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

Tonight I want to pay my respects to the Aboriginal elders of the Muckaty lands in the Barkly region, their families and their supporters around the country. I understand that only a tiny handful of MPs in this place could even find Muckaty on a map and bear no knowledge of the rich history of the place. For white politicians on the other side of the continent, the Barkly region is essentially regarded as the absolute middle of nowhere. There is nowhere better to park Australia's 60-year inventory of spent nuclear fuel, which is industrial waste that will still be carcinogenic a thousand generations from now, decaying silently away into future geological ages. Everything it touches, for all those future lifetimes of people who will never know our names, becomes not just contaminated but contaminating.

Every country that embarked on the nuclear experiment that lit up the mid-20th century with the light of a thousand suns has its own millennial legacy of spent nuclear fuel and reprocessing wastes. No country has come up with a solution that will keep it isolated for tens of thousands of years. Presently, nearly all of Australia's radioactive waste is banked adjacent to the Lucas Heights reactor on the outskirts of Sydney. A small amount of it is contracted to return to Australia from Europe next year. This impending shipment was the trigger for the process that came to a dramatic end in the Federal Court in Melbourne last week.

Late in 2005, the Howard government used its command of the numbers in both houses of parliament to ram through a bill mandating that Australia's radioactive waste would be trucked into the Northern Territory and dumped at one of three possible defence department sites—in other words, on land stolen from people who had been living and singing that country since before the last ice age. The Greens opposed this bill. The Democrats opposed it. The Labor Party stridently opposed it. But numbers matter in here and, on that night, we didn't have them.

I want to acknowledge the communities of people who spoke up for each of those three sites, the pressure and uncertainty placed on you, the stress on your families, and the leadership you showed in stepping up and saying no. All of you were unfairly targeted in a process with no procedural, scientific or democratic legitimacy.

Within a year, the fatal flaws in this bankrupt proposal were evident even to senior members of the Howard government. An amendment bill was pushed through here late in 2006 to add an illusion of due process to this amoral preamble: communities can now volunteer a site for the dump. Only sites in the Northern Territory, constitutionally weaker than the states, would be considered. Within what seemed like mere hours, a site was nominated by the Northern Land Council, and this place, Muckaty, which no whitefella outside the Barkly Region had ever heard of, was suddenly at the top of the Commonwealth government's target list. The cause and effect, and who really originated the Muckaty nomination, we will probably never know. But we do know that, from day one, this was a process driven from Canberra, not Tennant Creek.

Fourteen years earlier, the High Court had struck down the offensive legal fiction of terra nullius; but, even so, when government bureaucrats and politicians with more immediate things on their minds go looking for somewhere to dump the nation's most poisonous garbage, they go looking for empty lands, places in the middle of nowhere, places like Muckaty Station. And when they climb out of their shiny land cruisers, they discover that it is not empty at all. They discover it is a real place, not just a rectangle on their GPS—a place with a history and a story that proceeds history and many stories told in languages they will never bother to learn. Imagine their surprise to discover that this terra nullius is inhabited—inhabited by the formidable Dianne Stokes and her family, by Bunny Ngaparula, an elder who somehow seems to get younger every year, and by the deadly Kylie Sambo. They are confronted by Mark Lane Jangala and Ronald Brown and by Lorna Fejo and Dick Foster. They are challenged by mighty allies from further afield—Mitch from Arrende country and Donna Jackson from the Larrakia nation, and many, many others. Collectively, these unwelcome strangers are told to pack up their cars, their fancy maps and their 100,000-year-contamination nightmare and go the hell home.

If you are going to be thrown into a campaign like this without warning, you are going to need allies. Profound respect to Nat Wasley, her partner Paddy and up and coming anti-nuclear campaigner, Jalinyba. Natty, you are one of the most kickass organisers I have ever had the honour to work with. There is my dear friend Dave Sweeney, who has long been the backbone of the Australian Conservation Foundation's anti-nuclear work and is the author of the best one-liners in the business. There is also Jim Green from Friends of the Earth in Melbourne is one of the country's most dedicated and tenacious campaigners. There are so many others, but to name just a few: Cat Beaton and Lauren Mellor, Hillary Tyler and Justin Tutty, you stepped up when the old people needed your help. Ellie Gilbert and Peter Sutton, Leanne Minshull and Michael Fonda, you saw the need and did not look away. There is Jagath Dheera-Sekara, Rod Lucas and everyone at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, and dear Dimity Hawkins. My Western Australian Anti-Nuclear family—Jo Vallentine and the staunch BUMP crew—is just one powerful piece of a national campaign that finally delivered. And then there is everyone at the Arid Lands Environment Centre and the Environment Centre Northern Territory, FoE Melbourne and ACE campaigners—nearly all of them volunteers. For every demonstration, every banner drop, every early morning occupation of Martin Ferguson's electorate office, it has all been worth it.

There is Felicity Ruby, who worked with me for years. As we discovered, after the 2007 election, those Labor politicians who had been so staunch from opposition, turned silent when they actually had a chance to do something about Muckaty from government. They maintained their silence as Minister Martin Ferguson took this piece of procedural abuse designed by Prime Minister John Howard and then stepped up the aggression. We held off the Rudd government's waste dump legislation for two years. But in 2012 the Labor Party took legislative responsibility for driving this obscene theft of country over the raised voices of traditional owners and their supporters—and we will not forget this.

The appalling behaviour of the Labor Party in sliding seamlessly from condemnation to continuity makes recognition of the handful of ALP members who did buck the party line that much more important. I particularly want to acknowledge local MPs Gerry McCarthy and Elliott Macadam, backed by NT Chief Minister Paul Henderson; and, federally, Senator Louise Pratt, who tragically had to give her valedictory speech earlier this evening; Melissa Parke, the member for Fremantle; and, more recently, Senator Nova Peris, who brings heart and history to her opposition to this project. The rest of the Labor caucus stand condemned by your silence and by the votes you cast when you finally combined with the Abbott opposition to defeat the Greens in March 2012.

I also want to acknowledge those in the trade union movement who stood up when it mattered, particularly the ACTU and Unions NT, and also the MUA, the ETU and the Fireys, representing those first on the scene when things go horribly wrong at facilities like this. The failure of parliament to uphold its obligations to the mob, yet again, left it to the community movement and to a small but focused legal team as the last line of defence. George Newhouse, Mark Cowan, Steven Lennard and David Yarrow, thanks are owed for your generosity and your expertise. Ron Merckel QC, Julian Burnside QC and the brilliant Lizzie O'Shea, lawyer to the people—last week, you did it, and broke the Commonwealth government's resolve in the Federal Court and brought this shameful episode to an end. As a quick aside, you could have followed and supported this whole extraordinary contest if you were listening to the radioactive show on radio 3CR. Thank goodness for the community broadcasters.

There is a reason why the nuclear industry seeks high isolation sites for its proposed waste dumps: stable geology, deep groundwater, low seismic activity, no people, no mineral resources. Muckaty actually meets none of these preconditions, but put that down to a jittery government running before an artificial deadline. The reason the industry likes these remote, high isolation sites is that there is no form of engineered barrier that can contain spent nuclear fuel for such immense periods of time. They know this material will burn its way out eventually, and so they want to put it as far from the suburbs in which they live as possible What the mob in the Barkly want to know is, if it is too dangerous to leave where it is, guarded by a Federal Police detail and ticking away under 24/7 monitoring by technicians with lab coats and PhDs, how does dumping it in a shed surrounded by a chain-link fence on a cattle station somehow make it safe?

The campaign to support Dianne and the Muckaty mob was born out of this dismal injustice; racism, with a 25,000-year half-life. The NLC negotiated for $12 million for the 300-year head lease. It works out at a little bit over $800 a week, with the land passing back to the mob sometime in the 24th century. Beads and blankets, not laced with smallpox but with caesium.

We must never do this to an Australian community again. The Muckaty mob won this time, but it cost them, in stress to families, division in the community and time away from home. The Kunkas in South Australia had to go through this trauma a decade earlier. They won too. The mob at Cosmo Newberry were in the firing line when Pangea came calling in 1999 with a proposal to dump 20 per cent of the world's spent nuclear fuel. It took us a year to beat that. The Navajo prevailed over a similar project at Yucca Mountain in Nevada in the United States. What do all these projects have in common? The expectation that it is aboriginal communities that should bear the burden. This has to stop.

The Greens propose a new way forward. Its most important element is that it does not assume, as a foregone conclusion, that it should fall to some remote Aboriginal community to take responsibility for this poisonous time capsule. In fact, the most important thing we could do now would be to admit that there is no scientific or community consensus that a remote shed surrounded by barbed wire is anything like an appropriate management strategy for this material. It is time, as Dave Sweeney would put it, for a process, not a postcode.

We propose therefore an independent commission on radioactive waste management to run an open, deliberative process that acknowledges, as a starting condition, that if material is dangerous in Sutherland Shire, it will still be dangerous in the Barkly. It is time to leave the politics outside the room and bring together the best minds in the country, learning from 60 years of overseas experience, to design a long-term strategy of custodianship and eventually, perhaps, isolation of radioactive waste. It will confront us with the question of whether we should be producing this material at all.

Yes, it has to go somewhere. Maybe it ends up in Synroc bricks. Maybe it ends up two miles below the surface. Maybe it stays right where it is while smarter people than us work out how to contain it for periods approaching eternity. But, as we have been saying for nearly eight years, it will not be going to Muckaty. You mob were too deadly. You beat them. Take a rest and tell your story, and maybe this time a few more people will be listening.