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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (Senator Carr) to a question without notice asked by Senator Ludlam today relating to radioactive waste management.

I will speak briefly on the comments that Senator Carr made when I asked him a short while ago about Australian government progress on repealing the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act 2005 and the amendments that were subsequently moved in 2006. In the lead-up to the election campaign we saw pretty clear comments on behalf of Senator Carr, who was the opposition spokesperson for science, I believe, and from Senator Trish Crossin and Warren Snowdon MP from the then opposition relating to the process that the Howard government had gone through, the quite coercive and unconscionable process, I might add, to imposing the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act on the Northern Territory without a word of consultation to the Territory government, any of the communities there or any of the people living nearby on the sites that they were later targeting.

Quite reasonably, I think, two years on now from the election the Greens have a right to ask on behalf of the communities who are directly affected in the Territory and around Australia where on earth that promise has got to, because the Prime Minister has made much of his commitment to upholding all of his election promises. The Labor government have shown, in some cases, a quite astonishing degree of inflexibility on the basis of things they said during the election campaign. I think the first mistake the Prime Minister made was taking this responsibility out of the science portfolio and putting it into the energy and resources portfolio with Mr Martin Ferguson. I have taken this issue up with the departmental officers every time there has been an opportunity in Senate estimates to find out what the officers in the department are actually doing. What we have discovered has been really interesting.

On 18 March Martin Ferguson’s department and the radioactive waste management branch peer reviewed the engineering studies and the documents that were commissioned in the last few months of the Howard government, and then those peer reviews were themselves assessed. All of the documents have been sitting on the minister’s desk since some time in the middle of March 2009. The agencies concerned since then have absolutely no idea what is going on: whether the minister plans to open up a completely new site selection process that would open the process up and take another look around the country as to where the radioactive waste should go; whether they would still be targeting Mucketty Station, which is what most people believe; or whether they would be continuing with the other three sites that were nominated under the Howard legislation. Even the officers themselves in the minister’s department have been cut out of the loop. Presumably, the only people who do know what is going on and when this coercive process might be brought to a head are the minister and some of his closest advisers. Certainly the public have no idea; the traditional owners and the people most closely concerned, who have been sticking up for their country since late 2005, have been cut out of the loop; the Territory government has no idea where this process is going; and even the department’s own officers, nominally in charge of radioactive waste that the Commonwealth is responsible for, have been cut out of the loop and have absolutely no idea where the minister is going with this.

In response to the Howard era gobbledegook that we got in answer to questions that I put earlier, I am putting the government on notice now that we will shortly be filing a freedom of information request for those documents and others that relate under the brand, new regime—apparently—of openness and transparency in government that has been foreshadowed in recent days by Senator Ludwig. Apparently there is going to be an increased focus on accountability and transparency in government. I am certainly looking forward then to receiving those engineering studies and the other documents relating to the Prime Minister’s approach to handling radioactive waste in this country.

I would like to respond briefly before I finish to the comments that Senator Carr made when he lost his temper shortly before the end of question time and was yelling back across the chamber about whether or not the Greens care about the management of radioactive waste. I would like to put very firmly on the record that we understand this is a very complex and difficult public policy issue, that no government in the last 30 or 40 years has got it right or has even made a serious attempt at getting it right, and that the Greens are very, very concerned with what happens after. We realise and recognise that the repeal of this legislation is only the beginning. It is essential to take the pressure off the communities who are targeted at the moment, but it is only the beginning. I simply refer Senator Carr to the very good work that the Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts Committee did and reported on late last year. It was a majority report that said that there are in fact very serious issues here that we need to engage with. I refer Minister Carr to that report which recommended that the act be repealed forthwith a sustainable process be put in its place.

Question agreed to.