Barbara Pocock (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Sometimes the right thing happens in politics. Today it has at Kimba in South Australia. Today the Labor government has walked away from the mistaken ill-conceived plan to put low and intermediate level nuclear waste at Kimba in South Australia. It has abandoned a bad idea it took up from the previous government, a plan that was always wrong, a plan that provided only a temporary store of intermediate level waste, which needs to be stored for 10,000 years, and it kicked that can down the road for the children and the generations of the future. It was a plan that never asked South Australians what they wanted and did not listen to the voices of the Barngarla people, who opposed it on their country to a person and for years. It was a plan that divided the rural community of Kimba at great personal cost to many, a plan that many farmers and local residents fought as a threat to the clean, green produce and beauty of the Eyre Peninsula and Kimba.

Sometimes the right thing happens in politics but only because good people speak up and fight for the right thing. The Barngarla people, led by Jason Bilney, have fought for years. Don't mess with the Barngarla is the lesson of this history. People like Peter and Sue Woolford, all the farmers, fought this proposal which threatened their livelihoods and their community. People like Dave Sweeney and the Australian Conservation Foundation invested years of activism about the cost and failure of this proposal. People like Nick Llewelyn-Jones led the legal case to fight for the Barngarla people and their voice and all the citizens who opposed this project, and now we must look to a long-term, safe solution which is built on the full, prior and informed consent of First Nations people and all Australians. (Time expired)