Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (NT, Country Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to talk about the situation for the Kimba radioactive waste facility in South Australia, where the views of the local community were ignored by this Labor government after years of work and consultation. I recently met in Port Augusta with Indigenous leader Malcolm 'Tiger' McKenzie, who has been ignored by this Labor government and has asked me once again to raise the issue in the Senate.

This facility would have been the first National Radioactive Waste Management Facility and would have played an important role in safely storing the waste from Australia's crucial nuclear medicine industry. Consultation with the local community started under the coalition government, and two of my colleagues—first Senator Canavan and then Mr Keith Pitt—as ministers engaged with locals to select the site and ensure that it had community support. When he was the minister for resources, Keith Pitt met with the representatives of the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation, and the former government engaged with the corporation numerous times throughout the process to ensure that their voices were being heard. The coalition government offered to support the Barngarla people to undertake ballots to gauge community support. When a ballot was undertaken by the local council in the Kimba community, it found that most were in favour of the project. Over 61 per cent of residents of the Kimba area supported the site. Sixty per cent of local businesses supported the site. One hundred per cent of neighbours who shared a boundary supported the site.

But the Albanese government have walked away from the proposal, abandoning the site with no alternative solution. They've picked and chosen who they would listen to rather than taking into account the will of the broader community. This is a failure of the minister and a failure of the Albanese government.