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

This is an unusual bill, and I think that it is worth pointing out that this bill explicitly targets a particular site. This bill explicitly targets the Muckaty site. It is named in the bill as an existing nomination that was carried over from the 2005-06 legislation—the legislation of the former government. It is a little bit disingenuous to claim—although, again, I understand that Senator Evans is here representing somebody else's portfolio—that the court case can go on with no relevance to this bill and that maybe there will be others and so on. If the applicants to the Federal Court action are successful it will completely rip the rug out from under the government's strategy of targeting the Muckaty site, and the minister would do well to acknowledge that, if that happens, an enormous amount of time—committee work, the parliament's time and particularly the people on the front line in Tennant Creek, who did not ask for this thing to be targeted on their country and do not understand why it needs to be going there in the first place—will have been wasted. The bill explicitly names that nominated site and preserves the nomination, which is not what the government said it would do when it was in opposition. The then opposition spoke out in no uncertain terms in ways that were directed particularly at Northern Territory audiences that they would not let the nomination stand. Words such as extreme, arrogant, heavy handed, draconian, sorry, sordid, extraordinary and profoundly shameful were used, not just by the Territory representatives but also by people such as Senator Carr. An action so described is what Minister Ferguson has sent the unfortunate Senator Evans in to defend this afternoon. The Labor Party strongly opposed it on principle when they were in opposition—and for perfectly good reasons.

My question to the minister is whether or not he acknowledges that this bill explicitly targets the Muckaty nomination, which is directly relevant. You could look at it in one of two ways. It is either a complete waste of the parliament's time to be debating a bill that targets a site which, if the applicants to the Federal Court action are successful, will be taken permanently off the table or it may prejudice or get in the way of that action itself. I am not qualified, and I do not think anybody in this chamber is qualified, to go into the specifics of the question that is being heard in the Federal Court about who has traditional responsibilities for that country, because that is what that dispute is about. The dispute and the applicants in the dispute strongly contest the Northern Land Council's forwarding of that particular bit of country to the federal government, which has then seized upon it and said, 'We have a voluntary nomination.' Therefore this is not coercive but is coming from the community itself.

The people there, for obvious reasons, are absolutely up in arms. They were not asked, they were not consulted and they do not believe proper process has been followed. The minister has never had the good grace to go there and look them in the eye and tell them what the intention is. He is hiding behind the idea that somehow the bill locks in the Muckaty nomination as the only site. There are advisers here today who have been across the table in estimates and who have told us that they are not looking at any other site and have no other nominations, that nothing else has come forward and that Muckaty is all they have. They did not speak not under oath, but obviously they were not lying to an estimates committee. They told us that nothing else is on the table: Muckaty is it. For the minister to say that somehow this is tangential to the matters we are debating this afternoon is completely incorrect.

My primary question to the minister asks him to reconsider the matter and to bring on other legislation for this parliament to debate, because there are other things that this chamber should be doing. Failing that, perhaps during the MPI and question time periods, the minister could reconsider—noting that we are a week out from the anniversary of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to Aboriginal Australia—setting up something here which we are going to be very sorry for indeed. This is setting up a future apology for us: the coercive targeting of a politically vulnerable community in the Northern Territory to host the nation's most dangerous waste. It is a 300-year lease. Senator Scullion, at some point during the debate this afternoon, will be telling us about the $10 million that he has secured, which averages out at about $30,000 a year over a 300-year lease. I am wondering whether that will be dribbled out over the full three centuries or whether it is upfront. It is quite an achievement, Senator Scullion. We will get into that during the course of the debate.