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

I rise to add my comments to those of Senator Birmingham, to thank him for his work and, as ever, thank the secretariat and staff of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties for their work. Unfortunately, in this instance, the committee has let us down and missed a very important opportunity to reassess the sale of uranium to countries in Europe where most Australians, I believe, think it is going to safe pairs of hands where nothing can possibly go wrong and where meaningful safeguards are in place. In the wake of the horrific disaster in Japan earlier this year, the tabling of the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties report No. 122 this afternoon gives us an opportunity to pause, take breath and look at what actually happens. We do not agree that this treaty should simply be uncritically renewed, as essentially the majority report indicates.

What is happening here demonstrates a fundamental denial of the risk of the uranium trade. It glosses over the steep decline in nuclear capacity in Europe. The industry there has been in decline literally for decades—since the early 1980s—and it perpetuates the delusion that the safeguards regime actually provides meaningful safeguards. It provides political safeguards. The safeguards regime that is spoken of at such length in this report is political safeguards. It allows the Prime Minister to wave her hand and say: 'We have accounted for Australian obligated uranium in nuclear material. Their safeguard system is in place.' I suspect that very few people who get up in this place and talk with such confidence about the safeguards regime have the foggiest idea of what is involved at both an accounting and an enforcement level.

Key European players like Germany and Switzerland are pulling out of the nuclear industry, Austria and other European countries have formed an anti-nuclear block to push for a nuclear-free Europe, and nuclear energy has been in decline in the eurozone for many decades. This treaty says that it is the first agreement to include specific provisions on nuclear safety. So we thought that was interesting and that it was good that the treaties committee had dug into that a bit as the first agreement of its kind to include provisions on nuclear safety. We dug into it to work out exactly what it was invoking, and it turns out that it simply notes the existence of four pre-existing treaties. That is all it does—it invokes four pieces of paper that already existed. As demonstrated by the events at Windscale—now known as Sellafield, because after the fire there they had to change the name of the place—Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now Fukushima, you cannot do nuclear safety by simply cross-referencing bits of paper. Senior officials have now admitted that Australian obligated nuclear material was at the Fukushima Daiichi site—probably in all of the destroyed reactors. That does not seem to have sunk in with this government.

Renegotiating this treaty was an opportunity for Australia to demonstrate that it has learned something from the disaster in Japan, but after the glib and rather dismissive comments of Senator Birmingham just now we will wait and see if anything of sense is put on the record by the government. I find it difficult to imagine how bad a nuclear disaster has to get for Australian policy makers to wake up. Although many people think having a triple or quadruple full-scale meltdown on Japan's Pacific Coast is a worst-case scenario, it is not. These things can get worse, and Japanese authorities are now reporting what they believe may be continuing fission events inside the melted fuel at the base of one or more of the reactors in Japan, which are throwing out certain types of isotopes that occur only when fission is operating. In other words, these reactors, in some uncontrolled form, could start up again because the moderators that keep these plants from blowing themselves all across the landscape have melted along with the fuel and are now lying in a puddle at the base of the reactors, having gone right through the floor.

The Japanese authorities and the IAEA are now starting to report hints that occasional criticality or fission events may still be occurring. We may not yet have seen the worst of a disaster. Authorities there now freely admit they are not sure how they are going to bring those plants under control. How do you do that when you have got in the order of 1,000 tonnes of melted uranium fuel lying in a blazing heap that has gone part way through the floor of the reactor buildings on an earthquake-prone coast? What are they supposed to do, when human beings will never go inside those containment vessels or inside the core of those plants again? What exactly is the proposal? Yet the Australian government, with the full and uncritical support of the opposition, intends through instruments like this treaty to just keep shovelling the stuff out the door.

Now there is the madness of India. If we thought the Japanese run a tight ship, and they do—I would say they probably run one of the safest nuclear industries in the world, yet they have lost control of a complex of six plants—how much do senators in this place know about the Indian civil nuclear industry? Obviously, they know very little; otherwise, the proposal of the Prime Minister on the weekend would have sent up, at least from the opposition, some whimpers of opposition. We are used to Tony Abbott saying no and this would have been one opportunity when it would have been handy—but no, Senator Birmingham has rubber stamped that as well.

Learn a little bit about the history of civil nuclear energy in India before we race down this path of shovelling this material to plants all across the Indian subcontinent, because the long and honourable history of the anti-nuclear movement in India will tell you there are very good reasons why people are staging sit-ins and hunger strikes at the moment at the site of a plant that is under construction by, of all people, the Russian government. There is a reason that people are putting their bodies on the line and it is that they are sick of being showered in radioactive fallout from the normal operating practices of nuclear plants in India. The reason we do not have nuclear plants in Australia is that people do not want them in their backyard. I do not want them in other people's backyards either. It is long past the time that Australia took some responsibility for what happens to these concentrates when we put them on boats, wave them goodbye and count the meagre export revenues that, for some reason, MPs in both the major parties seem to think are so much more than they actually are. Less than a third of one per cent of our export revenue comes from this toxic, destructive and obsolete trade. Yet somehow it has been painted as some sort of economic saviour, even as the mining boom is warping and damaging other parts of our economy. Why do we not take a proper look at the lessons that could be learnt from the horrific suffering in Japan, right across eastern and western Europe in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster and in the various and numerous other parts of the world where near misses have almost depopulated huge areas and huge population centres? So this report on trade to Europe is a mistake. It is a brazen illustration that the government and the opposition are determined not to learn the lessons of the industry. I have to ask: how bad does it have to get? How many areas need to become radiation sacrifice zones? How many Aboriginal elders do you need to hear from about the destructive impact on country, on culture and on water here in Australia? How bad does it need to get? All I am asking before we rubber-stamp this thing and push this treaty through the parliament is that people simply learn the lessons not just of history but of what is going on right around us right now in the countries to which we export this material.

Senator Birmingham was teasing Senator Feeney across the chamber before about Labor's inconsistent position. I say to the coalition: the ALP may be in the process of selling their principles out, but at least they had them to begin with. I wish Labor well for its conference in December because I think there is still a chance to rescue some sanity from the dangerous turn that this debate has taken.