. This is a big uranium miner, backed by Rio Tinto with deep pockets, and they are taking an absolute bath. Cameco, Denison Mines and in particular Paladin, one of my favourites, are all suffering as a result of investors simply withdrawing funds from this industry.

This week we learnt that big European companies want to sell their stakes in Urenco, and the British government is also said to be thinking about selling its shares. The industry internationally has gone into something of a free-fall. The World Nuclear Industry Status Report—which I strongly commend as a fairly clear-eyed examination of who is building what around the world and who is closing what—shows that 438 reactors were operating this May in 30 countries, which is six fewer than the maximum of 444 in 2002. Fourteen countries are building nuclear power plants, but most of the sites are accumulating substantial and costly delays. Only three-quarters of those reactors are being built, in four countries only, and none of those countries has a history of transparency or reliable information about the status of their construction work.

The industry tends to think that China will save their fortunes. China gives me the greatest cause for concern. WikiLeaks cables released in UK newspapers now show that a Swedish political group revealed that US analysts are worried about the safety of new Chinese reactors. There is no independent regulatory authority there. There is no independent press. Activists or people like me who might raise their concerns in public forums end up carted away to re-education through labour camps, as Sun Xiaodi and his daughter were.

So I think the industry has a very serious problem. The disaster at Fukushima is vastly worse than we are being told. Parents in Fukushima City, a city of 300,000 people, 60 kilometres from the plant, have banded together to demand that the government do more to protect around 100,000 children who were living in areas that would have been evacuated if they had been within the impact area of the Chernobyl reactor. The Japanese government have been extraordinarily slow to respond. They have been very tight-fisted with information, and that has caused a great deal of harm and unnecessary alarm. It is unclear when those reactors will be brought back under control.

The impacts so much closer to home, as I mentioned at the beginning of my comments, are that sovereignty is denied while the radioactive contamination is the same. To the industry I say that we realise you are not for compromise, so of course neither will we be. We are in this to close you down, and I certainly will not rest until that has been achieved. (Time expired)