David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

Here we go again. The Greens, the very bastion of moral purity, once again are telling us what is right and what is wrong: that it is right to have low carbon emissions but that it is wrong to have nuclear power; that it is right to bring the world out of poverty but that it is wrong to give people the tools they need to accomplish this. Once again in a demonstration of bizarre ethical ambiguity the Greens continue to want everything but to give nothing. Alas, what more can we expect from this confederacy of protest movements that is the Greens in the Senate.

Let us give the reality of this situation some perspective. India is a nation where 40 per cent of people live below the poverty line, a nation that by 2025 will outnumber China with a population of some 1.5 billion persons. It is a nation that is growing quickly, as is its energy consumption. It needs the sort of stable and affordable energy that as Australians we take for granted. Currently 40 per cent of Indians have access to electricity for less than 12 hours a day and an estimated 300 million people still lack access to energy there at all. I asked the Greens how one billion people of India are going to meet their energy needs without nuclear power. How will their nation modernise, how will they grow? And how will they do this without pumping hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere? Coal, or maybe wind turbines as far as the eye can see, stretching from Calcutta to Bangalore. Or maybe the Greens just think India should not have electricity at all.

According to the Australian Academy of Sciences, for every 10,000 tonnes of Australian uranium we export we stop the generation of 400 million tonnes of CO2 from conventional power sources. That is quite a remarkable figure. How can the Greens sit here arguing that exporting uranium is wrong when it makes such a huge and clear difference not only to the lives of Indians but to our global environment. No matter how the Greens want to look at it, no matter how they paint it, the answer is the same: nuclear power equals development and the Greens want this stopped.

This is perhaps the ideal example to highlight the failure of the Greens party to celebrate their naive views on foreign policy with reality. It is their stance on issues such as this one that shows why Australia will never accept the Greens as a government in its own right. They just do not have the pragmatism required. It is one thing to want the world to be a better place but quite another to make it happen. If we really want a global clean energy future, not just one for the rich and privileged, we need to acknowledge that for large developing countries, particularly a country such as India, nuclear energy is one of many strategies that must be employed if this is going to happen. Australia can afford the luxury of not using nuclear power but India is not so fortunate.