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

I rise to speak on a different matter but one which perhaps has some relation to the contribution just made by Senator Cash. To begin with, I acknowledge the Arabunna and the Kokotha people of central South Australia, who are coping with the news as of yesterday that the Commonwealth government has signed off on a colossal expansion of the Olympic Dam copper-gold uranium mine. I also acknowledge my South Australian state parliament colleague Mark Parnell, who has done an enormous amount of work watchdogging this project and trying to come up with constructive counterproposals that would let the project go ahead without the extraordinary environmental, social and public health impacts of the project as proposed. I am speaking in particular of a study that was conducted about this time last year by Dr Gavin Mudd, a hydrogeologist at Monash University, on a proposal for the expansion of Olympic Dam that would go ahead without the uranium circuit—so the mine would proceed as a copper-gold venture—and with the processing being undertaken here in Australia rather than BHP's current proposal to simply export the smelting operations and, indeed, those highly skilled jobs to China.

The concept of environmental protection took on new meaning yesterday with the announcement of Commonwealth environmental approvals for this venture. The Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, Tony Burke, said, 'We have the toughest environmental conditions that you'll ever find imposed on a uranium mine.' This, I think, is known in the technical literature as a bald faced lie. We know this because the toughest environmental conditions found at a uranium mine are 2,000 kilometres northward at the Ranger Uranium Mine, on a lease chopped out of Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. There the company is required to backfill the mine voids with radioactive waste, removing—