Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

This evening, as we in this place debate the National Radioactive Waste Management Amendment (Site Specification, Community Fund and Other Measures) Bill 2020, I am reminded of many such debates in this place, some that have resulted in successful legislation and others that have been mired in dispute, in large part because of the failings of government to adequately consult. We know that radioactive waste is stored in a great many places in Australia, which is an undesirable thing. It is stored in more than 100 places, including Australia's hospitals and, of course, at Lucas Heights, the originator of much of the nuclear medicine material.

Our radioactive nuclear waste has built up over 60 years. It's a legacy that has supported the medical treatment of many, many thousands of Australians, including my own family members. It is therefore an important industry, and we need to find a solution for its waste disposal. We know there'll come a time when the storage at Lucas Heights runs out of room. Lucas Heights does have some capacity to keep the waste there, but I've visited Lucas Heights, and it is a fairly constrained site, and ANSTO have made it clear they would rather use that space for other scientific endeavours than see it have ongoing status as a waste facility. The department has claimed that the ANSTO site is going to be completely full by 2030 in any case.

For more than a decade I've participated in debates around this issue where the parliament and the government have yet to find a solution. We know that, if we're going to continue to use nuclear medicine, a dedicated storage facility is necessary. Back in 2012 the Gillard government enacted the National Radioactive Waste Management Act, for the purpose of creating certainty in a process to enable site selection for a waste management facility for this low-level waste.

However, in the hands of this government, that process has been entirely botched, in large part because of their failure to properly consult with First Nations people and traditional owners who've a cultural relationship with the community and lands around Kimba. It's a shame that this government has made such a mess of this process that it's trampled on the rights of First Nations people. In particular I note its attempt previously to get the Labor Party to simply vote for its site selection, to override that community consultation process, because it botched that process. It botched that process explicitly by failing to include and specifically excluding First Nations people from those consultation processes.

It's all very well for local government to have a vote—that's terrific—and for ratepayers to have a vote. But there are a whole range of different cultural values and relationships with that country that should have been taken into account, as was intended by Labor when it enacted that legislation. The original bill that was due to be debated in this place previously proposed a new facility at Napandee, near Kimba, to store low-level waste and to temporarily store intermediate-level waste. I think it's important to note that high-level waste should not be stored there. That is not what the community has voted for. That certainly also has the objection of First Nations traditional owners.

But the thing is, it hasn't taken much, now that this site has been identified, for many of those opposite to start talking about a nuclear energy future for Australia. So we need to be very careful, lest we jeopardise the important mandate for nuclear medicine and the need to consult with community, to consult with First Nations people, to find a site where we can safely store this waste. For those opposite to start mixing things up by talking about their support for nuclear energy and nuclear power is I think an indictment on what has already been a terrible process. It's worth noting that Australia will receive intermediate-level waste in 2022. This is waste that's been created by Australia and has been reprocessed into a form that is safe for storage, and it is due to be stored at Lucas Heights until a dedicated facility is available. As you start to see that intermediate-level waste coming in, you see the looming pressure there on Lucas Heights.

The Senate Economics Committee, through its inquiry, has taken evidence showing that some in the community—a majority of ratepayers—were perhaps supportive of this facility. But that's not the view taken by all of the community, including many farmers and others who have significant concerns about the impact on the region's agricultural production. I note that others have said that the facility will provide economic opportunity in the region. I do note, though, that there's little capacity for traditional owners to participate in deliberation around whether they support or get economic benefit from such a project, when they have been so overtly excluded from that process.

The Bungala Aboriginal Corporation has criticised the process undertaken by this government to assess community attitudes to the facility. They've notably shown quite comprehensively how inadequate those processes have been, including on the grounds that their members were excluded from taking part in a community ballot that was commissioned to assess community sentiment around the site. I think this is an extreme act of negligence and disrespect that this government has committed. It's an act of disrespect that we've seen repeated in other Commonwealth actions, including in the Commonwealth's failure to intervene under the powers that it has for the protection of Juukan Gorge and at the Gunlom site in Kakadu National Park.

We need to see First Nations traditional owners in our nation given a respected place at the table in all of these kinds of projects, so that their traditional connection and culture is held central to our decision-making as a nation. Unless we do that, and until we do that, it's very difficult to see how the search for a nuclear waste facility is going to be successful, because we've seen time and time again that the community division that is created through the failure to uphold community consultation and consent has brought previous processes, rightfully, undone. It was a privilege to talk to traditional owners around Muckaty Station, who through many Senate inquiries raised concerns they had about their country being chosen as the disposal site.

What's telling in this case is that it has brought around an inevitable failure for a successful site to be found. It has also brought incredible upset and discontent for these communities, who have been put through these arduous processes, where they have felt excluded, marginalised and put upon in relation to something that has a profound impact on their country. To my mind, it's why a First Nations voice to parliament, which has been called for in the Uluru Statement, is so important. It would mean that we couldn't debate legislation like this without having a proper intersection of First Nations voices in our deliberation on those issues. It's critical that we have a voice to parliament so that this parliament, and governments, can legislate responsibly and effectively in the interests of First Nations people and, most importantly, in the interests of being able to get important things done on behalf of the whole nation.

We know that last year the government wanted to, in effect, wedge Labor into helping it select their preferred site—in a departure from the legislation that's before us today, in which the Kimba site and two others have been put forward. These could prospectively, with community consultation, also be chosen. We know that the government has agreed to reinstate the ministerial site declaration process in the current act, as was proposed previously by Labor. It remains unclear to me—they wanted to make Labor complicit in overriding the rights of First Nations people in appealing that decision—to have the previous legislation come before the parliament.

Labor firmly believes that an aggrieved party should have access to judicial review. If people feel that the decision to locate the facility in their community—on their country, on their farming land, on their traditional ownership country—was not reached in a proper manner, then they should have the capacity to seek judicial review of those decisions, to see whether they were made properly in the first case.

I note there has been unanimous opposition from traditional owners. It would appear that, if the legislation had already been passed, the outcome would have been to impose this facility on traditional owners who didn't want it on their country. That's why we moved an amendment to that bill that would remove schedule 1 while retaining schedules 2 and 3. With the previous bill, schedule 1 dealt with site specification; schedules 2 and 3 dealt with the community fund and other measures. We're now back in the place where the government has seen sense, but I'm still incredulous that this government would have sought to ask Labor to be complicit in imposing that site on that community. Unfortunately for us, we didn't want to support the overriding of their judicial rights, but we certainly didn't want to see, therefore, a site declaration made that would have seen the community fund go to waste when it should be properly in place to support local community impacts.

It's worth bearing in mind that judicial review of the decision only allows the legality of the decision to be tested, rather than the merits of that decision. In that context, I would note that if the proceedings are unsuccessful there's no guarantee that a site selection would not still go ahead without the accompanying community fund, which was in the previous legislation. The rigmarole that this parliament and, indeed, the local community has had to go through to get to this place is a sad indictment on the environment that this government has fostered when it comes to consultation and the inclusion of First Nations people.