Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Finance and Administration (Senator Minchin) to a question without notice asked by Senator Allison today relating to the sale of uranium to Russia.

I take note of the answer given to me about the deal which has just been struck between Australia and Russia to supply uranium—a deal said to be worth $1 billion. Last week at a Russia summit we heard from journalist Grigory Pasko, who was jailed in Siberia for five years. Why? Because he reported that the Russian government had dumped radioactive material in the Sea of Japan. He also told us that around 20 journalists who had written extensively on Russia, its corruption and its human rights abuses had lost their lives under the Putin regime. Garry Kasparov was reported this week as saying: ‘Don’t trust Russia. It will sell Australia’s uranium to rogue states.’ He said it is okay to trade in other goods and we should not worry so much about them, but uranium is different. It is not like carrots or car parts; it is a very dangerous commodity which is in great demand by those states that wish to build nuclear weapons.

The government says there is a nuclear safeguards agreement in place and we should not worry—that everything will be all right—but I ask the Senate to consider a couple of things. In just a few recent years there have been almost 200 incidents of radioactive material having gone missing, having been stolen, having been hijacked or having disappeared, and that involved quite large amounts of radioactive material. Russia does not actually need our uranium. It was amazing that the minister should say that this is all about Russia’s development of an extra 30 nuclear reactors sometime in the future. If that were the case, there would be no reason to rush this agreement with a deadline of September. Russia has a supply of uranium—it has its own—and those reactors will not be up and running for at least 15 years, probably more like 20 years. The real issue here is what is going to happen to our uranium. If it does not end up in Russian bombs, and it probably does not need to, it will be onsold. That was the warning given by those journalists.

In fact, Russia has about 700 tonnes of highly enriched uranium right now. It needs uranium to downgrade that highly enriched uranium so that it is useful to be sold on as nuclear power reactor fuel. We have not heard that from the government. The pretence—the great swindle in this whole deal—is that Russia needs our uranium and it needs it for its own domestic peaceful purposes. That is a nonsense. Not only does Russia have 700 tonnes of highly enriched uranium awaiting reprocessing; it also has 10,000 nuclear weapons and has refused to disarm over the last decade. The first rounds were obsolete in any case, so it was hardly surprising that it would be prepared to dismantle them; but, like all of the weapons countries around the world, it has ignored its obligations under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and is not disarming further weapons.

It does not make any sense whatsoever that Australia should deal in uranium with Russia. We have the opportunity to get some leverage over this country if it seriously wants our uranium—a $1 billion worth of it; that is a lot of uranium. If it seriously wants it then we should be insisting that human rights abuses be addressed in Russia. We should be insisting on democratic regimes being stronger, which might control what seems to be out of control in terms of the administration of Russia currently ignoring its own laws. What we need to do is make Australia’s efforts heard by Russia. That should have happened at APEC. The minister said: ‘Oh, well. There are international fora for us to talk about human rights protection and the like.’ But where it matters, where we can actually gain some leverage over Russia, we choose to turn the other cheek, to not bother, to not be worried about those journalists who now have been taught a very serious and important lesson by the Putin administration—that is, do not speak out or you will find yourself in jail. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.