Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to continue my contribution to the debate regarding the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2010. I think the last time we dealt with this was back in March, and I had a few minutes to contribute to this just prior to question time. I do not have very much I want to say today in wrapping up my contribution to this debate, but I do want to turn our attention to the issue of radioactive waste and radioactive materials.

Radioactive waste has been an emotional issue. In my time that I have represented the Northern Territory, if it has not been the issue of whether or not we mine uranium the other major question has been what we then do with the waste that is produced once we have used that mineral for radioactive activities. We know that radioactive materials have a variety of important uses in industry, agriculture and, most noticeably, in medicine. The production and use of radioactive materials in all these applications is strictly regulated to ensure the safety of people and the environment. But we also know that around 500,000 Australians per year benefit from medical diagnosis or treatment using radioisotopes that are produced by the research reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney.

Radiopharmaceuticals—therapeutic drugs —contain radioactive materials. They are important in the diagnosis and treatment of serious illnesses such as cancer. We know that cancer affects one in three men and one in four women by the age of 75. While the quest for a cure continues, treating it directly by irradiating the cancer and using special radioactive medicines that attach themselves to the tumour provides benefits for many cancer sufferers. In the last 18 months we have witnessed the opening of an oncology unit in the Northern Territory. The Alan Walker Cancer Care Centre has been a welcome benefit and relief for people living in the Northern Territory. It means that now, for the first time ever, you do not have to pack up your goods and your family and travel down to Adelaide for those long periods of treatment for your cancer. In fact, your oncology, radiotherapy and chemo­therapy treatment can be done on the spot in Darwin. So lots of people are talking about and benefiting from the use of radioactive materials, particularly when it comes to treating diseases such as cancer.

I turn now to the issue of what we do with the waste that comes from those materials and that treatment. Getting the benefit of nuclear medicine also means accepting the responsibility to safely manage resulting radioactive waste. The majority of our waste is actually medium to low level, resulting from over 40 years of research, medical and industrial uses of radioactive materials. The low-level waste, which I have seen at Lucas Heights myself, includes paper, plastic, glassware, protective clothing—even Chux wipes and gloves—and canisters contam­inated as a result of the clinical procedures, and spent fuels. We know that this waste is currently stored in over 100 individual locations around the country, as well as in repositories in Britain and France.

A recent Victorian Auditor-General's report into hazardous waste said:

… there is little assurance that hazardous waste is stored and disposed of appropriately.

We have an international obligation to safely secure and manage our waste, and the next step in that is building a purpose-built radioactive waste management storage and processing facility, a single facility that would provide greater safety and security benefits for the community compared with the current practice. Our obligation does not include receiving waste from other countries. That is forbidden by Australian law and has been reiterated time and time again by ministers in my government and the Prime Minister. But, like other countries, we have to take responsibility for the proper management of our own waste. We know that spent fuels were sent to France and Scotland and that we have an obligation to store them because they are our fuels that were sent there for decommissioning and they are due back.

If we look at the history of the debate about where we are going to put this purpose-built nuclear waste facility in this country, we see, as I said in my previous contribution, that this has been on the agenda for decades. In fact, I think the Minister for the Regional Australia, Regional Develop­ment and Local Government, Simon Crean, started this process when the Hawke and Keating governments were in power, more than a decade or so ago. Now we have come to the pointy end of the debate: making a decision about what we are going to do in this country. We know that the previous coalition government reached an agreement with the Ngapa clan, who nominated their land at Muckaty Station as a potential site for the facility. The approach taken in this piece of legislation and by this government honours the commitments made by the previous government to the Ngapa traditional owners of the land at Muckaty Station.

We know that that land was identified through the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act and the traditional owners of the nominated land were identified by the Northern Land Council. And we know that the nomination has now been questioned in a court of law. We also know that as late as last week the Prime Minister, when she was in the Northern Territory, publicly stated that we would abide by the outcome of any court decision. We also know that other clans on the Muckaty land trust have nominated and entered into agreements with respect to their land at Muckaty Station for other uses, such as for part of the railway and as a gas easement. It is not uncommon, of course, for individual families to nominate sections of the land on the Muckaty land trust for use. I know there is a dispute about whether or not the Ngapa clan were the right people to have put forward their land for use by a purpose-built radioactive waste facility. That matter is being tested in a court of law. We have publicly said—on transcript, through the Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, and now the Prime Minister—that this government will abide by any outcome of that court case.

Let us turn to what the National Radio­active Waste Management Bill does. The bill that we have put before this parliament improves the existing legislation for the management of our radioactive waste. This piece of legislation does four key things. It introduces procedural fairness to all decisions regarding the selection of the site. It ensures that only voluntary nominations can be considered in selecting a site, and this process expressly recognises the rights of the traditional owners of any potential site. Again, the Ngapa clan have volunteered their land at Muckaty Station. That voluntary process is under dispute in a court. We have said that we will abide by the outcome of that court case. This bill rules out from further consideration the three potential sites that were identified by the previous government without consultation and without any deliberation as to the impact on any Indigenous people or traditional owners if any of those three sites went ahead, including the site in Katherine which borders a particular family's cattle station. In the event that further nominations are required to select a site, the Northern Territory will not be singled out as the only region that can be considered. If the outcome of the Federal Court case is such that it does not rule in favour of the Northern Land Council and the Ngapa clan, the Northern Territory will not be singled out as the only region that can considered.

What this legislation does, which I think people fail to appreciate, is to set out a blueprint for a purpose-built radioactive waste management facility in this country. It is not just about the Northern Territory; it is about a storage facility in this country. Some would claim that the government is disregarding the rights of traditional owners by seeking to enforce the storage of the nuclear waste at Muckaty Station. That is wrong. Under this bill the government cannot impose a facility on any one community. A site must be volunteered for consideration. The site at Muckaty was volunteered for consideration. Some people do not like that; some people disagree with it. But at the end of the day, under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act, that land was put forward. It was accepted by the previous federal govern­ment, the coalition government, and we have said we will acknowledge that acceptance, subject to the result of the Federal Court case. As we know, at present there are Federal Court proceedings challenging the Northern Land Council's ruling on the traditional ownership of the land at Muckaty Station, and Martin Ferguson, the minister, has said publicly that he would respect the court's decision and will continue to respect the wishes of the lawfully determined traditional owners of the land at Muckaty Station. The government has no intention to take any action under the Howard govern­ment's radioactive waste legislation. This is a different bill that will achieve a different outcome. This is a bill that acknowledges that volunteered site, and this is a bill that will now lay a blueprint for the nation's handling of radioactive waste material in this country.

Also, we will see the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act come into play. Before any work can commence in constructing the facility on a selected site, the requirements and necessary approvals under the EPBC Act and the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act 1998 will be met and obtained. The facts are simply missing from a campaign that is being waged against the establishment of a long-term solution for the responsible management of our radioactive waste.

I just say finally that we need to respect the rights of the Ngapa clan, who have made a decision about the use of their land just like any other Indigenous group. But, of course, that is being tested in the courts by other Indigenous members. We need to respect that, and we have said we will respect that. We are obliged to deal with the difficult issue of managing our own low- and medium-level radioactive waste, and we have a responsibility to the community to deal with it in a safe and secure manner so the important and valuable benefits of radioactive materials, such as cancer treatment, can continue. I just say again, though, that this is a blueprint for a national radioactive waste management facility. It does, of course, consider Muckaty first, but Muckaty Station and the Muckaty Land Trust were volunteered by Indigenous people under the land rights act, which we will honour unless, of course, there is a decision in the courts otherwise.

Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make remarks on the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2010 and particularly the extent to which it targets the Aboriginal community and Aboriginal land. I would also like to note that I know there are people keenly listening to this debate, both in the gallery and back in many communities.

This bill overrides Aboriginal heritage and environmental protection laws, and it is something that I have been passionate about since I first started in this place. When I first took on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander portfolio, this was an issue that came up virtually straightaway, so the Greens have been campaigning on this for quite some time. In particular Senator Ludlam, who will speak later, has been working intensely on this campaign and opposing the approach by this government that continues the approach of the previous government in foisting this facility on Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. I will go into that issue again a bit later.

We believe that this bill overrides both Aboriginal heritage and environmental protection laws to the extent that it seeks to impose nuclear waste on an unwilling community in the Northern Territory. This bill indicates the government's continued failure to understand the standards and agreements established at the international level when it comes to Indigenous peoples. The international Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues require the 'free, prior and informed consent' of affected communities, and this is something neither the previous government nor this government truly gets. Article 29, part 2 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states:

States shall take effective measures to ensure that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent.

This is not international best practice. In 2008 the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications and the Arts found that the previous government's bill on radioactive waste was unfair and discriminatory and that consultations and decision making should reflect the interests of all the clan groups in the immediate areas. Paragraph 2.33 of the committee report states:

The committee agrees that the undermining of legal rights by the current legislation is unfair and discriminatory, and should not form the foundation for any issue, including radioactive waste management.

The 2008 committee inquiry revealed that the former Howard government's proposal to store radioactive waste at Muckaty Station in the Northern Territory was strongly contested. The people of Muckaty, north of Tennant Creek, continue to be targeted and specifically named in this government's legislation. The environment committee inquiry put important documents on the table—in particular, the Aboriginal Land Commissioner's report that established the Muckaty Land Trust. The land commissioner recognised shared interests and group structures. He recognised interweaving songlines and ceremonial relationships to that land among five group communities—not just one but five groups. This covered the whole area covered by the trust, and those groups—and I apologise right now for my mispronunciation—are the Ngapa, the Milwayi, the Wirntiku, the Ngarrka and the Yapakurla groups. Stephen Leonard, who made a submission for and on behalf of the Muckaty traditional owners, emphasised the importance of this document.

In 1997, after hearing years of tested evidence in a transparent and objective tribunal framework, the Aboriginal Land Commission found that there was clearly joint and interconnected ownership between the five main groups in the Muckaty Land Trust where dreaming overlapped. This was a core reason why a single land trust was granted. Furthermore, the report clearly indicated that the nominated site was jointly owned by at least three to five groups. The current process isolates a small number of people as the exclusive owners of a patch of land within the trust. This determination has been made through a secret anthropological report commissioned by the Northern Land Council. The Northern Land Council rests its entire case on this document but refuses to reveal it even to other members of the Muckaty Land Trust, whose country it concerns and whose family members, we think, are likely cited. The documents recently found in the National Archives underline further how far at odds the NLC's advice is with the land commissioner's findings. The Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee also conducted an inquiry into this matter and made a recommendation that the minister 'undertake consultations with all parties with an interest in, or who would be affected by, a decision to select the Muckaty Station site as the location for the national radioactive waste facility'. I note that the minister has failed to do so. This is a disregard for parliamentary process, consultative public policy and, we believe, basic human rights. I would also like to quote from a letter I understand the minister has received from Mark Lane, who wrote to him about this issue last March. Mr Lane said:

These are our concerns. We told the government that Karakara is sacred land. Only men talk about the land. No women talk for Karakara in the Muckaty Land Trust. The site for the proposed nuclear waste dump is in an earthquake tremor zone. What if an earthquake opens the nuclear waste storage and radioactive waste falls into our groundwater basin? We don't get our water from the city, town or from the coast. It comes from right below us.

The Warlmanpa elders always said that the Karakara is not Milwayi country. Milwayi is a snake dreaming travelling through Karakara and Muckaty Land Trust to Helen Springs. Milwayi is the totem for the ancestors' ground. Is the government going to regret everything later when a disaster happens like what is happening in Japan right now?

Finally, he said:

The government should rethink about the whole nuclear cycle and leave our traditional cultural, spiritual homeland alone. If the minister had adequately consulted he would know about these issues and maybe he would be taking them into account.

The minister may have a similar attitude to the member for Canning, who has said:

Geologically it is the most appropriate place. It is geologically stable, from a weather point of view it is dry and lacks in humidity, and no one to speak of lives there.

I repeat, he said:

… no one to speak of lives there. It is a very sparse population. Barely anyone lives in that arid and desolate part of the Northern Territory.

I think the member for Canning needs to take a little trip and go and talk to the people that do live there, that do love and belong to that land.

Is that the approach of this parliament: no-one lives there so we can dump waste on them? That is the attitude that is prevailing in this place. We know that is not true. People do live there. There is a cattle station in the area. People live in the surroundings and use the land for ceremony, hunting and camp­ing—people with names, people with children, people with connection to that place. People do live there; they have connection to that country. Their land is not nowhere and they are not nobody.

As Melissa Parke said in the other place, we should guard against the notion that remoteness equates to emptiness. And as Gerry McCarthy, the ALP representative of the area, stated to the Senate inquiry:

If the government's decision is based on the testimony of an extended family group living far removed from the Muckaty Station, then the total dislocation of the Waramungu and the Warlmanpa tribal communities of the Barkly that I represent is at stake. Any determination to proceed without direct, open and accountable consultation with the wider contemporary Indigenous community representing the neighbouring clans, moiety and tribal groups of the central Barkly will effectively lead to generational division and conflict amongst the very people the minister has set out to support.

In evidence to the committee the Australian Public Health Association pointed out the health implications of the kind of divisive strategy set out in this legislation. The Public Health Association went into detail about the stress that results from disempowerment when there is a lack of confidence in decision making, when people do not have a say, when people have not been consulted, when their opinions are not taken into account, when they are not properly dealt with as individuals. The impact of these circumstances is very real and is one of the contributing factors to illness, stress and the 17-year gap in life expectancy.

We are supposed to be learning, we are supposed to be closing the gap and yet, here, the very practices that have led to the existence of this gap are being practised yet again when the government wants to dump something on a community. Exactly the same things that we have done in the past we are doing again. Exactly the same things that brought us the failed intervention are being practised again on these communities, and apparently they are supposed to wear it. They are supposed to wear the fact that some of this material may have been generated in generating nuclear medicines so therefore that justifies dumping it on their land and not taking their opinions into consideration—but that is okay because it is for the benefit of society. It is 2011. You would have thought that we would stop doing this, but apparently we have not learnt.

Division and conflict are much more prevalent when money is introduced in a context of poverty. The fact is that Aboriginal people are faced with the choice of sacrificing their land, health and water in exchange for what most Australians regard as their citizenship entitlements. As we heard in evidence to the legal and constitutional affairs committee inquiry:

So we made a decision about this waste problem to get money to build up our outstations, to get money to go back to our land and have schooling, have employment, have health out of the land itself, build up our station as a cattle station again, start a business.

We should not be doing that in 2011. It is the same thing that is occurring in other places around Australia where we are making Aboriginal people give up rights to their land so that they can then have access to the services that the rest of Australia takes for granted and knows that a good society provides: decent housing, decent health, decent education. If you tried to dump this in one of the green leafy suburbs so that people could get decent housing, decent employment and decent health, what do you think the response would be? The same as this community's has been: 'No, we don't want it. No, we don't want to sacrifice our land.' But these people, apparently, are in lands where no-one lives and it is empty. Well, it is not empty and they do care. We believe that this is a shameful indictment of the government's handling of Aboriginal people's rights, livelihood and future. It replicates yet again the approach that was taken during the intervention in the Northern Territory that we know has not worked, that we know was foisted on them with a top-down, patronising approach—and here we go again. It is all very well to wrap it up, saying, 'We've consulted one of the groups'; but, as we know, there are five groups there and they are saying; 'We don't want this waste dump. It's not appropriate to foist it on us. It's not appropriate to try to divide and conquer us, the same way you have done for the 200 years you've been in this land.' We are repeating those same mistakes. It is time it stopped. It is time we actually listened properly to what Aboriginal people want. There is no doubt in my mind that what we are practising here is radioactive racism, and it needs to stop.

Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2010. I commend Senator Siewert for her remarks a moment ago about the very real impacts on Indigenous communities when governments decide to impose things that would be unacceptable in other places in Australia. I particularly note the need for free, prior and informed consent. Everybody understands that a community's consent or otherwise is fundamental when it comes to assessing a community's response to a particular project, and in this case it is 'otherwise'. The community involved has not been properly consulted.

And why not? Why are we standing in this parliament talking about a national radioactive waste management bill? It is simply because the Australian government want to continue to mine uranium, expand uranium mining throughout the country and send that uranium to be converted into, they say, nuclear energy. We say it could be converted into nuclear energy but it could equally be sent off to displace other uranium into nuclear weapons regimes around the world. We are doing this because the government wants to dig more uranium out of the ground and have a nuclear waste dump in Australia. This begs the question: ought we not be leaving that uranium in the ground in the first place?

I note that, during the debate in the House, a large number of speakers used the bill to talk about nuclear energy and promote nuclear energy as a solution to climate change. The whole reason being put forward for why you would take away Indigenous people's rights, trample on the notion of free, prior and informed consent and take away from Indigenous people their real connection to the land by contaminating it in this way is that you want to promote nuclear energy as a solution to climate change. Since when has that been a solution to climate change? As Ian Lowe says:

If nuclear power is the answer, it must have been a pretty stupid question!

I note that Mr Macfarlane from the coalition took great pleasure in the other place in congratulating the Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, on declaring himself a supporter of nuclear energy. Mr Macfarlane congratulated Minister Ferguson on his foresight, vision and understanding, so to speak. Large chunks of that speech were an endorsement of Minister Ferguson and free advertising for the nuclear industry. The House also heard from a Tasmanian member, the member for Lyons; Dick Adams spoke at length about nuclear power—as did the member for Kooyong and others. They all spruiked nuclear power as the pretext for having to impose on Indigenous communities a nuclear waste dump that they do not want and to which they did not consent. Suddenly, Australia is doing the world a favour by promoting nuclear power.

Nuclear power is not a solution to climate change. Global warming is a very real problem. It is an urgent problem. We have to address it in the next 10 years. Rarely—in fact, never, I would purport, in the history of humankind have we had one group of people living at one period of time that will determine the fate of all future generations to come, including our fellow species on this planet. That is a pretty awesome responsibility that we who live now have. Within the next 10 years, we have to make sure that global emissions peak and then start to come down or we will have no hope of constraining global warming to less than two degrees above pre-industrial levels—and, even then, we give ourselves only a 50 per cent chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

The Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, said only last week in Bonn that 'two degrees was not enough'; it is too big a risk and we need to bring emissions down by 1.5 degrees—that is, we have to start talking about stabilising emissions at 350 parts per million. This is a really radical shift in the thinking about urgency, engagement on levels of emissions and what we have to do. We need the technologies we have right now. We have renewable energy technologies that we can implement right now. Nuclear energy will be too slow. Even if you got rid of the danger associated with nuclear waste, even if you put aside the issue of nuclear proliferation, it will be too slow to address the climate crisis within the time frame we have. That is a fact.

In addition, there has been all this talk about how safe nuclear energy is. Well, we just saw how safe nuclear energy was with the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Since that time, the German government has decided to phase out nuclear power by 2022 and the Swiss government to phase out nuclear power permanently by 2034. Japan has abandoned plans for nuclear to provide half its energy and has scrapped 14 planned new reactors. The Chinese State Council put an embargo on approval of new reactors. Venezuela has called off plans to build a reactor despite a 2010 deal with Russia to do so. The European Union countries decided to conduct stress tests on all 143 reactors in Europe, announced on 23 March, after an emergency meeting of the European Council of Ministers on Energy. Italy has decided on a one-year moratorium on its plans to revive nuclear power. The President of the Philippines has rejected the use of nuclear power due to safety concerns, and Israel's Prime Minister stated on 17 March that Israel was now unlikely to pursue civil nuclear energy.

A 10 May 2011 New York Times article reported poor market conditions for nuclear, saying:

Even supporters of the technology doubt that new projects will surface any time soon to replace those that have been all but abandoned.

Even before the Fukushima disaster, the world's nuclear industry was in clear decline, according to a new report from the World­watch Institute. That report, commissioned months before the Fukushima tragedy, painted a bleak picture of an ageing industry unable to keep pace with its renewable energy competitors—an ageing industry, a past technology, too slow, too dangerous and too expensive.

Now let me go to 'too expensive'. Why is it that the nuclear industry always has to come running to the government to get covered for insurance and for support and for the government to be the guarantor? No private sector company goes in for this with governments running along behind saying, 'We will stand by this industry. We will meet your insurance liability, because otherwise we know you will not invest'—corporate welfare for the nuclear industry; otherwise, they do not invest. And that is the catch here. Every time you hear someone standing up, spruiking for nuclear power and for how safe these nuclear waste dumps are, why is it that they so desperately need governments to intervene to skew the pitch for them? Why is it that they have had to come to the government and say, 'We need you to override environmental protection legislation; we need you to override the rights of Australia's Indigenous people, because otherwise we will not get our proposal up'? What does that tell you? Nuclear is too slow, too expensive, too dangerous, is not supported by the community, alternatives are available, but let us go to the government cap in hand and ask for the government's support.

And while I am on the subject of government, one of the most despicable things about this legislation is the absolute hypocrisy of the Labor government. When the coalition put up Muckaty Station, when they came out and said that that was going to be the nuclear waste dump, the Labor Party said: 'That is shocking! The people have not been consulted. Indigenous people have not been appropriately consulted. There has not been the prior informed consent.' Out they all came with it. Then the minute they get into government, yes, they take on the Welcome to Country, and we were delighted to see that when Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister in 2007, and Australia's Indigenous people had a right to hope at that point that things might be different. Now they have learned that nothing is different, that when the mining industry speaks both the Liberal and the Labor parties jump. When the uranium industry wants to be given the green light, then it does not matter to either the Labor Party or the coalition that Indigenous rights are trampled along the way. That is what is going on here. The very same people who only a few years ago were saying that this was an absolute travesty of social justice are standing up now, whimpering away in the background about how they are not really doing this, they are just cutting and pasting John Howard's legislation, are putting it into new legislation and giving the minister the power to determine that Muckaty will be the site. That is what is going on here.

This is a disgrace from the government and I hope that Australia's Indigenous people watching this happen will take it up to the government very strongly. They have been shockingly misled. When are the photo opportunities going to stop and when is real policy, genuine engagement, genuine consultation going to start? That is what needs to happen here. Everybody in this parliament knows at this moment that the people who have a connection, a real connection, to the land have not been consulted and do not want this waste dump imposed upon them. I would like everyone speaking on this debate to stand up and say why that should be overridden and why those Indigenous rights should be overridden. What is going on in this country? We do not need to be mining more uranium, we do not need nuclear power, we do not need nuclear waste dumps imposed on Indigenous communities. It is a matter of social justice. We have been hearing a lot lately about how the Labor Party has to get back in touch with one of its fundamentals, which is social justice. Well, let us have a bit of justice for Indigenous people in Australia. Let us have that justice when it comes to this particular issue.

I joined my colleagues when this matter first came on the agenda some years ago. We went up to one of the areas which was then proposed to be the nuclear waste dump, Mount Everard, one of several of the proposed sites. We had a look at that area and met with and spoke to families in that community. What was overwhelming when you sat down and listened to Indigenous people talking about their land and their connection to land was that they could describe every aspect of the land and they could talk about, and did talk about their spiritual connection to the land.

You go in there and bulldoze a hole in that land and put toxic waste into that land: what does that do to the spiritual connection to that land? What does that do to the sense of identity of those Indigenous communities? I was absolutely persuaded, listening to people talking about their land, of just what a disaster a toxic waste dump would be. Quite apart from the environmental issues concerned, the damage it would do to the cultural identification of Indigenous people with their land would be disastrous. That is precisely what is going on here with this legislation being imposed on people in the area of Muckaty Station. This is being done, but the worst aspect in all of this is that it has gone on for years and years. They have been dragged through this time and time again and given false hope by the government that it would not be the case and then been betrayed by that very same government. The coalition has always been prepared to impose this on Indigenous people. The government pretended they would do something other than this and now they have turned their back on those people and betrayed them. Is it any wonder that Indigenous people around Australia are losing faith in any of these processes? When push comes to shove it is always Indigenous communities who lose—they lose their rights, they lose their connection to country, they lose their connection to culture and they lose their languages—because governments consis­tently take away the support that they have. Most recently, in my own portfolio area of climate change, remote renewables were to be rolled out for Indigenous communities but that was scrapped by the government as well.

I want to say very sincerely that this legislation is a travesty of social justice in Australia. It is a betrayal of Indigenous people. It is a betrayal of the hope that Indig­enous communities had that things might and could be different. We are not going to get genuine reconciliation with Indigenous people as long as we continue as a parliament to treat them with the level of disrespect that this bill implies. And it is not just disrespect; this bill means that they could end up with a toxic waste dump on their land when they do not want it there. They were not asked about it and they reject it. They will have to either live with it or leave. What sort of prospect is that? We would not be doing this to any other group of people around Australia, as my colleague Senator Siewert said. I am not hearing the government propose this for the downtown area of any city around the country. The notion that it is empty out there harks back to the complete disrespect that came with the terra nullius conceptual framework of what was out there in Australia.

We have Indigenous people in this country. We have not as a nation given them the respect and support that they deserve. We are trying to do better, but this legislation is demonstrating the practical reality that, when mining interests and the interests of those who want to expand nuclear power around the world get in the way, governments prefer to listen to the bosses of those industries than listen to people who have a genuine connection to the land. The Labor Party ought to hang its head in shame in relation to this legislation. I hope those people who stood up before and opposed the coalition when the coalition was proposing Muckaty Station have the courage to cross the floor when this comes to a vote. They have been responsible for selling out any faith that Indigenous communities might have that parliamentarians actually mean what they say. I mean what I say. The Greens mean what they say in relation to this.

It is wrong. We do not need to be imposing a nuclear waste dump on people who have not been consulted. There is no free, prior and informed consent. There is no need to be facilitating uranium mining in this country. The best thing we can do with uranium is leave it in the ground and invest in renewable energy, which is a peaceful source of energy which cannot be mixed up with proliferation and which is the way of the future. Nuclear is too slow, too expensive and too dangerous. Australia's Indigenous people know that. That is why they stood up with the people around the world and in Japan in fairly recent times saying no to nuclear. It is time we actually recognised that in this parliament and stopped this assault on Indigenous communities. I oppose this legislation.

Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to say at the outset that I acknowledge and appreciate the importance that the mining industry plays in Australia's wealth. There will be debate later this year in this chamber about whether a mining tax is appropriate and whether the design of that tax is appropriate. I am not implacably opposed to nuclear power, but I have very grave reservations about it. I think what we have seen recently in Japan at Fukushima indicates we need to be very wary about the safeguards that are in place for nuclear power. I note that Germany will be shutting down a number of its nuclear power reactors in years to come. A conservative government effectively in Germany has made the decision to wind up nuclear power in that country. The National Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2010 is not about whether you are for or against mining or for or against nuclear power; it is a question of process—it is a question of treating the traditional owners at Muckaty Station with respect.

Not so long ago in this chamber we debated the wild rivers bill, which was a piece of legislation to overturn the Queensland government's wild rivers legislation. I know my colleagues in the Greens have a different view on this, as does the government, but I thought the key principle in that bill, which was introduced by Senator Scullion and by the opposition leader in the other place, was to ensure that there was genuine consent given before a wild rivers declaration was enacted in Queensland. In other words, that legislation would have overridden the Queensland legislation. I supported that legislation, and still do, because it is about honouring and respecting the traditional owners of the land. It is about ensuring that they have some real say in terms of self-determination. That is what the Queensland wild rivers legislation does not do. It is completely disrespectful of Indigenous owners in that it seeks to make declarations affecting the economic viability of the land and the self-determination and the economic destiny of Indigenous Australians in Queensland. As a result, that Queensland legislation is a very shabby piece of legislation. And I see some parallels to what is being proposed here by the federal government which is in effect picking up what the former government wanted to do in relation to this. I am disappointed that the government has opted to put this bill on the program this week when the legislation includes a proposed location for a radioactive waste dump that is currently the subject of a Federal Court challenge. This is about respecting traditional owners. This is about process first and foremost. It seems extraordinary when there is a challenge before the Federal Court, when there are matters that are still before the court, when there has been significant litigation about this—and I will go to that shortly—that the government is seeking to overturn a process that has already begun in the courts.

The bill specifically names one site in the Northern Territory, Muckaty Station, to be assessed as the location of a radioactive waste dump where nuclear waste from the states and territories will be deposited. The government claims that this is okay because the site was volunteered. But that is not the case. The Senate should wait until the Federal Court has made its findings as to whether those who claim to be the owners of Muckaty Station and who volunteered the site are the correct parties to do so. This is a live issue before the courts; it is a significant issue before the courts. It is an issue that must not and cannot be ignored. It concerns me that the government is seeking to just wipe away the Federal Court process, to ignore it, and to effectively say: 'We know better. We'll ignore the matters that are before the Federal Court in relation to this.'

I have heard very often from the government that they cannot support certain amendments until the outcome of a review, for example. That is what they do to me, to my fellow crossbenchers and to the opposition all the time by saying: 'We need to review this. We don't have enough information.' Yet today the government want to vote through legislation that is currently the subject of a Federal Court case. When the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Climate Change, Environment and the Arts inquired into this bill it noted the dispute between the Federal Court and concluded it would be inappropriate to inquire into a matter currently before the courts. In fact, the committee said in its report that it would be improper for it to do so. It is inappropriate; it is improper and the Senate should not vote on this bill today.

I want to give some further details in relation to this. The Australian Conservation Foundation do much good work—I do not agree with them on all issues, but they do some good work. I think it is important to put on the record what the Australian Conservation Foundation has said. It has described as cynical and irresponsible the introduction to the Senate of this bill aimed at fast-tracking a nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory. This bill will seek to override state, territory and local government concerns and exempt the federal government from meeting key environmental and Aboriginal heritage rules—this is what we are debating today. I agree with Australian Conservation Foundation campaigner Dave Sweeney who said:

This heavy-handed legislation is a cut-and-paste of a deeply unpopular Howard era law—it is not a credible or mature basis for managing Australia's radioactive waste.

It is being challenged … by traditional owners of the region.

I agree with Mr Sweeney and again I am not implacably opposed, as some are, to nuclear power. We should have a discussion and debate about it, but after Fukushima I think we should be even more wary about nuclear power. I think Mr Sweeney made a good point when he said:

Radioactive waste lasts a lot longer than a politician's promise so we need to get its management right.

He went on to say:

This dump plan is a cynical attempt to find a short term political fix to a long term environmental and human health hazard.

Mr Sweeney made the point that with key questions around consultation, consent and ownership currently before the Federal Court it is improper for Minister Ferguson to be trying to fast-track this legislation which is based on a false premise and a broken promise. I agree with that. I agree that this legislation is deeply flawed; it is deeply flawed because the Federal Court process is still proceeding.

Let us go into some of the details of the Federal Court case which really shows the folly as to this legislation being dealt with in the Senate today. The Federal Court case is around the ownership of the land in question. It is also about the obligation of the Northern Land Council as a statutory authority to consult with all groups. I emphasise all groups because that is a very serious concern. I think that there are some concerns about the propriety of those purporting to have ownership in terms of the decisions made. The land commissioner that established the Muckaty Land Trust, the site in question, recognised shared interests in group structures. He recognised interweaving songlines and ceremonial relationships—that is what the land commissioner stated—to that land amongst five community groups, not one but five groups, over the whole area covered by the trust. Those groups are Ngapa, Milwayi, Wirntiku, Ngarrka and Yapa Yapa. I apologise to any of those groups for mangling any pronunciation.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Say it in Greek.

Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Bernardi said 'Say it in Greek'. I think that would just make things worse, Senator Bernardi! Stephen Leonard who made a submission for and on behalf of the Muckaty traditional owners emphasised the importance of this document. He said this:

In 1997, after hearing years of tested evidence in a transparent and objective tribunal framework, the Aboriginal Land Commission found that there was clearly joint and interconnected 'ownership' between the five main groups in the Muckaty Land Trust where dreaming overlapped. This was a core reason why a single Land Trust was granted. Furthermore the Report clearly indicated that the nominated site was jointly 'owned' by at least 3 to 5 groups …

The current process isolates a small number of people as exclusive owners of a patch of land within the trust. This determination has been made through a secret anthropology report commissioned by the Northern Land Council. I think the Northern Land Council has a lot of explaining to do in relation to its behaviour with respect to this. I think that the Northern Land Council ought to be subject to a lot more scrutiny in this and other decisions. It is an area of deep concern to me that the Northern Land Council has taken the action that it has. The Northern Land Council rests its entire case on this document but refuses to reveal it, even to other members of the Muckaty Land Trust, whose country concerns and family names are likely cited. The documents recently found in the National Archives further underline how far at odds the Northern Land Council's advice is with the Land Commissioner's findings. What has the Northern Land Council got to hide here? What deal has been done to reach the decision that has been reached? Consent was purportedly given, but in fact a whole range of other groups have not been consulted in relation to this. I think it is important that the Northern Land Council come clean and disclose those documents before this matter is considered any further. I think it is important that the Northern Land Council be subject to rigorous scrutiny before this matter is considered further. The Northern Land Council is a beneficiary of significant public moneys. I think its behaviour in this case leaves a lot to be desired, and it leaves many unanswered questions.

The Senate committee was not provided with the Northern Land Council's anthro­pology report, its written submission or the transcripts of evidence from the Muckaty land claim—in other words, the documents recently found in the National Archives. Nor was the committee allowed to see the so-called new 2007 anthropology report which concluded that the Lauders were the exclusive traditional owners of the nominated site, because, as the Northern Land Council told the committee, the report contained culturally sensitive information. As such, the Senate committee had to rely on what it was told. This is not adequate. It reeks of a bungled process; it reeks of secrecy; it reeks of a complete failure of appropriate due process, fairness and natural justice. We are being asked to vote on a bill whose genesis is fundamentally flawed.

Further to that, reading the 1993 Northern Land Council anthropology report from the Muckaty land claim, which was submitted by the Northern Land Council to Justice Gray, the authors could not be more clear in asserting that the three Napa family groups 'shared the same sites' and had 'commonality of land interests' on Muckaty Station, although each group had different emphases for land off Muckaty Station. Justice Gray accepted that in his report. The Senate committee was not told of the evidence in the Muckaty land claim from Geoffrey Lauder and the other senior men that the Karakara was a Yapa Yapa aka Japurla Japurla site, nor was it told that Justice Gray accepted this evidence and specifically identified Karakara as a Yapa Yapa dreaming site in his report.

In the circumstances, and in view of the trenchant opposition of Dick Foster and other non-Lauder Ngapa leaders to the Muckaty site nomination, the authors of the NLC submission to the Senate—in which the Muckaty land claim evidence and the conclusions of Justice Gray were literally turned on their head—have an awful lot of explaining to do. It has been a deeply flawed process, a process which we ought not to be part of. I understand from Senator Ludlam that the mediation for the Federal Court matter is due to proceed in just two months time—sometime in August. That is only eight weeks away. What is the rush? Why won't we let the Federal Court do its work? Why are we insisting on dealing with a piece of legislation where there is already a process in place—that is, Federal Court litigation—so that those matters can be fairly dealt with under the rules of discovery, under the court processes and rules of procedure of the Federal Court, so that we can get to the truth of this?

I am deeply suspicious of the processes involving the Northern Land Council. There are too many unanswered questions. There are too many inadequate explanations given by the Northern Land Council. I think it is fair to say that this Muckaty plan is a bad deal, and it is important that we do not allow it to be a done deal.

In the committee stages of this bill, I would like to ask my friends, my colleagues in the coalition: in terms of getting the genuine consent of the traditional owners, how is this different from the coalition's wild rivers bill? I believe that is a noble piece of legislation because it is doing the right thing by Indigenous people and treating them with respect. But here I think we are not doing the right thing by traditional owners. These are not just the broad assertions of some owners saying, 'You haven't consulted me.' They have actually taken this a step further. They have actually issued proceedings in the Federal Court of Australia because they are so deeply concerned about the fate of process, about the deals that have been done behind people's backs, and about the secrecy on the part of the Northern Land Council. I am not sure how much the Northern Land Council gets in taxpayer funds each year, but I would hazard to say that it is in the millions of dollars. There needs to be some accountability for that organisation in what they do, because they have effectively marginalised some of their own people. They are supposed to be representing them, but they have not done so. The Northern Land Council ought to be held to account for their actions in relation to this.

I am not opposed to the concept of having an appropriate nuclear waste dump. I am not opposed to dealing with this in a way that is fair, reasonable and driven by process. But what we are seeing here is a piece of legislation which will in effect entrench a deeply flawed process, a damaged process, a process which leaves many unanswered questions. For those reasons, I cannot in good conscience support this bill being dealt with at this time. I will be supporting my Greens colleagues in any move to have this legislation adjourned, for this bill to be postponed until the Federal Court has done its work. I think it is shameful if we effectively vote to destroy any legal rights of traditional owners currently before the Federal Court of Australia, and that should be resisted at all costs.

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

This debate has been a long time coming. How long, exactly, depends on how you set your clock. Perhaps it began more than a year ago when this bill was introduced into the parliament, last February, or perhaps in late 2005 when the Howard government used its numbers to ram the original version of this bill through the Senate in order to target three sites in the Northern Territory. Perhaps it started in late 2006 when the Howard government came back to the parliament and forced through an amendment bill that explicitly paved the way for a single nomination at a cattle station called Muckaty, 120 kilometres north of Tennant Creek. Perhaps it really began on 26 January 1958 when the nuclear research facility that generated the waste we are discussing today first went critical, under the prime ministership of Robert Menzies, during the darkest years of the Cold War.

In truth, we need to wind back the clock just a little further to see when this fuse was really lit: 2 December 1942, when a pile of enriched uranium and graphite blocks went critical on a racquet court at the University of Chicago. At that point, with the first criticality of the first nuclear reactor, the template was set for the way in which high-level radioactive waste would be managed in nearly every jurisdiction in which it was produced. This pattern—which Australia followed with precision—runs a dismal road from indifference to and denial of the problem to the establishment of a pseudoscientific process to identify a dumpsite as far as possible from the location of decision makers, followed by attempted forced entry of the identified site and then defeat at the hands of the target community. The final phase, that of amnesia, allows the process to return to the indifference and denial phase, and the cycle starts again.

There is a reason why nearly everywhere in the world the nuclear industry's attempts to deal with its waste products follow this dysfunctional template with such remarkable consistency. I believe it has to do with the nature of the waste itself colliding with human perceptions and appreciation of time. Democratically elected governments work on three- or four-year electoral cycles. Private nuclear corporations look to quarterly reporting cycles and the longer depreciation time lines of their assets. Host communities take a broader view and think at least in terms of a generation or two. But the lethal wastes produced in a nuclear fission reactor defeat these human conceptions of time.

Consider the medical wastes and other contaminated by-products that needed to be shielded from people and the wider environment for three or four centuries. These are the gloves in hospital waste, the spent sources, the contaminated and com­pacted trash arising from all the different ways in which our industrial society uses and discards radioactive materials. These things are not merely contaminated, they are contaminating. Everything they come in contact with becomes itself some form of radioactive waste.

Our bodies are well adapted to deal with the full-time task of cell repair that comes with living in an environment bathed in low levels of background radiation. The nuclear industry likes to point this out, as though it somehow absolves them from direct responsibility for producing whole new categories of this obscenely dangerous material, whether in gigantic piles of finely powdered radioactive waste at uranium mines or in more concentrated and immediately lethal forms requiring the kind of intergenerational storage that we consider today.

For three centuries after the legislators and policymakers who wrote this bill are dead and forgotten that waste will still be ticking, it will still be capable of killing and injuring, and that is the legacy that we contemplate here today. This so-called low-level waste is the material that the Labor, Liberal and National Party MPs think should be put on a semitrailer and railcar and taken to a cattle station that only a handful of them could even point to on a map. Most of the waste has spent the first few decades of its existence in a shed at the Lucas Heights reactor complex in Sutherland Shire in the south of Sydney, watched over by the same technicians who created it, people who at least have qualifications in its charac­terisa­tion and handling.

It is an extraordinary legacy for our great-grandchildren 12 generations hence. By the time our descendants are able to take their eyes off this stockpile our debates in here will be a distant memory, although we might be conceited enough to imagine them reviewing the Hansard record to work out exactly why we thought producing this material was justified in the first place.

Despite the government's stated intentions and MPs filing in here talking about medical wastes and so on, that 300-year stockpile is absolutely not what this waste dump bill is about. It is about something else entirely. Spent fuel from nuclear reactors, whether from small research facilities or large-scale power stations in our customer countries, produces categories of waste that defy easy description. Remember that this waste is not only contaminated but contaminating. The fuel cores within every reactor on earth are slowly but surely turning the containment structures themselves into radioactive waste, such that the entire assemblies at the end of their lives need to be meticulously dismantled, cut up, somehow contained and then isolated in the same manner as the fuel itself.

This material—the spent-fuel elements, the old reactor cores and containment structures—if not properly looked after and stored, will still kill you in 50 or 100,000 years time. I defy anyone in this chamber to confidently make any prediction of any worth at all about the state of human society 100,000 years from now. If you look back in time a span like that takes us back two ice ages. The only people I know of with the kind of grip on deep geological time that matches the time spans we are forced to consider today are the Aboriginal people, whose 60,000-year occupation of this continent is documented in the extra­ordinarily resilient oral and symbolic culture that central Australians speak of as Jukurrpa or 'the law'. The million or so silent petroglyphs, or rock carvings, hammered into the granophyre galleries of Murujuga, the Burrup Peninsula, tell an unbroken and sophisticated story of 30,000 years or more of continuous occupation spanning different geological ages. These are the timescales that the producers and promoters of radioactive waste force us to contemplate.

That waste, the 100,000-year migraine left us by a few short decades of industrial thoughtlessness, is only heading to Muckaty in the interim, we are told. I confirmed that in Senate estimates only a fortnight ago. The government intends to transport the dismantled Lucas Heights reactor core and the reprocessed spent fuel and other long-lived garbage out to Muckaty in the interim. There is still no final disposal site in contemplation. The government asks us to trust it that its policy is only to host waste generated in Australia, and to that I can only say that trust around here, in these issues, is in very short supply. We have people from Bob Hawke on down promoting Australia as a global radioactive dump. What an extraordinary vision for our community that is. People promoting remote dumping of radioactive waste, whether locally, nationally or globally, have to answer two very simple questions. The first question is: why exactly does this material have to be stored remotely; why the obsession with centralising this poisonous garbage at a remote site? We know why, because every now and again the industry lapses into sincerity and tells us. For the really dangerous material, no engineered form of containment has been developed that this waste will not burn its way out of. Because the industry knows that its waste will eventually leak, it seeks what are known as 'high-isolation' sites: places with stable geology and with deep water tables that are unlikely to rise. This was explained in detail by the proponents of the Pangaea Inter­national waste dump, who outlined the strategy with unusual honesty. Checking to verify the company's strategy, I had it confirmed a couple of years ago at one of the Senate committees into this matter by officers of ANSTO, who said, 'Sure, we put it out there because the material will leak—yes.' This explains the obsession that nuclear industry decision makers the world over have with remote sites. Put crudely, they want it as far from themselves as possible because their own engineers have told them that they will need geology itself to be the final barrier when the engineered containment inevitably fails.

That brings us to the second question: when you find such a remote site, what will you tell the people who you find there? You could try the terra nullius approach favoured by Don Randall, the member for Canning, who told the House:

It is geologically stable, from a weather point of view it is dry and lacks in humidity, and no-one, to speak of, lives there. It has a very sparse population. Barely anyone lives in that arid and desolate part of the Northern Territory.

You can be fairly certain that the member for Canning has never bothered to go within 500 kilometres of the place he dismisses with such spectacular ignorance. But he is only repeating the words of former Minister for Education, Science and Training Julie Bishop, who said, 'Why on earth can't people in the middle of nowhere have low-level and intermediate-level waste?' The principle of terra nullius is written into this, the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2010, as it was written into the bill that we were meant to be replacing—'if the land is empty, there will be no-one to prevent us violating it'.

This is where the story really degenerates into tragedy. First the Howard government and then the Rudd government, and now the Gillard government, in full knowledge of just how dangerous this material is, has proposed to dump it thousands of kilometres from its point of origin, 120 kilometres north of Tennant Creek, on a cattle station that we know as Muckaty, in exchange for $11 million in a charitable trust and $1 million in educational scholarships for the people who put their hands up to host the dump for the next 300 years. It works out at about $40,000 a year for 12 generations to come before we come to the question of what should happen to that spent fuel over the next few dozen millennia.

Unlike the government, I do not pretend that there are not two sides to this debate. A nomination has come forward through the Northern Land Council of a site at Muckaty station, and the traditional ownership of the site is strongly disputed all the way to the Federal Court. But even if it was not disputed, what a dismal failure of governance it is to abandon all pretence of scientific best practice or due process and dump the nation's radioactive waste on a community in exchange for basic citizenship entitlements. Pangaea tried the same strategy with the Laverton mob in the western Ngaanyatjarra lands in Western Australia, and they failed because of a community campaign. The Howard government tried to dump the nation's radioactive garbage in the lands of the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta in central South Australia, and they failed because of community resistance led by the Kungkas of the area. Not to be deterred by the evident failure of this approach, the Howard government at the end of its fourth term targeted the Northern Territory, using the constitutional battering ram that this government in opposition proposed to repeal. It is hard to imagine how it must feel to be targeted by a government which has failed to provide the services that most of us take for granted and whose members arrive by aircraft from over the horizon to explain that jobs and educational services will be provided if only you accept guardianship of the nation's radioactive wastes for all time. We do not have to imagine how it feels, because Dianne Stokes and Mark Chungaloo tell us directly in a letter which I seek leave to have incorporated into the Hansard.

Leave granted

The document read as follows—

21 March 2010

Hello from Mark Japaljari Chungaloo and Dianne Nampin Stokes speaking on behalf of our Warramungu/Warlmanpa people.

The information given to us is that our people still do not want the nuclear waste dump to come to the Muckaty Land Trust.

We will not stop making noise in Tennant Creek/Muckaty or in our community where we live about 40 kilometres south of where the proposed Muckaty nuclear waste dump would be built.

We will not stop making a noise in Canberra either. We need our opposition to the nuclear waste dump to be understood and respected by Gov­ern­ment and especially Minster Martin Ferguson.

All our tribes in Tennant Creek have been talking to each other and we will all get together to protest by doing traditional dance showing the design that represents the land Karakara in Muckaty Land Trust. Our message is always: We don't want the nuclear waste dump anywhere in the Muckaty Land Trust.

These are our concerns:

Mark Japaljari Chungaloo

Dianne Nampin Stokes

Dianne Stokes and Kylie Sambo are, I think, in the gallery today, and I pay my respects as a much more recent arrival to this country to those who have never ceded sovereignty and who provide leadership to their people and to thousands of supporters right around the country. In the letter which I just tabled, Dianne and Mark are speaking for members of all the family groups of the Muckaty Land Trust, including many Ngapa people.

They asked me in Tennant Creek a month or so ago to bring a document into the cham­ber for tabling, and I checked with the clerks to make sure that it qualified as a document under standing orders. It is a banner which is covered in handprints and speaks in three different languages the simple message, 'No waste dump at Muckaty'. It has handprints from all the family groups represented on the land trust. I seek leave to have the document tabled and incorporated into the Hansard.

Leave granted.

The document read as follows:

Maybe this means absolutely nothing to Prime Minister Gillard or to the Minister for Resources and Energy, Martin Ferguson, but I am here to tell the government and opposi­tion senators, who will in due course file in here and probably vote for this bill, that you should take a moment or two to read the documents I have tabled. They are a sign from a long way from here that this proposal has been fought for six years, that it will be fought into the future and that the government is going to end up backing down as it has before.

How on earth has it come to this? The government cuts and copies a Howard era bill which guts the principles of procedural fairness and judicial review and overrides all relevant state and territory legislation that stands in its way. They base a single nomination on a mysterious piece of anthropological research that no-one has seen—not even the people who are probably named in it. The minister then grants himself total and unfettered discretion in deciding where the dump will be, whether on Muckaty or at some other site that looks sufficiently remote from policymakers in Canberra. Maybe they will be cracking open the champagne in Martin Ferguson's suite over in the ministerial wing later this week, and maybe the government thinks that this is in fact the end of the matter; but I am here to say that it really is not. We will continue to support the community and the people who have taken up this campaign, and we will continue to fight for the entitlement of all Australians to have decent employment prospects and education services without having to sacrifice their land. This bill should not be debated in this place at all while this matter is before the Federal Court. I move:

At the end of the motion, add:

and further consideration of the bill be an order of the day for the next sitting day after:

(a) the Government receives the written consent of the Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory to the dumping of radioactive waste in the Territory; and

(b) the Minister for Resources and Energy has completed consultations with representatives of the Muckaty Land Trust and all other parties with an interest in, or who would be affected by, a decision to select the Muckaty Station site as the location for the national radioactive waste facility; and

(c) the Federal Court decision is handed down in the case between the Muckaty traditional owners, the Northern Land Council and the Commonwealth concerning the nomination of the Muckaty Station site as the location for the national radioactive waste facility.

I will explain directly after question time what this amendment does.

Debate interrupted.