Through AUKUS, federal Labor are ‘normalising’ and legitimising High-Level nuclear waste.
The public has a right to full disclosure in an informed debate ahead of AUKUS nuclear decisions. Silence by political leaders paves a path for an AUKUS nuclear dump agenda.
Federal Labor has broken its commitment to announce a process for AUKUS waste storage
Through AUKUS, federal Labor are ‘normalising’ and legitimising High-Level nuclear waste
Minister Marles wants to put a flag on US Navy High-Level nuclear wastes and ‘call it our own’
Aboriginal People have a Right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent over AUKUS wastes
SA Premier to let ‘national security interests’ decide the location for AUKUS nuclear waste
Scenario: AUKUS nuclear waste to ship into Whyalla Port to go north to the Woomera Area
The Australian public have a Right to Say No to undemocratic new federal Labor powers to impose AUKUS High-Level nuclear waste, effectively by decree, across SA, WA and the NT.
AUKUS Regulation 111 (02 Oct 2025) overrides protections in our existing State and Territory laws, and specifically names and prescribes SA and WA laws that prohibit High-Level nuclear waste storage. These draconian federal powers lack social licence and are an affront to civil society, they damage public trust in governance and are an ongoing threat to Aboriginal People’s rights and cultural responsibility to protect their country.
The Objects of the SA Nuclear Waste Storage (Prohibition) Act 2000 set out what is at stake: “To protect the health, safety and welfare of the people of South Australia, and the environment in which they live” by prohibiting certain nuclear waste storage facilities.
Community now face federal imposition of untenable and illegal AUKUS nuclear waste storage,
see “The lethal legacy of Aukus nuclear submarines will remain for millennia – and there’s no plan to deal with it” (The Guardian, 10 August 2025, Interview with Prof Ian Lowe).
Federal Labor has broken its commitment to announce a process for AUKUS waste storage: AUKUS Minister Richard Marles MP made a commitment to announce a process to identify a site to dispose of AUKUS nuclear wastes by early 2024. The failure by Defence to set out any process – other than to take up powers to impose nuclear wastes by decree – is unacceptable.
‘Transparency warrior’ Rex Patrick has brought to light: “A Brief on how to choose a location for AUKUS nuclear waste was provided to Defence Minister Richard Marles in Dec 2023”, see “Submarine boasts, yet nuclear waste dumps submersed in secrecy” (MWM, 16 Feb 2026).
The public has a Right to Know what regions across SA, WA and the NT are being targeted for storage of AUKUS nuclear wastes. The secretive ongoing Defence review “to identify potential nuclear waste disposal sites” (ABC News March 2023) and the Brief must be made public.
The Woomera Area was reported to be a ‘favoured location’ for storage and disposal of nuclear sub wastes back in August 2023, see “Woomera looms as national nuclear waste dump site including for AUKUS submarine high-level waste afr.com. WA, Qld and Vic political leaders rejected a High-Level nuclear waste disposal site in their States in 2023. WA has suggested the Woomera Prohibited Area in SA: “would be one obvious location within the Defence estate, however, we will await the outcomes of the federal review” (SMH 15 March 2023).
Through AUKUS, federal Labor are ‘normalising’ and legitimising High-Level nuclear waste. Aspiring International nuclear waste dumpers Tellus Holdings Ltd that operates the Sandy Ridge waste repository in WA has partnered with Amentum UK to expand the Chandler Project in the NT. Amentum provides services to Pine Gap and was involved in the “Waste Isolation Pilot Plant” – the only nuclear geological repository in the US. In a Jan 2026 submission to a federal Inquiry Tellus offered to first take AUKUS & International Low-Level waste at Chandler.
The public has a right to full disclosure in an informed debate ahead of AUKUS nuclear decisions. Silence by political leaders paves a path for an AUKUS nuclear dump agenda.
Min Marles wants to put a flag on US Navy High-Level nuclear wastes and ‘call it our own’: AUKUS Minister Marles aims Australia take on second-hand US Virginia Class nuclear powered subs in the early 2030’s loaded with US origin military High-Level nuclear fuel waste accrued in up to a dozen years of US Navy operations of US ‘High Enriched Uranium’ nuclear reactors.
Swapping an Australian flag onto this US military nuclear reactor waste places an untenable ‘for ever’ burden on future Australian generations to have to try to isolate these US nuclear wastes.
Aboriginal People have a Right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent over AUKUS wastes:
Q: Will our political leaders commit to respect and comply with Aboriginal People’s human rights, set out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Article 29 (UNDRIP 2007), to “Free, Prior and Informed Consent” over storage of hazardous materials on their lands. AUKUS nuclear wastes absolutely are hazardous materials! Traditional Owners across SA, WA and the NT have repeatedly had to Say No to the imposition of nuclear wastes.
The SA Premier was called on to declare his position back in Dec and has so far not responded.
SA Premier to let ‘national security interests’ decide the location for AUKUS nuclear waste:
Premier Peter Malinauskas MP has said AUKUS nuclear waste should go to a ‘remote’ location in the “national security interest”, see “Site for high-level nuclear waste dump under AUKUS deal must be in national interest, SA premier says” (ABC News 15 March 2023).
The Premier’s “Office for AUKUS” (Letter, 07 Oct 2025) claims “safe and secure disposal” for High-Level nuclear waste, including spent fuel, produced when N-subs are decommissioned. The Office expresses no concerns over globally unprecedented High-Level nuclear waste disposal, declines to reveal what is underway and yet expects “community acceptance”:
“Determining suitable locations and methods for safe and secure disposal will take time, but Australia will do so in a manner that sets the highest standards … and which builds community acceptance for a disposal solution.”
Ahead of the SA Election the Premier has been called on to answer the Q: Will you accept or reject federal imposed storage of AUKUS nuclear waste in SA? so far there is no response.
REPORTER: Is a high-level nuclear waste dump the price that South Australia will have to pay for the jobs that go to the state? (Minister Marles Press Conference 14 March 2023)
MARLES: Well, as I indicated there will be a process that we will determine within the next 12 months for how the site will be identified. You’ve made a leap there, which we’re not going to make for some time. It will be a while before a site is ultimately identified.
SA is left in the dark, without a say, as an ongoing target for an AUKUS nuclear waste dump
Scenario: AUKUS nuclear waste to ship into Whyalla Port to go north to the Woomera Area
The Woomera Area is expected to be a target on a federal regional short list for an AUKUS nuclear dump site and Whyalla Port to be on a likely AUKUS nuclear waste transport route.
Rex Patrick has set out an array of potential locations and types of AUKUS nuclear waste facilities across Australia, see “AUKUS waste in perpetuity” (MWM, 22 July 2025). For further information: see Friends of the Earth https://nuclear.foe.org.au/nuclear-subs/
Or, Why Australia chooses to live in the lies of an American world
Burning Archive, Substack, Mar 07, 2026
Australia feinted on the global stage this week when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney went to Canberra. Offered dignity as a middle power, the Australian Government acted the pawn in another USA-run war.
Disappointing, but what I have come to expect, and we have to deal with the world as it is, right? Or, so the realist fictions say. But let me tell you a stranger history of the plural Australian experience, and how this decolonised nation came to be that way.
Contemporary Australia’s muddled national sovereignty is the product of three botched decolonisation projects:
Federation as White Dominion, 1890-1920;
USA Agent in a British Commonwealth, 1930-50;
Deputy Sheriff and Starlet in the USA’s Liberal Empire, 1968-1999.
You may not have heard these labels; I devised them for this essay. But don’t worry: I explain the history and evidence behind them at the end of this post on Australia’s experience of decolonisation.
Mark Carney’s Wake-Up Call to Independence
In each of the three botched decolonisation projects, Australians – both élites and masses – chose belonging to an empire, which claimed global supremacy, over modest, gregarious co-existence as a middle power of one earth.
Now, in 2026, another historic opportunity for decolonisation has arisen. It was announced to the Australian Parliament by the Prime Minister of another decolonised dominion, Mark Carney of Canada.
“Yes, the world will always be driven by great powers, but it can also be shaped by middle powers that trust each other and act with speed and purpose.
Mark Carney, Address to Parliament, Hansard, 5 March 2026
Will Australia seize the moment? Will we act with speed and purpose? Will Australia ride, or get dumped by, a fourth wave of US American decolonisation, by the unravelling of the USA Empire?
My hunch is: we will get dumped, and then sucked out with the rip into the most dangerous waters. Like a bad cocky swimmer in rough surf, we have not been paying attention to the world “as it is” around us, and not even swimming between the flags.
At least, the mainstream élites in politics, business and culture in Australia have not been paying attention. The omens of this opportunity for a new decolonisation have been noticed in the Great Southern Land, for a decade or more, by a few dissident, reviled voices. Like antipodean Havels, we have tried to live in the truth, and point out the lies and slogans our leaders ask us to hang in our shop windows, like the indispensable American Alliance, our great and powerful democratic friend, and the ‘liberal rules-based international order,’ exposed as a sham by Mr Carney at Davos. But Australian leaders have suppressed all readings of the omens. They have blocked their ears and masked their eyes. They refuse to see Australia as anything but the Deputy Sheriff of the USA’s Empire or some B-grade celebrity starlet aspiring to be enriched by Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire.
The Closing of the Australian Mind
The Australian mind is closed and colonised, like few around the world. It may be because Mr Murdoch has so successfully counter-colonised the political and cultural networks of imperial masters, Britain and the USA. It may be because we botched our past three attempts at decolonisation, and the gulfs have washed us down. It may be that we have been unlucky in our leaders. But I suspect, most deeply, it is because, in each attempt at independence, we neglected one crucial truth: colonisation begins and ends in the mind.
It’s only Day Five of the war, but surely the epic stupidity of Australia so cravenly backing the US-Israeli invasion of Iran is evident by now. Michael West reports.
We are led by fools and sycophants. The illegal, unprovoked invasion of Iran is not just garden-variety stupidity. This is stupidity on a grandiose, stratospheric scale.
The Israeli propaganda narrative that Iranians would sprinkle rose petals at the feet of their invaders has not come to pass. It has already been demolished in fact.
Instead of bringing freedom and democracy – ‘regime change’ – we have brought chaos, possibly a world war, and definitely the destruction of the Middle East. The world economy is being hit hard as we write; oil prices spiralling, energy prices about to soar, and the inexorable spectre of inflation and recession.
“And it didn’t have to happen.“
This was a war of choice. Even without the “Epstein Coalition” – as the Iranian media so aptly dubs their invaders – murdering 168 Iranian school girls on day one, ‘peace through strength’ was never going to happen.
Quite the contrary. The illegal and unprovoked invasion of Iran has hardened the resolve of Iranians, who are massing in their hundreds of thousands across the country to mourn their dead and chant Death to America, to back their regime.
Where was the advice?
The Epstein Coalition killed the Ayatollah, who was actually against nuclear power; he was a moderate. Did Albo and Penny Wong not seek advice from Foreign Affairs that attacking Iran was folly, that the anti-regime protestors were a minority, that the pre-invasion protests were a Mossad and CIA psyop, that Iran might attack US proxy states in the region, that invasion would be a Brobigdadgian mistake?
Or did they ignore the advice in favour of a Washington regime compromised by the Epstein pedophile scandal?
And now, we see the feeble, hypocritical whining by Israel and its supporters about Iran attacking the Gulf states. Is that our only moral defence? Decades of supporting these regimes: Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – US proxy states all – regimes now unravelling, the oil price is soaring, inflation and recession are beckoning globally.
Images are emerging from Bahrain of locals cheering on the Iranian missiles. Were DFAT and our politicians unaware of popular angst in the Gulf states against American imperialism?
And what did they expect Iran to do in the face of this existential threat? Not blow up American bases and infrastructure while the US attacked them; after the US betrayed them at the very negotiating table when they were offering significant concessions on nuclear enrichment, all to avoid war? This war.
Australia, the US flunkies
Yet here was Australia, Saturday night, first out of the blocks worldwide to throw its support behind Donald Trump and his preposterous “Operation Epic Fury”, a probable pedophile being blackmailed and led around by the genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu like a pony at the fairground show.
“Operation Epstein Fury”, it was fast labelled. The soaring, craven stupidity is hard to grasp. Both major parties backing it. Albo first, then Angus Taylor rushing to tow the Donald’s line. Then, Pauline Hanson, too, who even congratulated and praised Netanyahu. We are led by fools and sycophants.
The flawed defence of atrocity
To address the empty rhetoric of the pro-war lobby, criticism of this war does not equate to support for the regime in Iran. Defenders of the US-Israel atrocity are busy with their swarms of social media bots peddling the argument that “you are an Islamist terror supporter” if you criticise the invasion.
This is the 2026 version of “You are a Hamas supporter” if you argue against genocide in Gaza.
The cold facts of this debacle are that regime change does not work, that Iran did not want this war, that Iran appears to be exceptionally well prepared – even winning the war – that the Epstein Coalition, which Australia supports, is daily backing war crimes: blowing up hospitals, schools and civilian infrastructure.
“This is a war which has already been lost.“
The obvious reality is that regime change wars are a demonstrable failure. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Iraq – a million dead, irretrievable regional stability. In Afghanistan, 20 years, trillions of dollars spent, four US presidents, six Australian PMs – all to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
And here we are, the world’s busybodies, doing it again.
Who would ever negotiate with the US in good faith again, or Israel for that matter? Iran did not want this war. Iran has not attacked another country in 300 years.
The US lured them to the negotiating table, then, without warning, murdered their leadership. This echoes last year’s 12-day war, where Israel and the US lured them in on the premise of good faith talks, then murdered them and now play the victim.
What did they expect Iran to do in the face of this existential threat?
The record speaks for itself. The US is the biggest invader of other countries in history. Israel has, last year alone, attacked Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Palestine, Qatar, Tunisia, Malta, and Greece.
Six illegal attacks of sovereign nations, as well as three illegal attacks in international waters equals 9 all up. In one year. And now they are invading Lebanon again, seizing more territory as their puppets, America, fight their campaign against Iran.
Albo, what are you doing?
We know who the war mongers are. We are the war mongers. Yet, in his bizarre statement of support, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was the fastest out of the blocks of all the allies on the weekend, issuing a false statement.
The claim, echoed by the usual warmongers of the Lib-Lab establishment, is that Iran is guilty of attacks on Australian soil, referencing alleged attacks on a deli in Bondi.
We know who the war mongers are. We are the war mongers. Yet, in his bizarre statement of support, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was the fastest out of the blocks of all the allies on the weekend, issuing a false statement.
The claim, echoed by the usual warmongers of the Lib-Lab establishment, is that Iran is guilty of attacks on Australian soil, referencing alleged attacks on a deli in Bondi.
Then there is the age-old claim that Iran is about to produce nuclear weapons. The US and Israel’s nuclear risk claims have been so roundly discredited it’s a joke.
Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to instigate a war against Iran for 30 years – claiming Iran is days away, weeks away, months away from nuclear missiles.
And they were at the negotiating table again when the Epstein forces murdered them.
The propaganda
We are now seeing mainstream media decry the ‘illegal attacks’ on Israel and the Gulf states. Yet the ‘victim card’ is tapped out. Around the world, outside the legacy media propaganda, there is little sympathy for Israel having razed Gaza and slaughtered between 72,000 and 700,000 Palestinians while stealing more land in the West Bank daily.
It will continue. The media and political classes have failed so majestically that they can only try to salvage their authority with more propaganda.
The deplorable coverage of the murdered schoolgirls in Iran is a case in point. The “40 beheaded babies” and the “mass rapes” of Hamas filled the headlines in the West on October 8, 2023. Yet real murders – 170 murdered schoolgirls – have hardly rated a mention. Yes, a mention perhaps, but a side story, buried, no headlines of outrage.
Can’t handle the truth?
Is the truth too hard to handle? Is it not evident to everybody except the most brainwashed advocate of the Epstein lobby that Israel – the government, the state – is the problem here?
Netanyahu has won his ambition to drag America into a war against Iran, and if you follow the money, while world stock markets teeter, the stock market in Tel Aviv is surging, replete with weapons companies as it is.
Meanwhile, the ASX is tanking, ergo our savings. Oil prices are surging, ergo higher energy prices and inflation. The Houthis, Iran’s allies, are shooting again in the Red Sea while, on the other side of the Arabian peninsula, Iran has blocked the Straits of Hormuz, choking off a large chunk of the world’s oil supply.
Higher prices in India and China will mean higher prices for imports and inflation around the world.
The lessons of history have not been learnt; in fact, they have been discarded in spectacular fashion.
Antinuclear 