Antinuclear

Secrecy on reports about the nomination of Muckaty Station as nuclear waste dump

The committee recommended in May 2010 that the bill be passed, acknowledging at the time that it did not have access to key documents and information

I find it a shock, as do many supporters of the Australian Labor Party, that coercive attempts to dump radioactive waste out in terra nullius did not end with the election of the Rudd government but have in fact been picked up and cut and pasted exactly where the former government left off. Our leaders may have changed, but our resources minister effectively has not. I continue to recall and remark that the government opened its first term with an apology and that, if this legislation is allowed to proceed, it will close this term owing another apology to Aboriginal Australians. I think the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee missed an important opportunity to right what will be seen, if we entrench it and lock it in, as a historical injustice that should not be allowed to stand.

Report and speech on the evidence provided by the NLC to the legal and constitutional affairs committee inquiry into Muckaty Bill Senator LUDLAM  (Western Australia) 8 Feb 2012 ……..This matter is extremely important. A particular community in the Northern Territory has been targeted for a national radioactive waste dump in Australia. We have never had such a facility before. It has been very, very contentious for governments of all kinds, and it is something that has been extremely vexed—an issue that neither Labor nor the conservatives have ever been able to get a grip on.

In this instance, the site has been targeted for a particular cattle station about 120 kilometres north of Tennant Creek, and there is a serious dispute over whether the land should have been nominated from the Northern Land Council to the federal government. It is a site that is explicitly named and targeted in the legislation that is before this chamber. It is not an abstract matter. This is a site that has actually been identified—we had this confirmed again yesterday—as the only site that was in consideration by the federal government. It was named and locked in in the legislation before the parliament, yet the people of that region have taken a very serious dispute to the Federal Court over whether that land should have been forwarded in the first place.

It was up to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee in examining the bill—which it did with extremely truncated and narrow terms of reference the year before last—to decide whether or not this bill should proceed. It did decide, in the absence of quite a number of very important documents that the Northern Land Council refused to disclose to the committee when they gave evidence, to recommend that the bill be proceeded with. At the time my office forwarded quite a detailed dissenting report saying that, in fact, the committee had not done its job; even within its narrow terms of reference, it simply had not done its job.

It had not sought the requisite information to allow it to properly fulfil its function, and it has done so again. In the report that we are remarking on tonight, the committee has effectively said, ‘We don’t have the requisite information to properly fulfil our function. We’re not going to seek it and therefore we’re not going to make a finding.’ What makes this dangerous is that, in the absence of that information and in the absence of a proper effort to seek that information and evaluate it, the committee nonetheless recommends that the bill be passed—and that, I think, is an extraordinary oversight. It is what these committees are set up to do. It is the reason that we take evidence, take up witnesses’ valuable time and travel around the country seeking evidence.

The committee recommended in May 2010 that the bill be passed, acknowledging at the time that it did not have access to key documents and information, in particular the deed of agreement relating to the nomination—that is very, very important—or the anthropological reports that were relied upon by the Northern Land Council in forwarding this nomination and in claiming that it was in fact a nomination conforming to the land rights act. The committee at the time was therefore forced to rely heavily on testimony and assertions of those who did have access to the documents, namely the Northern Land Council.

The anthropology report, I think, is the key one. It was withheld from the committee, it has been withheld from other parties to the dispute until, I think, quite recently and it is the basis upon which the Northern Land Council nomination of the Muckaty site rests. The land council’s entire case rests on this anthropological report that nobody, including named parties to the Muckaty Land Trust, has seen. ….

Not only has the nomination by the NLC been contested; it has been contested by a large group of people who have taken their dispute all the way to the Federal Court. They, regrettably, have had to engage legal counsel to fight this nomination in the courts. We will not know whether there is fire behind the smoke, because, of course, the key documents were withheld from the committee…..

I find it a shock, as do many supporters of the Australian Labor Party, that coercive attempts to dump radioactive waste out in terra nullius did not end with the election of the Rudd government but have in fact been picked up and cut and pasted exactly where the former government left off. Our leaders may have changed, but our resources minister effectively has not. I continue to recall and remark that the government opened its first term with an apology and that, if this legislation is allowed to proceed, it will close this term owing another apology to Aboriginal Australians. I think the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee missed an important opportunity to right what will be seen, if we entrench it and lock it in, as a historical injustice that should not be allowed to stand.

February 10, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, politics