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

I have a number of amendments to the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill 2010 which I wish to speak to and which I addressed very briefly in my speech on the second reading; however, I did not go into a great deal of detail about the way that the Greens would approach the committee stage of this bill. I have said—and we were happy to let it go through on the voices—that we do not support the bill proceeding to the committee stage, and that is because we believe that it is irredeemable: it is a bill based on a false premise and a broken promise, and we genuinely do not believe that it can be greatly improved. However, in the interests of allowing the Senate to undertake its role of scrutiny and improvement of bills, some time ago the Australian Greens went to the trouble of proposing a number of amendments that fall into a couple of key categories.

Before I go into greater detail, I state that broadly the amendments try to improve the legal integrity of the bill as well as to somehow and somewhat constrain and curtail the minister's total and unambiguous discretion in siting decisions. We recognise that this bill relates to siting; that once a decision has been made on location, whether it be Muckaty or somewhere else, a whole range of processes kick into gear, chief among which is the process of environmental assessment under the Commonwealth EPBC Act. That is the central vehicle through which many of these issues will be addressed, but the regulator, ARPANSA, will also be quite centrally involved in establishing the radiation health and safety impacts of the facility, of the transfer of the materials to the facility and of its operation once it is up and running.

So we quite clearly recognise that this debate is effectively about siting and about who gets to decide which of the sites will be subject to those further processes of scrutiny and so on. But the difficulty we have is that, once these processes have been set in train, they will effectively be treated by gov­ernment as a foregone conclusion. Before the minister jumps up to argue that due process will be followed in all instances and so on and that we are basically pre-empting the process of an environmental impact assess­ment and a radiation safety assessment, you do not have to look too much further than the motion put up jointly by Senator Siewert and I on Woodside in the West Kimberley. Woodside are in the middle of applications to flatten 25 or more hectares of bilby habitat in the West Kimberley before the strategic impact assessment of the proposal for a gas plant in the Browse Basin in WA has been approved or even considered. It is well understood by the Western Australian government and by the proponents that that project is going ahead right where it is proposed to be—to the degree that the company is already going ahead and putting bulldozers to the site—before the process of environmental impact assessment has been undertaken and concluded.

It is distressingly common in Australian environmental law that once a decision on a site or location has been made, either by a private proponent or by a government, it is full steam ahead. Investment decisions are made, board approval is given, the processes roll out and bulldozers go to country and start flattening the pace in preparation for site works. Often these are negotiated away or are described as being preparatory or part of the environmental impact assessment process or whatever it might be. But effectively the entire process of the environ­mental impact assessment and radiation safety impact assessment will be thoroughly pre-empted by this minister, if past form is anything at all to go by. As soon as that pin hits the map and the minister has pointed a finger and decided where that site is to be, it will be full steam ahead.

We will pursue the processes that roll out with great diligence and attention to detail, but we know for sure that the government will be basing all further actions on the assumption that that site will go ahead, irrespective of what falls out of the environmental impact assessment process. That is why we need to pay so much care and attention to the process, in the first place, of siting the dump, which this bill quite clearly covers. What guides the discretion of the minister in the first place? On what grounds will the minister be making a decision about what is a site and what is not, what is appropriate for a store or a dump of this kind and what is not? The fact that we know—as we will go through in great detail during the committee stage of this bill—is that there is nothing whatsoever to guide the discretion of this minister. That is what a number of our amendments go to: the legal integrity of the process that allows a minister essentially unfettered discretion to go ahead and put this dump where he wishes and set these processes into motion.

We will probably hear shortly—and probably from Minister Sherry at the table, who has been given the unfortunate task of defending this appalling proposal this afternoon—comments relating to procedural fairness being restored, to rights of appeal being restored, to rights of judicial review being restored. We will go through this in a great deal of detail and point out to the government and to the coalition—whom I presume at some future stage will file in here and vote for the bill; they chose not to do so in the House of Representatives but we can only presume that they will vote for it here in the Senate—that there is no such guidance being placed on the minister's ability simply to point at a map. That is why we will be paying such clear attention to this bill.

It is not good enough, we believe, simply to stand up and wave this proposal through and give dignity to the fiction that the government is repealing the coalition's act, which has been in place from 2005, and replacing it with substantially different legislation. Large parts of the bill that we are debating this afternoon were cut-and-pasted from the Howard-era bill that was introduced at the end of 2005, when I was working for Senator Siewert, and was then amended again at the end of 2006.

Those cut-and-pastes from the earlier bill into the one that we are debating today relate most essentially to preserving the Muckaty nomination. This is even though Labor MPs in opposition during the election campaign, as Senator Minchin quite correctly pointed out yesterday, went on the campaign trail calling Prime Minister Howard's proposal to coercively and quite aggressively dump this material in the Territory an outrage. They called it sordid and shameful and they called quite unambiguously for its repeal.

Then, right after the election, for some mysterious reason that nobody has ever satisfactorily explained—and I asked Senator Sherry what the basis for this was a couple of weeks ago in question time and there was not a satisfactory answer, but perhaps one can be provided today—the decision was made to transfer responsibility for radioactive waste management from the science portfolio, where it has been for decades into the resources and energy portfolio. What sense does it make to take responsibility for the waste products of this industry, which has been regulated for years within the science ministry—and we heard Senator Carr during the election campaign being very clear on his views of the shameful way in which the Howard government engaged in this issue—and transfer it right after the election to Minister Martin Ferguson? As far as I am aware, he made no statements at all on the issue during the election campaign, because it would not have been part of his responsibilities from opposition to have a view on the matter. It is pretty evident to us all what the view is now.

The view now is simply to crash this project through or crash. As I explained at some length in my speech in the second reading debate, this is a proposal and a way of doing business that is prone to failure. It has failed a number of times, not just in Australia, whether it be the Pangea example of 1999 in Western Australia or the rather shameful episode in South Australia, which Senator Minchin addressed in his comments yesterday. The idea of aggressively rolling into a community and telling people that the material is going to go there is a recipe for failure, obviously. When you turn up, the people who live there or who have traditional responsibility for the area have nowhere else to go.

I acknowledge, as Senator Sherry does, that views are divided on the ground, in the area most close to the front line, that communities have been split and families have been pitched against each other. This would happen in any community if somebody in a suburban neighbourhood decided that they were going to give their backyard up for a radioactive waste dump, giving the neighbours no opportunity whatsoever to have a say. Even if you accept the tenure argument that will be run in the Federal Court by the Northern Land Council that the right people have been consulted, imagine being a neighbour and discovering that the decision has been made and that it is a done deal and you are told: 'Sure, we'll go through environmental impact assessment processes and whatnot but you have no rights as a neighbour whatsoever.'

If that is the outcome—and I am not going to reflect on the arguments that will be heard in the Federal Court, hopefully later this year—there will be people from the Barkly region, from all of the families that played a role in the establishment of the Muckaty land trust, who will feel justifiably ripped off by what they heard from the opposition, now government MPs, in the run-up to the 2007 election. They were absolutely unambiguous in their opposition to the way that this debate was conducted.

Before I go into too much detail on the amendments that I propose to move, I will ask my first question. Minster, do you recall me asking a question in question time a month or so ago—I might have inadvertently put the question to Senator Carr but I have been told that it is actually your portfolio responsibility—around what the thinking was after the 2007 election for transferring responsibility for radioactive waste to the Minister for Resources and Energy?

Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Minister for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I can provide some information. Senator, you have suggested that it is an unorthodox arrangement that it is not in the science portfolio. I have been advised that locating the radioactive waste management policy function as part of the resources policy function has been the prevalent arrangement over the last 30 years, so it is not unusual.

Radioactive waste policy has been the policy responsibility successively of the Department of National Development and Energy, the Department of Resources and Energy, the Department of Primary Indust­ries and Energy, the Department of Industry, Science and Resources and now the resources division of the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism. It was only in the period 2001 to 2007 that the radioactive waste function was located in the Department of Education, Science and Training. It was reunited with resources because of the commonality of the nuclear issues involved in uranium mining and radioactive waste policy deliberations.

Regardless of the location of this function, it continues to have access to the advice of relevant expert Commonwealth agencies, including the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation in the innovation portfolio and Geoscience Australia in the Resources and Energy portfolio.

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

I thank the minister for that quite comprehensive answer. It would have been great to have got that in question time. Nonetheless, I acknowledge that you have provided it to us.

Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Minister for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If you'd given us some notice we could have provided it to you.

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

It was nearly two months ago. I would like to ask a question that, again, the minister referred to obliquely in his second reading speech, about the case for remoteness, which we have heard a lot of here in Australia and around the world when it comes to final disposal of radioactive waste. Why exactly is it that the industry is so keen and that the government is following this lead on a remote site? I can certainly understand the arguments for why you would want to bring various categories of radio­active waste together into one place or two or three places—the so-called argument for centralisation—where properly qualified people can look after it, repackage it and so on when that is required. But the case dramatically has not been made for why that particular site should be remote. The minister addressed that issue to some degree in his second reading speech, where he quoted some of the guidelines—I think you were quoting the IAEA—but simply repeating guidelines does not actually justify the argument as to why the industry is so keen for this material to be placed as far from centres of population as possible.

This is a question that I have dedicated quite a bit of time to. If I genuinely believed that the best thing to do was to put this material on rail cars and take it to a sheep station, I would not be wasting my time arguing the matter; I would have spent most of my time making sure that the govern­ment's consultation processes were adequate so that we could get on with finding an appropriate location somewhere out in the bush. However, right from the time that I was working on the Pangea proposal to bring a substantial fraction of the whole world's radioactive waste to Aboriginal country to the east of Laverton in the Savory Basin in my home state of Western Australia, I have been intrigued as to the interest of the international nuclear industry, led by a Swiss consortium, for a remote site in particular.

There are two broad categories of waste we are discussing here and I do not think the government has necessarily made a particularly good case for the remote storage of low-level waste. For example, the minister addressed the Mount Walton East intractable waste facility in Western Australia, which takes, among other chemically toxic materials and other intractables, low-level radioactive wastes—gloves, medical equip­ment and so on—from the WA health sector, spent sources, engineering uses in the mining industry and so on. That material is taken to a remote location out in the desert and dropped down a hole, and that is presumably its final resting place.

As I said in my speech in the second reading debate, that material can be lethal for 300 or 400 years, after which the half-lives of most of the isotopes in question have faded away to background levels and that material can, effectively, be safely walked away from. It will not be by any measure different to the material before it was activated and made radioactive in the first place. In the instance of sources or materials that were generated from radioactive waste that do have further uses in engineering in the mining sector, you could say that the radiation has basically faded away to levels that would not be detected above the background level.

But, of course, that is not the only material that the government propose to take to Muckaty. When you preserved that nomination and explicitly named it in the legislation that we are debating today, you were also proposing to take waste which would be classified as high-level in the first few weeks and months after it is removed from the Lucas Heights reactor, past and present. Then, after a certain period of time of cooling, it is classified as long-lived intermediate-level waste. According to the international guidelines, which you can quote to me again if you like, that material is suitable for deep geological disposal—for burial—and that, of course, is not what is proposed at Muckaty at all, unless the plan has changed radically since the last time I asked departmental officials about it. The spent fuel in the reactor cores will be disassembled from Sydney and taken to whatever remote site ends up being used for the interim—and I will address during this debate exactly how long that interim is proposed to be.

Returning to the issue of remoteness, if this material has been in Sydney for 50 years, as some of it has, in a shed being looked after by people who are qualified in radiation waste management—that is what they do for a living—why exactly is the Western Australian government determined to place radioactive waste at a central remote site? I can understand centralising and bringing the material together, but why exactly to a remote site?

To give the chamber some idea of the thinking behind this, and let's make this explicit, in 2005 the former science minister Brendan Nelson asked:

… why on earth can't people in the middle of nowhere have low level and intermediate level waste?

His successor in the science portfolio, Julie Bishop—who I think I probably misquoted in my second reading speech the other day—noted that all sites on the government's shortlist were 'some distance from any form of civilisation'. What a remarkably enlight­ened comment! That did not go down all that well in the sites that were under discussion, in places like Tennant Creek. The member for Canning, Don Randall, said in the House during the debate:

… 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.

So clearly the argument here is to get it as far away from people as possible.

Of course, the question that comes from that is: why exactly do you want to remove this material as far as possible from the centres where the decisions are made—and how do you explain that to the people who live where you propose to take it? Beyond the remarks the minister already made in his second reading speech—and I have the guidelines in front of me; you can read them if you wish, Minister, but I am fairly familiar with what you were reading from before—I wonder whether he would care to address exactly what the case is for remote storage, which I acknowledge is not centralised storage.

Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Minister for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator, I draw your attention to a document which you are probably aware of from the National Health and Medical Research Council: 'Code of practice for the near-surface disposal of radioactive waste in Australia (1992)'. On page 11, under 'Site requirements and selection criteria', it says:

2.4.1 General site characteristics

A near-surface repository site ideally should be located in an area with favourable meteorological, geological and geographical characteristics so that the radioactive waste, once in place, will be adequately isolated from the biosphere for the time that the radionuclides originally present, or their progeny, constitute a radiation hazard. Ideally the natural characteristics of the site should provide the initial effective barrier to the dispersal of radionuclides from the waste or to human intrusion. The location of the disposal site and its characteristics will influence the design of the facility. These should also be considered when determining …

There are a range of other references. Under 'Site selection criteria', 2.4.2, on page 13, it says:

e.     the site should be in an area of low population density and in which the projected population growth or the prospects for future development are also very low;

So these are some references to the selection criteria.

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

I thank the minister for citing those guidelines; I suspected that that was where he would go. That refreshingly frank restatement of the guidelines is actually the nub of the problem. What the minister just told the chamber is that the industry wants to take the material to a remote site so that, when the dump leaks, it is as far away from people as possible. He said that quite explicitly. I do not think that is even a controversial statement; it is more or less black and white. When the stuff leaks out of the container, you want it to be somewhere with low rainfall, somewhere where the groundwater table is half a mile below the surface, somewhere where there are no earthquakes, somewhere where the climate has not changed markedly in the last couple of million years and obviously somewhere a long way from people. If the thing is going to leak and the stuff is going to go all over the place, you would absolutely want that to be somewhere remote.

That gives us something of a hint as to why the government is having such difficulty selling this proposal to the Northern Territory: 'We want to take this stuff to the cattle station in Tennant Creek so that when it leaks it will be a long way from us.' I wonder whether the minister will choose to acknowledge that that is why the government is having difficulty. It is also why the Howard government had that difficulty. Senator Scullion, who has joined us, has spent a long time thinking about these very difficult intractables as well, and we have also. It is extraordinarily difficult.

How on earth do you propose that a site is so indestructible that in two ice ages the material will not have dispersed all over the place? That is exactly the question that this government is facing now. You cannot explain to the traditional owners, to the Cattlemen's Association, to the council or to any of the residents of Tennant Creek that that is the reason you are having so much difficulty selling this proposal, getting decent headlines and getting it through this chamber. It is a really difficult sell when you have to go up there and acknowledge, 'We think it's very important that, when this stuff leaks out of its container, it be a long way from us.' That is really what this debate is about.

I am not blaming the minister for this, because this government inherited an issue that was inherited by the Howard gov­ernment, by the Hawke-Keating government and by the government before that. The reason for this inheritance is that, as with the nuclear industry everywhere else around the world, we just went ahead with building these reactors and churning out various categories of intractable waste without coming up with any idea of how we were going to manage the waste products.

It is interesting and profoundly important to acknowledge that the reason for choosing a remote location is that the stuff is going to wind up out of the box that you put it in. This is less the case for the low-level waste and I freely acknowledge that. A large volume of the radioactive waste that we produce in Australia, and the stuff that the government tends to go on about in terms of cancer treatments and so on, is low-level material that will still be able to kill you in 200 or 300 years time, and after that you can take your eyes off it. This material is literally lethal. In North America they have built houses out of uranium tailings waste, for example, and the radon emissions inside those places are enormous. That has happened because people have forgotten where the tailings piles were. Thirty or 40 years after the mines have become defunct, they have quarried the stuff because the signposts have all blown over. That is the kind of issue that we face here. We need to find a strategy, find a way of passing this material onto the generation that follows us so that they can pass it on to the generation that comes after them, for tens of thousands of years. It is formidably difficult, and that is why successive governments have struggled so hard. I will tell you one thing that I am reasonably sure of: in the midst of the ambiguity of a task that difficult, one thing we certainly should not be doing is putting the stuff on a flatbed and taking it to a cattle station and then walking away.

What we have at the moment, the situation that has prevailed at Lucas Heights for the past 50 years since that reactor started churning this material out, is that it is being looked after, and we have been told that it has been looked after quite safely. I have no reason to dispute that. It is surrounded by scientists, engineers, technicians—smart people who study this stuff, who do it for a living, who look after it. Guess how many of them will be accompanying that material up to Muckaty? None. Nobody. Unless the minister would like to correct the record that the department put to me during an estimates committee last year, and probably the year before that as well when I checked, there will be rotating shifts of six security guards—two on, two off, two on, two off. There will be security guards on eight hour shifts around the clock for the next 300 years. Those are the jobs, by the way, that were promised to the people in the Barkly region. Some of the loneliest security guards in the country will be looking after that material.

But it is not the intention of the govern­ment, as far as I am aware—please correct the record if the thinking has shifted—to send any of those technicians after the waste they have produced, send any of those engineers or scientists or people who trained in the storage and condition of this waste. Not at all. This is going to be a lonely shed in the middle of nowhere, as the former science minister put it, with two security guards looking after it. That is quite some employment boost for the Barkly region! They are really looking forward to that economic development arriving in their area!

I tested these ideas a couple of times. The people who made it the most explicit, which was extremely valuable when I was working on the Pangea campaign in 1999, were the company itself. This was a consortium based in Switzerland, with money from British Nuclear Fuels and involvement from various other members of the international nuclear industry. They proposed to put up to 20 per cent of the world's high-level spent fuel—this is material that is more intractable than the slightly lower level waste that we produce in Australia from a small research reactor—on a guarded railway line and take it up to Laverton and dump it in a hole there. Their promotional video was somehow found by Friends of the Earth and leaked to the press through my colleague and good friend Robin Chapple MLC before he went into parliament in Western Australia. The video spelt out exactly why Pangea was seeking a remote site. It was really interest­ing and it is worth looking at; it is still online if senators care to track it down. With all of the preconditions that the minister read into the record before—low rainfall, low geologi­cal activity, not too many earthquakes, low water table and really simple stratified geology—when you put this stuff into a hole half a mile underground and it burns its way out of the container, you would want to be a long way from it. That is the case for remote dumping. It is a hideous concept when you consider it as starkly as that, but that is how Pangea put it in their video. There is a cute little graphic of this stuff burning its way out of one of the containers they put down there. You would want that to be a long way from a regional water table. You would not want mining operations anywhere near that for any time in the next quarter of a million years or thereabouts because presumably your fences and signposts will have blown down.

I recognise that this is not geological disposal, that what is proposed for Muckaty is not a hole in the ground half a mile below the surface. It is in fact an interim store for one of the categories of waste—the so-called long-lived intermediate level waste—to sit around for the next 200 or 300 years while people scratch their heads and work out what on earth to do with it. Maybe we will chase some of that suitable geology—which, ironically enough, as Senator Minchin acknowledged yesterday, was what Minister Crean was doing all those years ago. He was setting out to find the right kind of geology in Australia for a remote hole in the ground so that, when the stuff leaked out of its containment, it would be a long way from most people. It is a very difficult proposition to sell to people in the Barkly region that that is explicitly what is going on here. By world standards we have relatively small volumes of the really dangerous stuff that will last and be very dangerous and lethal for tens of thousands of years; but we do have some, and it is our responsibility to look after it. Looking after it does not mean sticking it behind barbed wire on a cattle station.

Australia has never really had a debate about the most appropriate management strategy. The debate we have had here in Australia has been about which remote Aboriginal community should host this stuff. In remote areas where we have starved people for resources in health care and education—the kinds of issues that Senator Scullion and Senator Crossin have been working on—who is interested in 12 million bucks, which is about $40,000 a year for 300 years? People representing the Territory know very well, as I do from a Western Australian perspective, the kinds of extraordinary disadvantage and deprivation suffered by Aboriginal communities in this country. And that again is something this government inherited. It is trying to do something about it. Some of that activity is dramatically misguided, contemplating the intervention, and some of it is helpful. But the fact is that this is the kind of economic development that these communities do not need—hosting, for a pittance and a tiny handful of jobs, material that industrial society here in Australia and everywhere else in the world has not the remotest idea what to do with. We need to get over the debate that we have had in Australia about which remote Aboriginal community should host this stuff until the end of time. That is absolutely an appalling way to continue.

We all thought, from the comments that Senator Carr was making in the run-up to the 2007 election, from the statements that he put out, from what Senator Crossin said, from things that Mr Snowdon put out at the time, that the ALP had got it, that they had spent a bit of time thinking about it. They acknowledged the difficulties that had been run into in South Australia and that there was the prospect that we would see this debate going differently. It was pretty explicit. I was really excited because it looked like we had a breakthrough. We had an opposition with some energy and some drive that, for the first time in a generation, got this issue. And look what happened right after the election. Portfolio responsibilities were taken away from Minister Carr. I strongly suspect that he would have made a much better job of this issue than Mr Martin Ferguson has, but I guess we will never get to find out. But away it went, and we are straight back on track. The Muckaty nomination will be preserved. 'We will eventually repeal the Howard government bill, and we know that that is nothing more than a cut and paste job, and away we will go.' It has become very strongly apparent since then, and it is written into every line of this bill, that nothing has been learnt at all. That is why we are in the middle of a fight. That is why this issue is back in the NT News today and in the nation's media and the ABC. We have another confrontation, and it was a needless one. I will put on the record again, as I did during my speech in the second reading, that the Australian Greens will work with the government, will work with the opposition, will work with anybody with goodwill who wants to acknowledge that this is a complex and intractable issue. This is something that is not going to go away any time soon. But the strategy of aggression and coercion has got to stop. That is the message that I have heard loud and clear in the time that I have spent in Tennant Creek and on site in Alice Springs chasing this issue around the country in committees and taking evidence from people who dispute the tenure of the land in question—and now that is being tested in the Federal Court case—and also dispute the deeper idea. Even if the Federal Court finds that, according to the requirements of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, the right people have been spoken to, they dispute the idea that it should automatically be a remote Aboriginal community that has to host this material. I think that fundamental underlying premise is what needs to be very, very strongly contested.

I approached ANSTO when they gave evidence on my original bill at the end of 2008—which I think is one of the reports that Senator Sherry read from—that we should simply repeal the Howard legislation and move ahead, as the government was telling us they proposed to do at the time, with a different strategy with a bit more scientific integrity. I asked ANSTO:

... is it the case that we are looking for the stable geology and distance from groundwater sources [because] there is no form of engineered containment that can hold this material for the time periods that are required?

Mr McIntosh quite rightly replied:

For low-level waste, it is not such an issue.

And I tend to agree. I asked him:

Yes, but for the long-lived, intermediate or high-level waste, it is?

Mr McIntosh said:

Yes.

Senator Pratt asked Mr Bradley Smith, the Executive Director of the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies: 'What is the urge to take this to out of town and dump it on a cattle station somewhere, and what do we have to do to get it right?' I think Mr Smith's answer was actually quite instructive. He said:

The history of discussion about a facility since 1979 shows that all communities have reacted strongly, or there has been activism from communities. South Australia, three or four years ago, was a recent example. At some point a decision has to be made. I understand your argument. I am just saying that there is an obstinate fact here. We have radioactive waste. It is not stored on an optimal basis. We need a national facility or a commonwealth facility to do that. That means hard decisions have to be made.

That is code. Senator Pratt continued:

You are arguing that at some point, because there will inevitably be community opposition to such a site, the scientific factors in terms of the demand for a site are going to have to override a community mandate to locate the site.

Mr Smith, not representing the government but representing FASTS, said yes, that is what will happen. Sooner or later we are just going to have to crush somebody. We are just going to have to come through the front door and dump it. That appears to be approach that the government is committed to taking. So my question to the minister is: has the government ever assessed options for long-term storage, intermediate storage or interim storage of this material that do not involve remote dumping?

Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thought I might take the oppor­tunity to put in context some of the comments of Senator Ludlam. He made a couple of observations that I would agree with: it is a difficult process; it is difficult for cattlemen and those traditional owners of country to understand what is happening. But, Senator Ludlam, with respect, it makes it a lot more difficult if we are not actually dealing with the facts.

This legislation does not prescribe Muckaty at all. What we are dealing with today has nothing to do with the location; it simply prescribes the circumstances around where it can be located and a whole suite of issues around that. The real reason that, first of all, it is currently in the Northern Territory is that there was a decision many, many years ago. There are very few in this place who can still remember when this started. I suspect there is no-one in the Senate who was around when that process started.

That was an agreement by all states and territories, paid for by the Parliament of Australia, that they would investigate the best site—not the best available site but the most suitable site. That site was to be found in the Officer Basin in South Australia. Millions of dollars were invested by the Australian parliament to do that. Mike Rann decided that political expediency was far more important to him and his party than the health and welfare of Australians. The states and territories would not take that so, of course, they have chucked it to the dear old Northern Territory—and those in this place would know my views on that.

But as for why it is on Aboriginal land, we now need to look at the Northern Territory. It was open for the then Chief Minister in the Northern Territory, Clare Martin, to nomin­ate anywhere in the Northern Territory because of all of the pastoral leases in the Northern Territory. She could have con­sidered not the most available site but the most suitable site. But on the very same day that she had that capacity—so it can hardly be seen to be a considered process—she decided that she would tell everybody that we were not considering any places.

That left only one group of people, the Northern Land Council, who you would have to have a deal of respect for because they were an independent group who decided they would have a process that would go through a selection period. Firstly, they had a meeting of all Northern Land Council members simply to consider whether or not their body would be a body under which nominations could occur. It was a three-day meeting simply to see if they were going to have anything to do with it. We have a process which is subject to a High Court decision at the moment, which is a very robust process. As I said, what we are talking about today has nothing to do with that. But at least they dealt with it with some independence and not with the same political self-interest that the Labor Party in the Northern Territory did. That is the reason why the site is now both in the Northern Territory and only on Indigenous com­munities. It is simply because of the political self-interest of the Labor Party, both in South Australia and in the Northern Territory.

There were a number of remarks from the senator in regard to why we locate these in remote areas. Whilst it was fairly dry, I would recommend to you the references by the minister in that regard. It is not about keeping things away from people; it is about finding a site that is unlikely to be disturbed in the near future—in geological terms, the next 100 years. It is a site that would certainly need to meet those specifications. But remember that, in terms of saying, 'Let's take all this material and hide it away somewhere,' this is only intermediate level waste. Remember, the high-level material is at Lucas Heights—right in the middle of Sydney. That is the only high-level waste we have in Australia—right in the middle of Sydney. So nobody is hiding it anywhere. This is simply the best place to keep it. And it meets those standards.

We have had remarks from the senator—and this is what makes me nervous—about things 'leaking out' and 'running out'. I can remember some of the local people from Muckaty being concerned because they had been told that, when the 44 gallon drums rubbed through, the material would simply run out into the sand and run out into the rivers and would hurt marlu and other things. I was pretty disturbed, and I asked them where they got that information. It was provided to them by a third party, apparen­tly—no doubt, without mischief. But I went on to tell them that we are not allowed to keep, nor do we keep, either liquid matter or particulate matter at the facility. So the notion of 'leaking' can be misinterpreted—and I am not verballing the senator—as a radioactive leak if there is a crack or something and it comes out. As for the notion of something 'running out' and getting into water sources no liquid, particulate matter or dust is stored there.

One of the most difficult things about this material is that in storage it is actually difficult to measure how much radiation is coming out of a drum, on the surface, or whether it is coming out of the material that is stored, because, in fact, the concrete, with the granite in it, has more radioactivity coming out of it than the container. So it is very difficult to measure all those things. But it is important in terms of safety to put that in the proper context. Firstly, there are no leaks and nothing is running anywhere or blowing around or running into rivers, or, in two ice ages' time, doing something. It is also important to note that this is all recov­erable—in other words, the intermediate level waste will be in a warehouse on a large concrete floor, which somebody hoovers, and there will be these big lumps of things sitting on concrete blocks. As I have said, there is more radioactivity coming out of the concrete than out of the container for that material.

It is also important to note that, as the senator indicated, there is no deep burial, no 'leave it and forget it'. All this material—and some of the low-level material is actually soil, much of which, in fact, is not actually radioactive anymore, though we do not have time for that story—being stored there is entirely recoverable. When I say 'recover­able' I mean that, if we need to move it or do something with it, we simply pull the gravel out, blow the gravel away, lift the containers and move them. So to say that somehow the level of amenity provided for safety and security is not adequate is simply not true.

I recall that earlier you said that we do go on about the health system. I have to say that this is one of the most important elements of our health system. As I have said in this place before, there are numerous uses for these medicines, and the only reason we produce this material is that we cannot have those medicines in this country without this material. It is as simple as that.

One of the most important medicines we have in this country is a product called technetium. The fact that we have tech­netium available in this country ensures that the very bad old days, particularly for things like breast cancer, are gone. A full mastectomy, and the trauma and cosmetic loss that go with that, can now be completely avoided through forensic surgery, with a great deal of confidence that the technetium will identify not only the tumour in the breast but also the lymph nodes that it drains to.

There are those who would say, 'There are always options; we can always import it.' Well, I would very much recommend to them the words of the former leader of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Dr ElBaradei. Dr ElBaradei was very clear about the future of access to radioactive pharmaceuticals. Radiopharmaceuticals will not necessarily be available unless every airport, wherever a plane lands, has stringent controls about fire safety mechanisms, because, if we have an aeroplane crash, then they need to have a level of amenity that will deal with radiation as well as a fire in those other materials. So the single message was: in the future, you will need to have some independence if you still want to keep a fantastic health system, which has to hinge on radiopharmaceuticals and radiology and oncology.

Cancer is still one of the greatest killers in this country and sadly we still do not have a magic wand or any unique solutions for treating or curing cancer. But, without doubt, anybody who is a commentator in this area knows that radiopharmacology and oncology pretty much depend on the production of these medicines and the capacity for us to have a research reactor which only provides medicines—only provides good things for all Australians. And, if the downside is this, this country accepted that it would take both the benefits of radiopharmaceuticals as well as the responsibilities. We have signed an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency that, because we can use nuclear fuel rods to produce medicine, we have the responsibility to accept that the rods, after they have been processed and had the plutonium taken from them, will be returned to Australia where they can be stored safely. And they can be stored safely. This is intermediate level waste. There is no particulate matter and there is no liquid matter. And, on any balance, this is something that Australia has to have. I am always saddened by the continual politicisation of an issue that is so central to the lives of Australians right across this country. And, as a Territorian, I am saddened that we have again been forced to do something, rather than having put our hands up and made our contribution to ensuring that this country has the same level of amenity, in terms of health, that other countries enjoy.

Progress reported.