Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to highlight an issue that has bedeviled this country for around 50 years. We should be proud that we run a world-class nuclear medicine facility at Lucas Heights in Sydney. However, the creation of nuclear medicine does create nuclear waste that, of course, we have the responsibility to manage. So far, we have simply managed that waste by storing it at Lucas Heights. It's stored there perfectly safely. It's 30 kilometres from the middle of our biggest city, and, despite what you might hear in the media, the management of nuclear waste is a very safe exercise. However, the site at Lucas Heights is running out of space. We've known it's been running out of space for decades, so a process has been underway to try and find a long-term site to store nuclear waste—it should be said it is low-level or intermediate-level waste—from the production of nuclear medicines.

We were very close to finding that facility when a small town in South Australia, Kimba, a couple of years ago voted 61 per cent in favour of having a facility. There was over 60 per cent support to have the facility in their local community. You would think that would mean we would proceed—let's go, let's do this and build this—but unfortunately a decision of the Federal Court has held this up further. That is a consequence of the fact that the Labor Party has refused to support legislation which would simply have us make a decision.

It's about time the parliament made a decision on how we manage nuclear waste, which supports the creation of nuclear medicines, which one in two Australians will use in their lifetimes. One in two Australians will use and benefit from nuclear medicines. We should be able to, as a parliament, make a decision on how we manage that. If we can't make that decision, we should just forget all this palaver about nuclear submarines, because we're never going to be able to manage the waste from nuclear submarines if we can't make a decision about the waste from nuclear medicines.