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

As a formality, I foreshadowed a couple of issues on the way through, principally about definitions of a prescribed legacy site—whether any of the facilities, former weapons test sites or former mines that I listed in my second reading contribution will be caught in the bill. I thank Senator Day for the courtesy. I will get a couple of questions out of the way and then we will move to the amendment. Does the minister have anything else she would like to advise us about?

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In response to your questions earlier regarding those particular sites, obviously it is only the Commonwealth sites that come under the ARPANS Act. Clearly, the controlled person, as defined in the act as the Commonwealth entity or the Commonwealth contractor, must be in place for it to come under the Commonwealth.

My understanding is that the Alligator Rivers site and the Little Forest Legacy Site come under the Commonwealth's purview. Maralinga, that you also referred to, does indeed come under the Commonwealth power—or it did, because my advice is that that site has been remediated. Those that come under state and territory responsibility do not fall under the ARPANS Act. They are the ones that you referred to—Rum Jungle, Radium Hill and Port Pirie.

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

I guess there were two surprises in the minister's comments there, one being that she believes Maralinga has been rehabilitated. I am sorry to break your heart, Minister Nash—Maralinga is still a mess. There are parts of that site that are heavily laced with plutonium from a botched effort to rehabilitate that site some time ago. Maralinga is not a safe place for people to go. Admittedly, it is a huge land area and much of it is, but there are areas in there that are still heavily contaminated and, I believe, that goes for some of the other test sites as well.

The Alligator Rivers Region that I referred to refers to a number of smallish—by today's standards—uranium mine sites that were worked out in the fifties and sixties. It will be a pleasant surprise if you can confirm that those sites are to be considered as part of the ambit of this bill, because that was not my understanding. Maybe the minister would like to clarify. If you miss spoke that would be a shame, but if those are a couple of sites that are brought a little bit closer to better regulation then that would be a welcome development.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am happy to take some further consideration on notice, but my advice is that Maralinga was remediated and handed back in 2012. Those other issues I am happy to take further advice on and come back to on notice.

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

At the risk of undermining the collegial spirit in which this debate has been entered into, I put those questions to departmental staff and ARPANSA a fortnight ago during the committee hearings. I put them to you 15 minutes ago during the second reading contribution. I find it really odd that you would not have an answer one way or another, because I have been asking this question for awhile. I am not sure why your advisers would need more time for that.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Without really being able to explore this any further, other than in the context we already have over previous times, Senator Ludlam, we have given the indication to you in answers to questions on notice and through that process. My advice is, as I have given to you. You clearly have a different view about those things. I am happy to take it on notice, again, but reiterate the advice that has been given to you through that process in the chamber and in response to those questions on notice.

Bob Day (SA, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Family First Party I move amendment (1), circulated in my name:

(1) Schedule 1, page 3 (before line 4), before item 1, insert:

1A Section 10

  Repeal the section.

My home state of South Australia—I like starting a speech with 'My home state of South Australia'; it just gets me off on the right foot—amongst other things, is blessed with significant uranium deposits. On a per capita basis we have, perhaps, the most in the world.

Let me mention a former state Labor MP, the late Mr Norm Foster. He was one of the first members in the other place for the electorate of Sturt. He then became a member of the South Australian Legislative Council. In 1982 Norm Foster crossed the floor in the state parliament to get uranium mining underway at Olympic Dam, in South Australia. In expressing his conscience in support of that state, Norm Foster resigned from the Labor Party, to perhaps avoid being expelled for going against party policy. Thankfully, history and the Labor Party were kinder to him in later years and he is now hailed as a hero in South Australia. It just goes to show, though, that sometimes groupthink has to be taken head-on, no matter what the cost. When this legislation was created in 1998, a provision was inserted by the Greens, to automatically ban certain types of nuclear activity and installations.

Senator Ludlam interjecting—

I thank Senator Ludlam for his interjection; he still holds to that view 20 years later. I want to highlight that this is not the end of the debate, if the amendment is defeated. It is not even the beginning of the end. I accept that the government was perhaps housekeeping in this particular legislative area and then along I came, opportunistically, with an amendment about nuclear installations. And when you come from South Australia you take every opportunity that you can. I get that. I also want colleagues to get that, when it comes to a nuclear future for South Australia—and my South Australian colleague Senator Edwards and indeed a number of other coalition senators have offered encouraging words to me in support of this amendment—I and others from South Australia and no doubt other senators from other states support that, and breaking down the barriers to get on with the nuclear fuel cycle and industry for South Australia.

A royal commission into the nuclear fuel cycle has been instituted in South Australia and, to its great credit, state Labor got this underway. My party, the Family First Party, has welcomed and supported that. I note that it has been reported that the South Australian government's Attorney-General's Department is already preparing tenders for consultants to bid for the work in preparing business cases for the very things that are described and banned outright in section 10 of the act. This move is designed to clear and improve the business case for South Australia participating more broadly in the nuclear fuel cycle.

I want to also make it clear that a nuclear spent fuel facility is already permissible at law, although the Greens also tried to stop that in 1998. We need and already have low-level facilities, but these are presently licensed by the authority.

I also want to talk about nuclear submarines. I want to emphasise, again, that I support nuclear-powered submarines, not nuclear-armed submarines. Some of our major allies have nuclear-powered submarines, not least of which are the UK and the United States. The generation of submarines currently under the competitive evaluation process will of course be conventional submarines. But I hope that the next generation after that will be nuclear, because there is no doubt that these provide the tactical superiority and particular range that a large and relatively remote nation such as Australia needs. Informed opinion tells us that Australia's defence needs are for 12 submarines, six conventional and six nuclear powered.

Having a nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear industry will greatly improve the prospects of us establishing a nuclear submarine industry and, indeed, developing local talent. We could work, for example, in partnership with, say, the United Kingdom or the United States and progress towards having our own nuclear industry, supporting nuclear-powered submarines.

With respect to international comparisons, let me just outline for the benefit of senators where Australia presently sits in comparison with its major trading partners when it comes to the types of facilities described in section 10 of the act. Thirty-three nations have nuclear power and 19 of those nations have nuclear fuel fabrication. Eleven nations have nuclear enrichment plants. There are seven nations with reprocessing facilities. Australia is one of just four out the 20 G20 nations that does not have nuclear power. Eighteen of the 34 OECD nations have nuclear power, and Australia of course is not one of them. So nuclear energy and its fuel cycle is not an international pariah as some might suggest; in fact, far from it.

I want to move on to consider small, modular reactors, which Senator Leyonhjelm mentioned a short time ago. I have learnt a little bit about this aspect of nuclear energy. Let me tell you about small modular reactors, SMRs for short. In brief, they are small, economically efficient, reliable nuclear energy sources—

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

They don't exist.

Bob Day (SA, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They do exist—

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

Nobody has built one.

Bob Day (SA, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They are assembled in-house and then shipped to the desired locations. They are often destined for remote locations as they require few staff and have fewer containment issues. They employ inherent—

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

Where are they operating?

Bob Day (SA, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will get to that, Senator Ludlam—

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

I'll stop.

Bob Day (SA, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If you don't mind. We have talked about courteous—

The Acting Deputy President:

Senator Day, address your questions through the chair. And those on my left, order.

Bob Day (SA, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Ludlam is very close to me here. It is irritating me in my ear as I go along through this, Mr Chair.

There is no need for long transmission powerlines with these small modular reactors in remote locations, and South Australia of course has abundant remote locations. There is a smaller power output relative to the larger power plants, and the initial construction costs are much lower by comparison. SMRs produce between 10 and 300 megawatts, compared to 1,000 megawatts for a typically large reactor. SMRs have load-following designs so that when electricity demands are low they produce a lower amount of electricity. They are fast reactors and are designed to have higher fuel burn-up rates, reducing the amount of spent fuel produced. And, importantly, they use low enriched uranium, which is non-weapons-grade uranium. This makes the fuel less desirable for weapons production, supporting nonproliferation.

Let me talk about the knowledge economy in South Australia. We are hearing much these days about improving our international competitiveness and giving our own young people reason to stay in Australia, in South Australia in particular. It is a worthwhile debate to have, and that mentality was a driving force behind the Medical Research Future Fund debate, with scientists writing to us, urging us, that our best and brightest were going overseas to pursue research opportunities.

I ask my colleagues today in this debate: where will the next Albert Einstein come from? Will they be Australian? Where will the next Ernest Rutherford come from? He was a New Zealander. South Australia has produced a Howard Florey. Will we one day develop the equivalent of a hadron collider in South Australia?

I have somewhat of a background in science and I have to say it is very discouraging when you have a law saying that some science is completely off-limits, even though you have other nations in the world delivering significant benefits to their citizens.

Will we one day celebrate a huge leap forward in scientific technology? Lockheed Martin are saying they are close to doing that with nuclear fusion. Will that involve a former Australian citizen who went to Britain, somewhere friendlier, to do nuclear science? What a shame that would be. We embrace nuclear medicine and its benefits to our health, and we ought to be embracing the nuclear fuel cycle also.

I moved this amendment because it is simply illogical to have a law saying that you simply will not entertain certain technologies. By all means, if you want to impose strict licence conditions so be it; do so. We know that regulation rules out a host of other things already because it makes it uneconomic to proceed, yet it is regulatory extremism to statutorily ban certain things from ever being considered. The 1998 provision was not opposed by the major parties because they were not looking this far into the future. My amendment is designed to get the parliament to reconsider the future, and to vote in favour of the future, by supporting this amendment.

Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In responding to the amendment, I firstly would like to commend Senator Day for seizing the opportunity to encourage debate around this issue.

While the government welcomes a discussion around the broader opportunities that exist for a nuclear industry in Australia, it has been clear that any move to expand the nuclear industry in Australia would require bipartisan and broad community support. I can inform the senator that the government believes all energy options, including nuclear, should be part of any community discussion about Australia's future energy mix. The energy white paper 2015 states:

The Australian Government will consider the outcomes of the South Australian Royal Commission into its future involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle including the mining, enrichment, energy and storage phases for the peaceful use of nuclear energy.

And I note the royal commission is due to report its findings in May 2016 and also note that South Australia is indeed Senator Day's home state.

The Australian government is also committed to monitoring international developments on nuclear energy and will continue to work with the states and territories on improving the regulation of nuclear industries. Improvements include responding to technical developments and the streamlining and removal of any unnecessary regulation. The Department of Industry and Science is reviewing options in this regard, and repealing section 10 would be premature in light of these existing processes and policy settings.

While consideration of lifting prohibitions may be relevant when setting the policy direction for Australia's energy future, such considerations should be made at the right time. In the case of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Amendment Bill 2015 before us, it is intended to update the legal framework governing the safety of existing facilities and the protection of workers, the public and the environment.

Consideration of section 10 of the act was outside the scope of the review of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act 1998. The review of the ARPANS Act was undertaken to improve the operation of the legislation and to update the regulatory scheme to better reflect international best practice.

The bill provides ARPANSA with a range of tools in order to best manage radiation risks and to monitor and enforce compliance with the legislation by existing Commonwealth entities. Repealing section 10 of the ARPANS Act in isolation would not result in a situation whereby the prohibited nuclear installations could then be constructed or operated in Australia. The ARPANS Act only applies to Commonwealth entities. Other legislation at both state and federal levels would need to be repealed and amended to enable the prohibited nuclear installations identified in section 10 to be constructed and operated in Australia. I note again that such an action would be premature in light of processes underway to consider options and opportunities in relation to the future of the Australian nuclear industry. As such, the government does not support the amendment but we look forward to further discussion of this issue.

Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Mental Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor does not support any amendment that would repeal section 10 of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act. Section 10 of the ARPANS Act provides that nothing in the legislation is taken to authorise the construction or operation of a list of nuclear installations—a nuclear fuel fabrication plant, a nuclear power plant, an enrichment plant and a reprocessing facility. These issues were canvassed at the Senate inquiry and the committee's view was that:

A change of this significance is broader than the committee's inquiry into the provisions of the bill and deserves separate consideration.

Senator Day, I join with the minister in congratulating you for using this opportunity to have a debate but I say to you that this is not the place, in the Senate, on a regulatory bill to be having a debate which could result in completely change Australia's energy policy. This bill goes to the regulatory framework for the regulation of radiation sources in our country. I do not think this is the place to have that debate. We note that the inquiry is being undertaken by the South Australian government and the issues you are trying to canvass will, I am sure, be considered there. We do not support your amendment, which, as I said, would fundamentally change Australia's energy policy.

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

I also join with my colleagues in thanking Senator Day for bringing this bill forward, despite the admonishment just then from Senator McLucas about this not being the time or the place. The Greens also have, from time to time, introduced amendments which would radically change the course of a particular piece of legislation. Today is as good a day as any. I am not going to support the amendment and I will explain as clearly as I can why not.

Let us start with South Australia. I think where Senator Day and I would be in firm agreement is that the South Australian economy is in deep trouble. Between the closure of advanced manufacturing for cars, the extraordinary uncertainty faced by naval shipbuilders in South Australia at the moment and, ironically enough, the uncertainty provoked by BHP's intentions on the Roxby Downs expansion you have three of the larger employers or potential employers in the state of South Australia potentially hitting the wall at the same time. I recognise, as do my South Australian colleagues, that that puts the state in a very serious predicament, one I would hope in here would be above politics.

It is without much pleasure that I would remind Senator Day and others that it was only a week or so ago that 380 employees of BHP lost their jobs. I think part of that is as a consequence of the company's decision a couple of years ago to not proceed with the expansion of the Roxby Downs open cut. Senator Day is quite right when he points out that Australia hosts a very large fraction of the world's uranium reserves but the Olympic Dam operation or the Roxby Downs site has a surprisingly large proportion of that uranium infantry at that one single site. The problem we have, which BHP discovered, is that yes, that deposit is huge, but it is very low grade and is a long way underground.

BHP's initial modelling showed that they were going to need to run the largest haul packs in the world 24/7, around the clock, for four years just to remove the overburdened before they could reach the top of the ore body, an excavation which would ultimately become the largest on the planet. For four years those diesel powered monsters would go down and down into the pit just to remove the overburdened and to put it into a temporary mountain to one side of the pitch before starting to mine marketable ore. Once we had the numbers on the size of the open cut, what it would look like, how much it would cost to access that ore body and how much radioactive waste would have been piled on the surface in 50, 60 or 70 years of the mine's life, we would be leaving, in effect, more than a cubic kilometre of very finely powdered, pulverised, carcinogenic radioactive waste on the surface. Neither the South Australian government nor the Commonwealth environmental regulators were proposing that that radioactive material should be put back in the hole at the end of mining.

I think one of the reasons that BHP ultimately decided not to proceed with the expansion—you could also argue that Roxby is a copper-gold venture which has uranium as a by-product—one of the things that killed that expansion was the very low world uranium price which had fallen from the extraordinary spike in 2007 to the point where they simply could not make the numbers add up. Now even a couple of years after that decision has been made we are still seeing companies having to let people go.

So yes, there is a lot of uranium but it may be too low grade and too deep to bring to the surface at this time. That is before you bring in the issues that have plagued that site for many years—the destruction of Aboriginal country and sacred sites, in particular the draining of the mound springs, the extraordinary consumption of water in processing operations not just for uranium but for copper, gold and other material coming out of that underground site and the fact that this is the feedstock for the global nuclear fuel chain.

Senator Day used the term 'nuclear fuel cycle'. While this probably sounds pedantic, I do not use that phrase. There is no cycle. There is no closed loop. It has never existed. It has been a dream since the 1950s that you could feed the waste products of the nuclear fuel cycle, as they were calling it then, in the form of plutonium, back into the front end at so-called breeder reactors and nobody, not even the best engineers and technologists in the world, in Russia, in Japan and in North America have ever figured out how to make it work.

You were listing before, Senator Day, the countries that operate reprocessing plants, and I am presuming you would include Japan in that list. They are not reprocessing there at the moment. It is so formidably difficult to close the loop on the 'nuclear fuel cycle' that we should not dignify it with that term. It is a one-way process for creating very low-grade uranium ores into various categories of intractable radioactive carcinogenic waste, including here in this country.

So no expansion at Roxby—and, if you are looking to one of the world's largest uranium mines to provide those jobs and that economic stability at a time of great instability in other sectors, it is the last place that you would want to look. What about if we head north to a much higher grade deposit and look to Kakadu? The Ranger uranium mine is presently on its knees. The company has just abandoned proposals to go underground and are looking at a kind of the reverse process to what they are looking at at Roxby. According to Rio Tinto, they will not be going underground at Ranger. So, effectively, you have a mine that is on its knees. They now have to have a very serious look at cleaning up 30 years of radioactive messes inside a World Heritage area, and it is not at all clear from company statements whether they have the financial resources to do that. Coming back to central South Australia, the Beverley uranium mine is looking radically uneconomic. They have been shedding people as well. The Honeymoon mine, which was opened with such fanfare a couple of years ago, is uneconomic as well.

It is not simply due to the low uranium price, but that is of course a key factor. Why is the world uranium price so low? Partly it is because of the indestructible optimism of advocates. We heard before from Senator Leyonhjelm—who put it about as well as I think I have heard it put in recent times—about that glowing, radiating enthusiasm for an industry that simply derides any opposition as emotional or irrational and says, 'We can finally kick the 1980s to one side.' I think it was very interesting, Senator Leyonhjelm, that that was your baseline, because the 1980s was this curious collision of the hangover of Three Mile Island, where the asset of a nuclear utility that had been running perfectly was converted from an asset into a multibillion dollar liability over a period of about 20 minutes, and the point where regulators were trying to decide whether or not to evacuate a million people from the site around the stricken reactor at Three Mile Island. Eventually they got that site back under control again and no human being will ever set foot inside that reactor building again.

The markets, Wall Street in particular, had already decided that the industry was simply going to be uneconomic. The writing was on the wall before 1979, except that you had this huge construction build in the pipeline from the sixties and the seventies. So the 1980s is a very interesting period to start looking at this industry, because you still had the tail end of that extraordinary construction boom of the 1970s and reactors coming on line. It was a time of enormous optimism in the industry until 1986, when engineers at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine lost control of the reactor during a very, very poorly calibrated test and blew the side out of the building. Again, hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from that site. At this time the writing was very seriously on the wall.

When I go to look for the facts, not for the stuff that I guess I was indirectly accused of by both of the previous speakers—around irrationality or, 'It's just emotional' or 'You're not looking at the facts—I get my facts, which are available to everybody to evaluate, from The world nuclear industry:status report 2015. I think it has been in publication for six or seven years now, and it is an extraordinarily valuable resource. They do not bring an agenda—they would not describe themselves, I would hope, as either pro- or antinuclear—but they do put a lot of very important global data into the public domain and they update it once a year. That is why I could not help myself and I was a bit undisciplined during Senator Day's comments when he was putting onto the public record stuff that the evidence simply does not support. So let us go through this in a bit of detail.

One of the reasons that the world uranium price is so low is that inventories are piling up around the world. You had between 40 and 50 reactors in Japan offline—the entire country's nuclear fleet offline—after 3/11 and nuclear inventories simply building up around the world. The reason that they have not started up again is that, firstly, the Japanese public are aware that 160,000 radiation refugees had to be pulled out of that area and most of them will never be able to go home. I do not know how many people have visited that site, but I have. I got within 10 kilometres of the reactor into an area that had recently been opened up again. It was though the tsunami had only just happened yesterday. It was a haunting experience. There are 150,000 radiation refugees still unable to go home—nor is it likely that they will ever be able to. The Japanese public trusted the industry and were told that such a thing could never happen. So there has been a staggering betrayal of trust.

Another thing is that, yes, it had an impact on Japanese coal and gas imports, but the Japanese public realised for the first time in the postwar era that they did not need what they call the atomic mafia. The lights stayed on and the Japanese economy stayed intact. Yes, their energy imports went up, and instead of importing uranium from places like Australia, they are importing gas from places like Australia, but the lights stayed on. So there were two fundamental betrayals of trust: the industry was not needed and the industry was not safe. That has permanently changed the character of Japanese politics. Apart from, I think, one unit that went online within the last fortnight or so, the other reason that those reactors have not started up in Japan is that local authorities—prefectural and district level authorities—have a very important say in whether or not those plants get back up. So, if we are looking to Japan as a customer country for Australian uranium, we would need to look somewhere else.

France was mentioned as the country with the highest density of installation of nuclear power stations in the world. It might have been Senator Leyonhjelm—though I do not want to misquote him—who said that there had been no accidents. The record of accidents in the French nuclear industry—which I will not go into in detail now—stands for itself. But here is the thing: the French authorities are backing out of the industry. Japan was once held up as the exemplar of the nuclear economy. Pro-nuclear advocates do not talk about Japan so much anymore, but they do talk about France. But AREVA are now technically bankrupt. They were downgraded to junk standard by Standard and Poor's, and the share value plunged to a new historic low on 9 July, with a value loss of 90 per cent since 2007.

AREVA is the state-owned entity that basically does everything in relation to atomic energy, all the way through the fuel chain from mining to waste—parking and waiting and seeing. AREVA is effectively bankrupt, and the French policy now is basically around getting from 70 per cent back to less than 50 per cent nuclear. They realise that that extraordinary reliance on ageing and extremely inflexible and risky reactors in France is a dead end for their energy policy and they are looking to diversify. Where are they looking? They are not looking to fossil; they are looking to clean energy, to renewable energy. And that is what is happening elsewhere.

I refer again to the Theworld nuclear industry: status report. The industry is stuffed, colleagues. The global nuclear industry is on its knees; it is on its way out. It would be something of a tragedy, I would think, for well-meaning senators in here looking for economic diversification, looking for energy security, to look to this dead end that has never, ever lived up to its promises. Nuclear plant construction starts plunged from 15 in 2010 to three in 2014. I will quote one paragraph from that same report:

The 391 operating reactors … are 47 fewer than the 2002 peak of 438 ...

So peak nuclear was 2002—that is getting to be a while ago now. It has all been in decline since then. There are 47 fewer reactors operating now than there were then. That is a reasonably large number. The report goes on:

… the total installed capacity peaked in 2010 at 368 gigawatts before declining by 8 percent to 337 gigawatts …

So now we have basically rewound the industry by about 20 years in terms of installed capacity. Further:

Annual nuclear electricity generation reached 2,410 terawatt hours in 2014—a 2.2 percent increase over the previous year, but 9.4 percent below … peak …

My question to Senator Day is whether he would like a copy of this document. I do welcome this debate because the nuclear debate has been happening in Australia for decades and there are important reasons why the pro-nuclear side keeps losing and one of them, I would suspect, is simply overlooking the underlying fundamentals of a market that is broken and has delivered only risk, despite promising such extraordinary benefits.

David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act is the legislation that makes it illegal to authorise a nuclear power station, fuel enrichment or a fabrication facility or a reprocessing facility. Senator Day's amendment would repeal section 10 of the ARPNS Act and thus make it possible, not necessarily probable, for the regulator to authorise a nuclear power station, fuel enrichment or a fabrication facility or a reprocessing facility. In submissions to the Senate inquiry, both the Australian Nuclear Association and Engineers Australia suggested such an amendment. Senators Nash and McLucas have both said now is not the time for such an amendment. Senator Ludlam suggested there is never a good time for an amendment like this. I would argue that now is as good a time as any to start peeling back the Australia's absurd attitude to a nuclear industry. Senator Day's amendment would make a useful start and I signal my support for it.

Bob Day (SA, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In summing up, I thank my colleagues for their contributions on my amendment. I would particularly like to thank my colleague Senator Leyonhjelm for his support. In response to Senator McLucas suggesting that my amendment would fundamentally change energy policy, I was not suggesting that but rather just removing a ban on even considering these things at the first hurdle. Whether my amendment represented a fundamental change in energy policy, I thank Senator McLucas for her compliment.

In response to Senator Ludlam's comments, he makes my point exactly. He says that there is no nuclear fuel cycle. What have the last hundred years of brilliant discoveries and inventions been all about? We used to burn off gas from oil refineries and now it is recycled. Methane used to leak out of rubbish dumps and now it is harnessed and used for fuel. And there are all the medical breakthroughs. I think Senator Ludlam's short-sighted approach, saying, 'We can't allow it because we haven't done anything yet,' is my whole point. The whole point is where might the next big medical or scientific come from? If we keep on blindly with a 'Ludlam-ite' approach—excuse the pun, Senator Ludlam—it will get us nowhere.

It would appear that I do not have the numbers for this to succeed today. I accept that. This amendment has come at relatively late notice. I do thank senators for their contribution. It has triggered an interesting discussion. I will read Senator Ludlam's discussion paper on this because it really is very, very important for my home state of South Australia. Nonetheless, I have moved my amendment on sheet 7764.

Question negatived.

Bill agreed to.

Bill reported without amendments; report adopted.