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

We are all appreciating each other today! I will put on the record a couple of comments and concerns about the narrowness of the drafting of the bill, but the fact is, as Senator McLucas has expressed, this does improve regulation of a sector that does have potential to cause enormous environmental and social harm and enormous harm to public health.

I guess it is worth acknowledging at the outset that the separation between the regulator and the regulated in this country has often been dangerously close. In instances I was following with whistleblowers at ANSTO's radioisotope facility in Sydney, we saw what extraordinarily, to my mind, amounted to regulatory capture, where whistleblowers who were trying to put on the public record the real dangers to workers' health were being attacked and eventually sacked or set aside. Under the previous government we saw some quite welcome reforms that moved the regulator more to an arm's length basis from those they were regulating. In my view this bill—not in a bit melodramatic way, but in small but important ways—continues the process of giving the regulator a freer hand at regulating this extraordinarily dangerous technology: through increasing transparency and accountability; through powers to require licence-holders to produce information; through powers to issue the improvement notices within a set time frame; and by being able to issue directions—again this goes to Senator McLucas's comments—about what happens in an emergency where the act or regulations are basically silent, where it may not be the case that ARPANSA has time to go through formal processes of issuing an instruction or direction but effectively needs to bring its expertise as a regulator to bear on an unforeseen potentially very risky or threatening event. I think those amendments are sensible. Noting ANSTO's reservations, nonetheless we are pleased to support those amendments here.

There is a very narrow definition in the bill, however, of prescribed legacy sites to which the act applies. I may take up a bit of time before we debate Senator Day's committee stage amendment to put a couple of questions to the minister and her advisers about the definition of 'prescribed legacy site' and what is in and what is out. I suspect that it is no surprise to the minister that I will be doing so. They were questions that I raised during the brief inquiry into which I teleconferenced a couple of weeks ago. I felt that I came out of the hearing without much more information than I went in with, so I am hoping that a bit of preparation and a bit of work has been done in the meantime—it would be great.

There are no specified outcomes for reducing contamination at legacy sites. So although we have a broader range of places and powers brought into ARPANSA's ambit there do not appear to be any benchmarks for, for example, dose thresholds at sites. Senator McLucas put quite correctly our ambition when it comes to ionising radiation exposure to human beings or to the wider environment. Our ambition is to minimise that exposure to the point where it is imperceptible, because the literature for so many years internationally has said that there is no safe dose. You cop a risky dose—airline pilots and air crew get a dose of ionising radiation—when you are 10 kilometres above the surface of the earth. You get a dose of ionising radiation if you stay out exposed to the sun too often. Those kinds of doses are just from being a human being alive on the planet being exposed to stray cosmic rays from time to time. But there is no safe dose. So we need to do anything at all that we can to reduce the additional doses that are being effectively forced on people, without their consent, from industrial exposure not only in the workplace—where you presume the workforce are properly trained and are given an understanding of the risks of exposure to ionising radiation—but also downstream of uranium mines.

We need to minimise these non-consensual doses of harmful ionising materials. We need to minimise it down towards zero, because any additional exposure—the way it was put to me in the literature years ago when I first came across this technology and was trying to understand what is going on at a biochemical level is that it is like machine gun fire inside the nucleus of the cell. Maybe something important gets hit; maybe it does not. But once that cancer has started or once that other damage has been done to the DNA, particularly in children or to foetuses in utero, you cannot claw it back. There is no way you can heal somebody once that damage has been done, and it takes just one decay track through one cell to cause cancer. I guess that is the literal understanding of why there is no safe dose. Yes, we are exposed to ionising radiation just in the course of our normal lives, living on a planet that is mildly radioactive. But everything we can do to force those additional exposures back towards zero is important.

People living in the vicinity of uranium mines, either operating ones or closed mines in the Alligator Rivers region in the Northern Territory, for example, are extremely distressed to read credible research from a couple of years back that showed the incidence of cancer among Aboriginal people in host communities around the closed Alligator Rivers mines in the NT that were operated in the fifties and sixties was double that of background populations or other populations in the area. That is how serious it is. I will get to the wider consequences, as I guess is probably appropriate, when we come to debating Senator Day's amendments about how this is precisely the wrong time to be ripping the lid off and opening the door to wider expansion into nuclear technology. The evidence is out there—not because the Greens say so; the industry itself is starting to front up to the consequences of just how much trouble it is in overseas. But I will hold those comments off until we get to the committee stage.

I foreshadow, to give the minister's advisers a bit of time in case the material is not immediately at hand, that I will ask to get an inventory of which existing sites are included under the amending legislation we are discussing today and which are not. My understanding, which was not changed during the inquiry of a couple of weeks ago, was that the act would not cover, for example, contaminated sites around Maralinga or other areas of nuclear weapons testing, where Australian service personnel and Aboriginal people from central and north-western Australia were bombed, were exposed to ionising radiation and to fission products in fallout by an ally. I note—as I think is appropriate in this year when we are commemorating the sacrifice of veterans in conflicts into which we have sent them—that in Australia the atomic veterans are not eligible for a gold card, because they were bombed by an ally. If they had been exposed to radiation from imperial Japanese forces or from any of the other forces that we faced during the Second World War they would be automatically eligible for a gold card. Because their exposure occurred from being bombed by nuclear weapons deployed by an ally—Australian uranium basically fired upon them in central Australia by the British government—they are not eligible. They are dying one by one; that cohort diminishes year by year. These are the sorts of risks that we are talking about. As far as I am aware—I would be delighted to be proven wrong—Maralinga and the other nuclear weapons test sites are not covered; they are not brought into the ambit of the regulator.

Port Pirie, Wild Dog, Radium Hill, Rum Jungle—radioactive contamination in this country goes back way further than most people think, certainly further than I thought. Early radium workings go back way before the development of a nuclear weapons or nuclear power industry. That, for me, is one of the reasons why it is important to remark when we see this kind of regulation coming through the Senate that nuclear accidents and nuclear contamination have a start time. Often you can pinpoint it, as they were able to pinpoint to within a few seconds the reactors at the Fukushima site on Japan's Pacific coast going into meltdown on 3 November 2011. These accidents and these contamination and exposure sites have a start date but they have no end date. There are still contamination legacy issues at Radium Hill, which was contaminated more than 100 years ago. There are still contamination issues at the—by today's standards relatively small—uranium workings in the Alligator Rivers region that were mined out, closed down and rehabilitated as far as the authorities of the day were concerned decades ago but are still leaching materials into the wider environment. Ionising radiation is invisible. It does not tell you that it is there. You cannot see it. Unless you are carrying a Geiger counter around with you, you do not know that it is there. That is why these sites are so dangerous. I am very keen to know whether any of those sites that I listed, the so-called orphan sites where state regulation is either completely absent or patently inadequate, are caught by this bill and whether they will be brought within this bill and what it would mean if they were. What are the obligations that arise?

One of the questions I put during the brief committee hearing was: why are there no cost implications in this bill? If we are going to see a higher level of accountability and a higher level of rehabilitation for these orphan contaminated sites, surely that is going to cost money. Protecting people who are cleaning up the radioactive aftertaste of these sorts of operations does cost money. It is an unavoidable consequence which is often not factored in—it is almost never factored in—at any point in the nuclear fuel chain. I was a bit curious and maybe even a bit perplexed to see that there were no cost implications with this bill, because that to me would imply that nothing is in fact going to change on the ground. Again, Minister—through you, Mr President—if I am wrong about that I would be very happy to stand corrected.

We are also interested to know about the definition of a 'prescribed legacy site', and I will go into this again a little bit in the committee stage, unless the minister wants to address these comments in her closing remarks. It is not entirely clear to me what such a site is. Is it mining, a processing facility, a research facility? In some parts of the amending legislation it is clear which sites are included. Based on their management by Commonwealth entity, the institutional jurisdiction defines whether a site is caught or not. That is reasonably clear. But what about some of these other orphan sites where ownership is not entirely clear. In the end we chose not to bring forward amendment at the committee stage to try to bring all the sites within ARPANSA's ambit as a regulator. It may in fact be a wiser course to lift the standard of state and territory regulation and to create that consistency around the country where it is lacking at the moment.

I will confine my comments to the clauses as they are outlined in the bill. I think Senator Day has actually done us a bit of a favour in bringing his amendment forward. The Greens certainly will not be supporting it, but it is a good opportunity to look at the consequences of what would happen if the chamber did support that amendment. In the meantime, I gather that this amending legislation have been in the works for a long time and that a lot of work has gone on behind the scenes to bring it forward. I acknowledge the government and those public servants who brought this amending legislation forward and commend it to the chamber.