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

You can tell at the outset the matters of public importance written by the Australian Greens compared to those that are written by the coalition. This is a matter of great urgency. I want to begin with the international law dimensions because the matter raised does speak directly to the fact that sales of uranium to a country that stands outside the nuclear non-proliferation treaty are illegal at international law. Australia is, of course, a signatory to the treaty of Rarotonga. For senators who are not aware, that is the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty. It creates a geographical region in which nuclear weapons are banned, but it does more than that. It stipulates that a condition of nuclear trade is full-scope safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Senators may not have been aware that the only way you get full-scope safeguards with the IAEA is by signing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty; and it is because Australia has these treaty commitments that every Australian government for the last 41 years has upheld the principle of not selling uranium to non-NPT states.

Here is somebody I would not normally quote in the Senate. In fact, this might be the first time I have ever done so. The current Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, said in 2006, from opposition:

As the second biggest supplier of uranium, Australia cannot have one set of rules for some countries and another set for others … Labor calls on John Howard to clarify his support for the NPT and rule out the export of uranium to any state unless and until that state joins the NPT.

What a difference a change of government makes. Minister Ferguson, who has since then been a diligent sock puppet on behalf of the interests of the uranium mining industry, has completely turned that former position on its head. What interesting timing for Australia to be undermining international laws and treaties, just when we have secured a seat on the United Nations Security Council. The same UNSC in 1998, after India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons, adopted resolution 1172, and it is worth quoting from. That resolution:

Encourages all States to prevent the export of equipment, materials or technology that could in any way assist programmes in India or Pakistan for nuclear weapons or for ballistic missiles capable of delivering such weapons, and welcomes national policies adopted and declared in this respect;

Some senators might remember the Cold War and the Cold War suicide pact between the Soviet Union and the United States of America and the various alliances that shifted during the period of the Cold War. During that nuclear suicide pact, fortunately, although these weapons were never stood down, the finger stayed off the button. But we still have nuclear weapons targeted on the subcontinent at the enormous metropolises of Delhi, Bombay, Karachi and Islamabad. India and Pakistan are engaged in an active and expanding nuclear arms race in the Asia-Pacific region. What a remarkable contribution to the Asian century it will be to have Australia's name on a piece of paper saying that we do not particularly care about fuelling that arms race.

I understand that senators might be a little uneasy and I know there are many of them inside the Labor Party; I have always suspected there would be a handful inside the coalition, but they are very, very quiet—I am sure they are there. They would be very uneasy about expanding the uranium trade to India.

Senator Mark Bishop interjecting—

I can dream, Senator Bishop. You never know. But senators would at least want to know that the safeguards regime is watertight and that—and I suspect there is total agreement in the chamber on this matter—Australian uranium will not end up in nuclear weapons in India or anywhere else. I see some nodding, so I sense that is correct. Tell me, if you will, how a safeguards agreement would cope with the following. The former head of the national security advisory board in India suggested this in 2005—see if this sounds familiar:

Given India's uranium ore crunch and the need to build up our … nuclear deterrent arsenal as fast as possible, it is to India's advantage to categorise as many power reactors as possible as civilian ones to be refuelled by imported uranium and conserve our native uranium fuel for weapons-grade plutonium production.

Somebody tell me how a safeguards agreement can be written to prevent the Indian authorities from doing exactly that. Nobody is making eye contact anymore; isn't that interesting.

My colleague Senator Waters will discuss how Campbell Newman, inspired by the sale of uranium to India, swiftly dumped a clear election commitment not to mine uranium in Queensland. The rest of the country is watching with a kind of horrified fascination as Campbell Newman abolishes the Public Service and runs absolutely roughshod across environmental regulations in Queensland. I will leave those comments to Senator Waters. Senator Rhiannon will discuss the dopey reversal of the 26-year ban on uranium mining in New South Wales earlier this year. That was very, very carefully dealt with during the election campaign because it is a nasty thing to talk about. Nobody goes into an election campaign promising to expand exports of a carcinogenic material, apart from Western Australia, actually. So let us go there. I will focus my remarks on what is happening in my home state of WA.

Many people in WA are very deeply concerned about the prospect of Toro. They are a small exploration outfit; they have no cash reserves; they have never actually run a mine; their parent company, OZ Minerals, describes them as a non-core asset. They are proposing to strip mine a relatively small by international standards calcrete deposit across an ephemeral watercourse that runs into a salt lake, Lake Way, in the north-east goldfields. The Western Australian government's Environmental Protection Authority took a look at it, and I would observe that that name was not intended to be ironic—that you would have an environmental protection authority and you would hope that its objectives would be based on protecting the environment, but that appears to have fallen by the wayside. Based on remarkably sketchy and insufficient evidence and the complete absence of some very important pieces of information, the EPA has given it the tick, as we knew it would.

The Barnett coalition government in Western Australia has turned the environmental impact assessment process into a one-way foregone conclusion. Nobody seriously believed that the EPA was going to knock that proposal out on the grounds that it did not satisfy the EPA's objectives. This is a uranium mine that has a proposed 14-year lifespan, but the company can only tell us where it is getting its water from for the first seven years. After that, I guess we just have to hope for the best. In a state with so many mining projects, with fully allocated surface water resources and a very well documented decline in rainfall, that is completely unacceptable.

Minister Tony Burke, in my view, is entirely within his rights to ask the company where it plans on getting the water for the second half of the mine life. He should ask the Western Australian government to do its job so that he can do the job assigned to him under the Commonwealth EPBC Act. He cannot do his job in assessing this project if he is not provided with the information that was required by law. The Barnett government and Toro have failed to do that. The minister does not get to be pro-nuclear or antinuclear, and I think that is kind of sad but I respect that his act says he assesses the project according to the law. It is my view that he cannot do that at the moment because Toro have not presented their proposal in full. The director-general of the WA Department for the Environment and Conservation has stated that there is a significant risk of loss of another individual taxon, probably at both species and subspecies level, of Tecticornia should the project proceed as proposed. So a uranium mine that will leave a permanent carcinogenic hotspot across a salt lake bed in the north-east goldfields may also wipe out a number of listed species. That is fantastic news. I wonder if anybody else would care to address those concerns on the way through.

The Commonwealth environment minister by law cannot preside knowingly over the destruction of species. He cannot preside over the extinction of particular species. So you would think that the proper studies and information would be provided, for example on stygofauna, nominated by the WA EPA as a threatened ecological species in 2008. But, no, we have this headlong rush to get the first uranium proposal up before the next state election. Those are the kinds of imperatives we are dealing with here. It is pretty offensive. Nobody, certainly not Toro, not Colin Barnett or the industry's man in Canberra, Martin Ferguson, appears to give a rat's.