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

I thank the advisers, who have obviously just been flicking through the report. That bears out the point I was making. The sense of urgency that the government has been proclaiming—not just this government, but also the previous one—the justification for needing to dump this stuff in a shed on a cattle station, is that we have got this vast amount of material coming back from overseas and we have nowhere to put it, that there is nowhere for it to go, and that that is the deadline. Successive ministers have been using the urgency of this material being returned from overseas as a pretext for the claim that we need to set up a shed in the outback at Muckaty or whatever given site has been targeted. I have not worked out exactly what the proportion is, but I will take the minister's advice that there is 427 cubic metres of this material already banked at Lucas Heights, already sitting there, and an additional 32 cubic metres of this very long-lived lethal material due to come back in reprocessed form from Europe. We already have well over 10 times that amount of stuff parked at Lucas Heights. So what is the urgency? Where on earth does that come from? Could ministers stop using that as a pretext.

We heard again from the advisers, and from the officers who appeared at budget estimates the week before last, that this material, when it does come back, will be parked at Lucas Heights. It has been in the budget for at least two budget cycles that I am aware of. Preliminary studies have been done. ARPANSA consider their guidelines to be appropriate whether it is a remote site or a site at Lucas Heights. So that justification has evaporated. And it was actually never there in the first place because the same people spinning us that line knew very well that the material that was coming back from Europe was not going to be an enormous burden that was going to overwhelm our abilities, our management structures or our capacity at Lucas Heights to look after it. That was simply not true. I thank the minister for providing that information and for the fact that it is reasonably up to date. I trust that, if there are any amendments or significant changes to that, you will let the chamber know. I was not after a specific quantity down to the last kilogram, but you have given us the order of magnitude and that is appreciated.

We live in a naturally radioactive environment. The sun, and uranium locked up in granites, produces background radiation. But human activities from 1945 onwards have increased our exposure to ionising radiation, and entirely different isotopes and transuranic materials have been created that are vastly different from background radiation. So you cannot say that people who have been exposed to plutonium downwind of weapons tests are suffering from something that is just like background radiation only more of it. Plutonium did not exist on planet Earth, apart from in absolutely trace quantities, until we began producing it in uranium reactors for weapons. These isotopes are different from background radiation. They come in various forms that can become airborne and be breathed in, or find their way into the water table and gene pool, which is entirely unlike background radiation.

For example, miners are exposed to radon in Australian uranium mines. They say that radon can come from very slow uranium decay in granites, which will sometimes build up in basements and so on, and therefore it is okay for workers to be exposed to elevated levels of radon because it is somehow natural. But if you grind up a uranium deposit, turn it into something as fine as talcum powder, disperse it across a mine site into a uranium mill, and the workforce breathe it in, they are getting quantitatively and qualitatively different levels of exposure. Because radon is an alpha emitter, it is going to be repelled or will not actually expose the worker to dangerous levels if it is coming from outside. Alpha radiation dissipates across a very short distance and can be stopped by skin or by the paper suits that people wear and so on. If you get that material inside you, if you pulverise that uranium deposit and convert it into a very fine powder, you have got a very serious problem because the material is resident in your lungs. Each link in the nuclear fuel chain releases radiation, beginning with drilling for uranium. To protect future generations from being damaged by it, we must stop creating more radiation and phase out the sources. We must also responsibly contain radiation from the environment.

Instead of truthful data about radiation, over the decades we have received government denial, self-serving control of information and refusal to redress the shameful wrongs. Governments have not made archives of information available about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. The French government has been equally shameless in the instance of the health databases from France's weapons testing in the Pacific. And, even in the instance of Maralinga, we are still fighting to provide a gold card for veterans who were exposed to radiation from weapons tests conducted by our ally Great Britain during the Cold War. So resolving the effects of nuclear activity and the nuclear threat is now a matter of our survival. We cannot contain nuclear threats or environmental damage or support the sick and dying without truthful information. We have other suitable objects clauses for this bill to ensure that the most suitable site on the continent is based on environmental considerations, geography, hydrology and so on. But the object embeds in the legislation that we need to find the right place. It would not necessarily be an earthquake zone—and Muckaty is in a seismically active area—and the locals would have told the minister that if he had had the courtesy to go and meet them and look them in the eye.

You would not necessarily select a flood plain. I have obviously spent more time in Tennant Creek and the surrounds than the minister. I had the invitation from traditional owners, but when I tried to visit the site we could not get in because the area was flooded out. It does not sound like a particularly good idea for a shed.

It would not be adjacent to or on top of a sacred site, as Muckaty is. Muckaty is a men's site and the men have been telling the government that through the kinds of letters that Senator Di Natale read in before and that I have tabled as correspondence from these people. They have been saying, 'Don't put that stuff there. It is not appropriate that it goes there.'

When the government promised to establish a process for identifying suitable sites—that is: scientific, transparent, accountable, fair, allowing access for appeal mechanisms, ensuring full community consultation in radioactive waste decision-making processes, committing to international best-practice scientific processes and so on—that was what the government committed to. Instead, we are seeing quite the opposite. Best practice involves putting this material where it is most appropriate, where there are the right characteristics. While it might be a politically convenient characteristic for the minister to be able to say that some people have nominated it, it does not make it the best place. A process that involves landowners, whether Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal, nominating lands or parcels of land as possible sites for a dump is not a scientifically rigorous process. This gets back to the debate that we were having before about the principle of volunteerism. I happen to believe that calling for volunteers from some of the most disadvantaged and marginalised communities on the planet is not the only alternative to simply walking in and coercively dumping it on somebody. What we have here today is the worst of both worlds.

What we need in order to achieve 'international best practice'—since the minister has used that phrase a number of times—is a regulatory framework that strategically locates a site based on best science and risk management but also takes into account the impacts on economic and social issues. It should be one that applies strict criteria, standards and policies designed to deal with all environmental risks to the facility—very long-term environ­mental risks—and one which has input from and is acceptable to the community, not just something determined by Minister Martin Ferguson sitting in his electorate office in Batman while the clock on his turfing-out ticks down. The framework should provide constant vigilance, community oversight, risk removal, and prevention of pollution or contamination, rather than just project assessment, approval and condition, and it should provide a framework which deals with the residual risks, emergencies and contaminated lands if things go wrong. The objects clause would ensure that an overall object of the bill is to ensure that this material is not put where it is convenient but where it is appropriate, and that means for the stuff that is here and the material that is due to come back from overseas.

Unless Senator Scullion feels like making a contribution to explain why he does not think these very sound and sensible principles, which I am sure that he and his party agree with, should be embedded into the objects clause—principles that will guide the way that this bill is interpreted for the next several centuries—I will not detain this chamber any further. I hope we might at least hear something from Senator Scullion, or perhaps I have managed to change the minister's mind in the course of this short debate. Otherwise I commend this amendment to the Senate.