Wong, Marles schedule US trip as nuclear submarine deadline nears
Financial Review, Andrew TillettPolitical correspondent, 26 Oct 22,
Annual top-level foreign affairs and defence talks will be held in Washington in December, allowing senior officials to lock down final details over Australia’s planned purchase of nuclear-powered submarines before the Albanese government publicly outlines its plans for the multibillion-dollar project.
With this year’s federal budget eschewing major funding decisions in the defence portfolio, The Australian Financial Review understands the US will for the third year running host the annual AUSMIN talks between the Australian and US governments………..
One defence source suggested that holding talks in the US would result in the ministers being accompanied by a bigger-than-usual cohort of Australian officials to speak to US counterparts from the Defence and Energy departments about the submarine project.
The nuclear submarine taskforce, which is examining the best options for Australia to acquire nuclear submarine technology from the US and UK under the AUKUS partnership, is due to report to the Albanese government in March after an 18-month study on what submarine to acquire, where it will be built, delivery timetable, cost and any interim measures required to avoid a capability gap.
Separately, former defence minister Stephen Smith and former Defence Force chief Angus Houston are conducting a Defence Strategic Review looking at the military’s weapons needs in light of deteriorating regional security. That review is also due in March.
Both reviews will outline billions of dollars in new spending for Defence that will need to begin to be accommodated when the next budget is handed down in May.
This year’s budget papers fail to reflect the significant increase in funding required for existing projects as construction gets under way in earnest…………………………….. more https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/wong-marles-schedule-us-trip-as-nuclear-submarine-deadline-nears-20221026-p5bsyp
Rex Patrick: has the Australian Senate lost its mojo?
Michael West Media, by Rex Patrick | Oct 25, 2022, “Powerful” or “piss-weak”? The Senate has greater powers than a royal commission yet in recent years its authority has declined amid refusals by the likes of the Defence Department, the Tax Commissioner and the government itself to cooperate with Senate orders. Former senator Rex Patrick on responsible government. ……………………….
Accountability in the Australian parliament
Both houses of parliament are empowered under Section 49 and Section 50 of the constitution to conduct oversight of government and to throw the light of publicity on its acts.
The powers are significant allowing MPs and senators to ask questions of ministers (as occurs at question time and through questions on notice) and to inquire, compel witnesses, order the production of documents and to deal with contempt. The strict powers of each house of the federal parliament are greater than those of a royal commission…………………………………………….
the appetite for dealing with contempt by the Houses has died, rendering the inquiry power impotent. Exercising a power when it shouldn’t be is inappropriate, but so too is not exercising the power when it should.
Yes minister, no senator
Of course, the House of Representatives doesn’t conduct government oversight. The powers of the houses are exercised through a vote of the majority of its members and the government, by definition, controls the house. It can suppress information or inquiries which are to its disadvantage, sometimes by refusing to supply information, sometimes by using its numbers to stop inquiries altogether.
It is the Senate that is the grand inquest of the nation. Or at least it should be. But it isn’t. It fails dismally.
The Senate seems satisfied with answers to question on notice that are both untimely and unsatisfactory. Most senators seem to just accept non-answers from officials at Senate estimates or politically infected and erroneous answers.
All too often, orders for the production of documents have been met with contempt, with the government trumping up untested and often bogus public interest immunity claims. In those cases where the Senate arguments are strong for the documents to be produced, the Senate does nothing except weaken itself.
Across my time in and around the Senate I witnessed contempt after contempt.
- On November 17, 2014, the Senate ordered the production of an economic modelling report into the impact of the future submarine project on the Australian economy. The Senate was refused access to it. I later obtained it using Freedom of Information (FOI) laws.
- On October 9, 2016, the Senate ordered the production of the French submarine design and mobilisation contract. The Senate was refused access to it. I later obtained it using FOI.
- On September 4, 2017, the Senate ordered the production of the Future Frigates. It had been given to overseas shipbuilders, but the Senate was refused access to it. I later obtained it under Freedom of Information laws.
- On November 16, 2017, the Senate ordered the production of information relating to Murray-Darling strategic water purchases. The government withheld crucial valuation information which, wait for it, was later released to me under FOI.
……………………………………. No privileges, thanks
The privileges committee, often erroneously characterised by the media as “very powerful”, is impotent. It’s made up of senators, who thanks to their weakness and partisan loyalties, are a disgrace compared to their British counterparts who have for centuries battled to ensure Parliament is supreme over the executive.
The committee’s two most recent reports say it all.
For two years the Department of Defence withheld documents from the Senate’s economics reference committee’s inquiry into naval shipbuilding. It unquestionably interfered with the progress of the committee’s inquiry, but the privileges committee failed to find this was a contempt. It’s finding weakened the Senate. Once can expect the government to do more of the same in the future……………………………..
Mojo lost
We often hear people call for a royal commission to get to the bottom of something. This is a strange call for two reasons.
Firstly, a royal commission is established by letters patent issued by the governor-general on the advice of government. Royal commissions are always for investigations in which the government is interested, not the people.
Secondly, the Senate has greater powers than a royal commission.
eople either subconsciously or consciously turn away from the Senate because they know it is weak. They know it has lost its mojo. And governments and bureaucrats know this better than anyone. So, it’s a vicious cycle in which the authority and power of the Senate continues to decline.
Its weakness is not the fault of the government and it’s not the fault of the Senate staff who do their best to support inquiries. It is exclusively the fault of senators.
The powers of the Senate have been established by convention. Unexercised, those conventions will turn into points of interest for historians. That would be a tragedy, because securing accountability of government is the very essence of responsible government. https://michaelwest.com.au/rex-patrick-has-the-australian-senate-lost-its-mojo/
A Political Solution for Assange: Jennifer Robinson at the National Press Club
The teeth in Robinson’s address lay in the urgency of political action. Assange is suffering a form of legal and bureaucratic assassination, his life gradually quashed by briefs, reviews, bureaucrats and protocols. “This case needs an urgent political solution. Julian does not have another decade to wait for a legal fix.”
https://theaimn.com/a-political-solution-for-assange-jennifer-robinson-at-the-national-press-club/ October 23, 2022, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark
It was telling. Of the mainstream Australian press gallery, only David Crowe of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age turned up to listen to Jennifer Robinson, lawyer extraordinaire who has spent years representing Julian Assange. Since 2019, that representation has taken an even more urgent note: to prevent the WikiLeaks founder from being extradited to the United States, where he faces 18 charges, 17 confected from the archaic Espionage Act of 1917.
In addressing the Australian National Press Club, Robinson’s address, titled “Julian Assange, Free Speech and Democracy,” was a grand recapitulation of the political case against the WikiLeaks founder. Followers of this ever darkening situation would not have found anything new. The shock, rather, was how ignorant many remain about the chapters in this scandalous episode of persecution.
Robinson’s address noted those blackening statements from media organisations and governments that Assange was paranoid and could leave the Ecuadorian embassy, his abode for seven years, at his own leisure. Many were subsequently “surprised when Julian was served with a US extradition request.” But this was exactly what WikiLeaks had been warning about for some ten years.
In the Belmarsh maximum security prison, where he has resided for 3.5 years, Assange’s health has declined further. “Then last year, during a stressful court appeal hearing, Julian had a mini stroke.” His ailing state did not convince a venal prosecution, tasked with “deriding the medical evidence of Julian’s severe depression and suicidal ideation.”
The matter of health plays into the issue of lengthy proceedings. Should the High Court not grant leave to hear an appeal against the June decision by Home Secretary Priti Patel to order his extradition, processes through the UK Supreme Court and possibly the European Court of Human Rights could be activated.
The latter appeal, should it be required, would depend on the government of the day keeping Britain within the court’s jurisdiction. “If our appeal fails, Julian will be extradited to the US – where his prison conditions will be at the whim of intelligence agencies which plotted to kill him.” An unfair trial would follow, and any legal process citing the First Amendment culminating in a hearing before the US Supreme Court would take years.
The teeth in Robinson’s address lay in the urgency of political action. Assange is suffering a form of legal and bureaucratic assassination, his life gradually quashed by briefs, reviews, bureaucrats and protocols. “This case needs an urgent political solution. Julian does not have another decade to wait for a legal fix.”
Acknowledging that her reference to the political avenue was unusual for a lawyer, Robinson noted how the language of due process and the rule of law had become ghoulish caricatures in what amounts to a form of punishment. The law has been fashioned in an abusive way that sees a person being prosecuted for journalism in a hideously pioneering way. Despite the UK-US Extradition Treaty’s prohibition of extradition for political offences, the US prosecution was making much of the Espionage Act. “Espionage,” stated Robinson, “is a political offence.”
The list of abuses in the prosecution is biblically lengthy. Robinson gave her audience a summary of them: the fabrication of evidence via the Icelandic informant and convicted embezzler and paedophile Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson; the deliberate distortion of facts; the unlawful surveillance of Assange and his legal team and matters of medical treatment; “and the seizure of legally privileged material.”
Much ignorance about Assange and the implications of his persecution is no doubt willed. Robinson’s reference to Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, was apt. Here was a man initially sceptical about the torture complaint made by Assange and his team. He had been convinced by the libel against the publisher’s reputation. “But in 2019, he agreed to read our complaint. And what he read shocked him and forced him to confront his own prejudice.”
Melzer would subsequently observe that, in the course of two decades working “with victims of war, violence and political persecution, I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonise and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.”
The concern these days among the press darlings is not press freedoms closer to home, whether they be in Australia itself, or among its allies. The egregious misconduct by Russian forces in the Ukraine War or China’s human rights record in Xinjiang are what counts. Villainy lies elsewhere.
The obscene conduct by US authorities, whose officials contemplated abducting and murdering a publisher, is an inconvenient smudge of history best ignored for consumers of news down under. The Albanese government, which has continued to extol the glory of the AUKUS security pact and swoon at prospects of a globalised NATO, has shelved any “political solution” regarding Assange, at least in any public context. The US-Australian alliance is a shrine to worship at with reverential delusion, rather than question with informed scepticism. The WikiLeaks founder did, after all, spoil the party.
On a cheerier note, those listening to Robinson’s address reflected a healthy political awareness about the tribulations facing a fellow Australian citizen. The federal member for the seat of Kooyong, Dr. Monique Ryan, was present, as were Senators Peter Whish Wilson and David Shoebridge. As Ryan subsequently tweeted, “An Australian punished by foreign states for acts of journalism? Time for our government to act.”
Others were those who have been or continue to be targets of the national security state. The long-suffering figure and target of the Australian security establishment, Bernard Collaery, put in an appearance, as did David McBride, who awaits trial for having exposed alleged atrocities of Australian special service personnel in Afghanistan.
Such individuals have made vital, oxygenating contributions to democratic accountability, of which WikiLeaks stands proud. But any journalism that, as Robinson puts it, subjects “power to scrutiny, and holding it accountable,” is bound to incite the fury of the national security state. Regarding Assange, will that fury win out?
No Nuclear Waste Dump in SA” Motion passed South Australia Labor Conference Sat 22 Oct 2022
Federal ALP should start to act in accordance with the SA Labor State Conference “No Nuclear Waste Dump in SA” Motion passed Sat 22 Oct 2022
Motion full text:
TITLE: No Nuclear Waste Dump in South Australia
In 2020 the former Liberal Federal Government announced that a Nuclear Waste Facility would be established in Napandee, outside the town of Kimba, South Australia. This decision was made without prior community consultation and was met with mixed reception.
In response to criticisms of the consultation process the previous Liberal government gauged community support for the project with a survey. This survey was only available to ratepayers and all other community members were excluded. This meant that renters, transient people and most egregiously Native Title holders were excluded from even this meagre attempt at consultation. There is a strong concern that the facility would negatively impact the health of the surrounding environment, farming areas and the nearby human populations. The paltry consultative process has done little to assuage these concerns.
The Barngarla People have openly expressed their concern towards the facility and are currently fighting a legal battle to have this project abandoned on the basis of the poor planning and consultative processes. Despite the ongoing legal case the earthworks for this project have been approved and are set to go ahead regardless of the outcome. SA Labor Caucus supports a veto right for the Barngarla community on this facility.
This aligns with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, stating that no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of Indigenous Peoples without their free, prior and informed consent. More recently Premier Peter Malinauskas reaffirmed that the South Australian Labor party strongly opposes this facility and still supports the right of the Barngarla people to have veto powers. This sentiment is consistent with the current Federal Labor government’s commitment to reconciliation. Continuing with this project, including anciliary earthworks outside of current legal injunctions, despite the opposition of the Barngarla people undermines efforts toward reconciliation.
Motion: Therefore – SA Labor calls on the Federal Labor government to listen to the Barngarla people and ensure their voices are heard.
Just like the Liberal Party, the Australian Labor Party appoints a pro-nuclear stooge (Madeleine King) as Resources Minister.
New Resources Minister backs Kimba nuke dump, https://vanguard-cpaml.blogspot.com/2022/06/new-resources-minister-backs-kimba-nuke.html?fbclid=IwAR0KRK5heMT8KlqDSY7WetXJhJrwMTqeMDwaLrzET6p-SQYA29j87DAp03Q by Nick G, June 6, 2022
The ALP’s new Resources Minister Madeline King has wasted no time in showing her support for the proposed nuclear waste dump at Napandee, near Kimba on Eyre Peninsula.
In response to an appeal to herself and PM Albanese from the disenfranchised and ignored Barngarla traditional owners, King has today stated that the nuclear waste dump was “a step forward” in the management of nuclear waste.
Background
Napandee was one of three sites proposed by the former Coalition government for the storage of intermediate and low-level nuclear waste. Two, including Napandee, were at Kimba, whilst a third was at Wallerberdina in the Flinders Ranges.
The operation of any of the three sites in SA was illegal under SA law.
Under state legislation introduced by the Olsen Liberals and strengthened by Rann Labor, it is illegal to operate a nuclear waste facility in SA or to import or transport nuclear waste in SA.
The legislation is quite clear and states:
8—Prohibition against construction or operation of nuclear waste storage facility. A person must not construct or operate a nuclear waste storage facility. Maximum penalty: In the case of a natural person—$500 000 or imprisonment for 10 years. In the case of a body corporate—$5 000 000.
9—Prohibition against importation or transportation of nuclear waste for delivery to nuclear waste storage facility. A person must not— (a) bring nuclear waste into the State; or (b) transport nuclear waste within the State, for delivery to a nuclear waste storage facility in the State. Maximum penalty: In the case of a natural person—$500 000 or imprisonment for 10 years. In the case of a body corporate—$5 000 000.
This legislation came about largely through the actions of the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta (the Anangu women of Coober Pedy) who led a campaign against a 1998 Howard Government proposal for a nuclear waste dump in SA.
In 2004, following Howard’s conceding defeat on the issue, three of those women, Eileen Kampakuta Brown, Ivy Makinti Stewart and Angelina Wonga issued a statement that began: “People said that you can’t win against the Government. Just a few women. We just kept talking and telling them to get their ears out of their pockets and listen. We never said we were going to give up. Government has big money to buy their way out but we never gave up…money doesn’t win.”
In 2016, SA Labor Premier Jay Weatherill set up a Royal Commission into SA’s nuclear energy future which included a proposal for a dump for high level overseas nuclear waste. Massive protests were held and a “citizen’s jury” effectively knocked all talk of nuclear waste dumps on the head.
The resurrected SA site proposals were met with further protests. The Adnyamathanha peoples led opposition to the Wallaberdina site and were successful in winning the vote in a community consultation of people in the Flinders Ranges.
The initial Kimba sites were rejected by former Minister Josh Frydenberg in 2016 due to a lack of broad community support; however in 2017 his replacement Matt Canavan revived the proposal and accepted Napandee as the site for the dump.
Barngarla Pushed Aside
Approval for the Kimba site required broad community support through a community consultation. In preparation for a local vote, millions of dollars of federal funds were poured into Kimba for “social and economic development” during the consultation process. Community facilities were upgraded, footpaths and gutters put in, and the town generally given a face lift.
No definition of “broad community support” exists in legislation, but Canavan mentioned a figure of “around 65%”. Kimba Council defined those eligible to vote as ratepayers living within a prescribed area and excluded the Barngarla native title holders on the grounds that they lived in other towns on Eyra Peninsula.
The Barngarla appealed to the Federal Court which upheld the Council’s decision on the grounds that the Barngarla would be “too difficult to identify”. A vote was held, resulting in a 61.5% vote for the dump with a majority of 70 in favour.
The Barngarla commissioned the Australian Election Company to poll people identified as Barngarla by the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation and identified 209 eligible voters. There were no votes for the dump, and 89 against it.
Had those 89 Barngarla votes been included in the Kimba Council “consultation”, the outcome would have been a “no” vote carried by a small majority.
Labor Opposition facilitates Napandee declaration
In Opposition, Labor had the opportunity to block the declaration of the Kimba site. However, Madeline King did a deal with the Coalition in June 2019 that allowed new Resource Minister Keith Pitt to declare Napandee as the site for the dump. Under the original federal legislation, an aggrieved party to the declaration had no right of judicial appeal. King negotiated to provide the appeal right and withdrew Labor opposition to the declaration despite saying that Labor would not pass the bill unless traditional owners were comfortable with it.
They clearly were not, and neither did they have the resources to properly fund a judicial appeal, although that process has now begun in the Federal Court.
Who is Madeline King?
Madeline King is a right-wing Labor politician with close ties to the mining industry and pro-US lobbyists.
She is a commercial lawyer who immediately prior to entering parliament was the chief operating officer of the Perth USAsia Centre, a think tank based at the University of Western Australia.
King was a ministerial adviser to federal Labor MP Gary Gray from 2011 to 2012. Gray had been National Secretary of the ALP from 1993 to 2000, but resigned to take up a position with fossil fuel giant Woodside Petroleum. As its Director of Corporate Affairs, he was an executive at the time when, in 2004, Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer ordered the bugging of the East Timorese government during negotiations aimed at depriving the island nation of desperately needed revenue from underwater gas deposits. Gray was part of the Woodside negotiating team.
In 2007, Gray contested the WA seat of Brand and became part of Rudd’s Labor team. He retired in 2016 to take up a position with Mineral Resources, but was appointed Australian Ambassador to Ireland by Scott Morrison in 2020 in what some people have said was a move to prevent him having to testify in the case against Bernard Collaery and possibly incriminating Downer under cross-examination.
King’s employment as advisor to Gray has made her no stranger to the interplay between the corporate world and the benefits that accrue to Labor politicians who do their bidding.
No need for a Kimba dump
Opponents of the Kimba dump point out that much of the low-level waste (some of which needs to be stored for up to 300 years) is already safely stored at Woomera in SA. Some of it is stored at facilities at which it is produced. Medical nuclear waste accounts for only around 1% of the total and is short-lived and decays quite safely at the hospitals and treatment centres at which it is generated.
Intermediate level waste is generated at Lucas Heights in Sydney. Its decay time is far longer and needs to be kept from contact with humans for 10,000 years. A 2020 federal parliament inquiry confirmed that ANSTO, the operator of Lucas heights, has the ability to manage its waste onsite for “decades to come”. Ultimately, it will need to be stored in an underground repository. The government says this will take decades while the federal nuclear regulator says it could take a century to identify and construct.
If intermediate level waste is transported the 1700 kilometres from Lucas Heights to Kimba, it will be stored there as a temporary measure, in drums above the ground, pending its removal at some future stage to a permanent underground facility.
It therefore makes no sense to move these drums of intermediate level waste across the continent when there is storage capacity at Lucas Heights. Kimba is a temporary solution to a non-problem.
The issue of nuclear waste storage is one that must be referred to nation-wide community consultation. It is not a matter to be placed on the shoulders of this or that “remote” community to decided. We are all involved and we should all decide.
SA Unions made their position clear on March 15 when they unanimously supported a motion standing with the traditional owners. SA Unions Secretary Dale Beasley said “South Australian unions are completely united in their support of the Barngarla Traditional Owners and their opposition to the proposed nuclear waste site at Kimba”.
Let’s make this year’s Hiroshima Day (August 6) a day for concerted action against nuclear energy, nuclear waste dumps and nuclear-powered submarines.
Let’s keep alive the spirit of the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta.
Scandalous conflicts of interest in Australia’s advice from USA on nuclear submarines.
To an extraordinary degree in recent years, Australia has relied on high-priced American consultants to decide which ships and submarines to buy and how to manage strategic acquisition projects. In addition to the six retired U.S. admirals, the government of Australia has hired three former civilian U.S. Navy leaders and three U.S. shipbuilding executives.
RETIRED U.S. ADMIRALS ADVISE AUSTRALIA ON DEAL FOR NUCLEAR SUBMARINES,
Washington Post, By Craig Whitlock and Nate Jones 19 Oct 22, Since 2015, Australia has hired the admirals and other former Navy officials as high-dollar consultants on shipbuilding,
Two retired U.S. admirals and three former U.S. Navy civilian leaders are playing critical but secretive roles as paid advisers to the government of Australia during its negotiations to acquire top-secret nuclear submarine technology from the United States and Britain.
The Americans are among a group of former U.S. Navy officials whom the Australian government has hired as high-dollar consultants to help transform its fleet of ships and submarines, receiving contracts worth as much as $800,000 a person, documents show.
All told, six retired U.S. admirals have worked for the Australian government since 2015, including one who served for two years as Australia’s deputy secretary of defense. In addition, a former U.S. secretary of the Navy has been a paid adviser to three successive Australian prime ministers.
A Washington Post investigation found that the former U.S. Navy officials have benefited financially from a tangle of overlapping interests in their work for a longtime ally of the United States. Some of the retired admirals have worked for the Australian government while simultaneously consulting for U.S. shipbuilders and the U.S. Navy, including on classified programs.
One of the six retired U.S. admirals had to resign this year as a part-time submarine consultant to the Australian government because of a potential conflict of interest over his full-time job as board chairman of a U.S. company that builds nuclear-powered subs.
Australia has leaned heavily on former U.S. Navy leaders for advice during its years-long push to upgrade its submarine fleet, a seesaw effort that has rattled long-standing alliances and remains beset by uncertainty. After abruptly canceling a pact with France last year, Australia is now trying to finalize a deal with the United States and Britain to build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines that could cost an estimated $72 billion to $106 billion, when adjusted for inflation over the length of the program.1
The outcome will have global ramifications and could alter the military balance of power among the United States, its allies and China. Helping the Australians build nuclear-powered submarines would enhance U.S. national security in Asia overall but could strain U.S. shipyards and delay the Pentagon’s own plans to add more subs to its fleet, according to U.S. military officials and defense analysts.
The Australian government has kept details of the Americans’ advice confidential. The Post was forced to sue the U.S. Navy and State Department under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain documents that shed light on the admirals’ involvement.
Under federal law, retired U.S. military personnel as well as reservists must obtain approval from the Pentagon and the State Department before they can accept money or jobs from foreign powers. The law applies to retirees — generally those who served at least 20 years in uniform — because they can be recalled to active duty. Records show that each of the six retired admirals followed the rules and received U.S. authorization to work for the government of Australia.
Between 2015 and 2021, the Navy received 95 applications from retirees to work for foreign governments — and approved every one, according to the documents that The Post obtained under FOIA. Government lawyers fought the release of the records, arguing that they were of little public interest and that disclosing basic details would violate the retirees’ privacy
For three of the retired admirals on Australia’s payroll, the U.S. Navy spent less than a week reviewing their paperwork before granting permission, the documents show. Two of the admirals applied to work for the Australians within one month of their retirement from the military.
Officials at the White House and the U.S. Navy declined to comment for this article.
Compared with the U.S. Navy, which has about 290 deployable ships and submarines, Australia’s fleet is small, with only 43 vessels. But Australia’s strategic importance looms large because of its proximity to the Indian and Pacific oceans, as well as the world’s busiest shipping lanes, near the contested waters of the South China Sea.
If Australia acquires nuclear subs, it will become the seventh country to do so. With only 26 million people, Australia would be by far the least populous member of the club.
To an extraordinary degree in recent years, Australia has relied on high-priced American consultants to decide which ships and submarines to buy and how to manage strategic acquisition projects. In addition to the six retired U.S. admirals, the government of Australia has hired three former civilian U.S. Navy leaders and three U.S. shipbuilding executives.
Since 2015, those Americans have received consulting deals worth about $10 million combined, according to Australian contracting records posted online.
The six retired U.S. admirals who have worked for the Australian government declined to be interviewed or did not respond to requests for comment.
Some Australian lawmakers and defense analysts have expressed doubts about whether the U.S. consultants have been worth the expense. The Americans’ recommendations have influenced a series of ill-fated decisions by Australian officials that could delay the arrival of any new submarines until 2040, almost a decade later than planned.
“We were paying a lot of money [for advice] and it wasn’t obvious to me that we were getting value for money,” said Rex Patrick, a former member of the Australian Senate who has criticized the government’s submarine acquisition plans.
$6.8 million for advice on an aging fleet
In September 2021, after years of futile attempts to replace its aging fleet of six submarines, the government of Australia announced two decisions that surprised the world.
First, it abruptly canceled a long-standing $66 billion agreement to buy a dozen French diesel-powered subs. Then it revealed it had reached a historic accord instead to acquire nuclear propulsion technology for submarines from the United States and Britain……………………………………………….
As Australia negotiates with the United States, it is paying for expert advice from two people who once served in American uniforms: retired U.S. admirals William Hilarides and Thomas Eccles……………………………………….
The influx of American shipbuilding consultants in Australia began eight years ago…………………………………………………………………………………..
The Australian government created additional naval advisory committees — and stocked them with Americans.
In October 2016, Australian officials announced a new Naval Shipbuilding Advisory Board with Winter, the former Navy secretary, serving as the chairman. He was joined by three retired admirals: Eccles, Hilarides and Sullivan.13………………………………………
Marcus Hellyer, a senior defense analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Canberra, said the advisory panels could have used more European perspectives to balance out those of the Americans. Unlike the U.S. Navy, he noted, the Australian navy does not design its own ships from scratch and is accustomed to relying on foreign models.
“It’s a very different kettle of fish to the U.S. system,” he said.
A carousel of consultants
By 2019, Australia’s landmark submarine deal with France appeared to be in jeopardy. Delays plagued the design phase. Projected costs rose. Doubts spread about whether the Shortfin Barracudas, which the Australians dubbed their Attack class of subs, would be capable of deterring China’s more imposing undersea fleet.
The American carousel of hired help continued to spin. Sullivan, the retired vice admiral, left the shipbuilding advisory board in 2019. That same year, Johnson resigned as Australia’s deputy defense secretary. But the Australian government added three more U.S. civilian consultants to its advisory panels.
Australian lawmakers grew impatient with the submarine program’s delays and irritated by the Australian government’s unwillingness to let its highly paid U.S. advisers answer questions.
The American carousel of hired help continued to spin. Sullivan, the retired vice admiral, left the shipbuilding advisory board in 2019. That same year, Johnson resigned as Australia’s deputy defense secretary. But the Australian government added three more U.S. civilian consultants to its advisory panels.
Australian lawmakers grew impatient with the submarine program’s delays and irritated by the Australian government’s unwillingness to let its highly paid U.S. advisers answer questions.
‘It’s confidential’
In June 2021, worried about the fate of the submarine agreement with France, the Australian Senate insisted on hearing directly from Hilarides and senior Australian defense officials.
Lawmakers wanted answers: Had the American consultants urged the Australian government to consider modifying, or even killing, the Attack-class submarine deal?
Testifying remotely from the United States, Hilarides was as tight-lipped as Winter had been.
“Because that advice is used to support government decision-making, it’s confidential,” Hilarides said.
Three months later, the Australian government canceled the submarine contract with the French. It also announced a new three-way defense alliance with the United States and Britain, including an agreement to admit Australia to the exclusive club of nations with nuclear-powered submarines.
Only four other countries — China, Russia, France and India — operate nuclear subs. Brazil is trying to develop nuclear reactors for submarines, but its progress has been slow.
Left undecided was whether Australia would buy U.S. or British nuclear subs, and where they would be built. But defense analysts predicted the United States would probably win out.
Australian lawmakers soon began to raise questions about the American consultants and their connections to the U.S. submarine industry.
Donald, the retired four-star admiral on Australia’s Submarine Advisory Committee, has also served as chairman of the board of Huntington Ingalls Industries since 2020. The defense contractor, based in Newport News, Va., is the maker of Virginia-class submarines, the same model that the government of Australia was now thinking about buying.
At a parliamentary hearing in October 2021, a senior Australian defense official acknowledged that Donald’s role with Huntington presented a potential conflict of interest. But the official said the Australian government and Donald hadn’t yet decided if it was necessary for him to resign as a consultant.
Donald remained on the committee for six more months. In his written response to questions, Donald said he resigned in April to avoid any conflicts after “it became evident” his committee “would need to become involved in providing independent critical assessment” on acquiring nuclear-powered subs.
But Australia is still paying other Americans for advice on how to negotiate with the U.S. government.
Winter, the former U.S. Navy secretary, registered with the U.S. Justice Department in September 2021 as a foreign lobbyist working for the Australian prime minister’s office. In his disclosure form, Winter said he would be paid $6,000 a day, plus expenses, to support Australia during its nuclear submarine talks with Washington.15………………………………………………………
Australia will almost certainly have to buy its first nuclear subs off American or British production lines.
U.S. Navy and British Royal Navy officials, however, say their shipyards are booked solid making their own submarines. The only way to squeeze in orders from Australia would be to spend billions expanding U.S. or British shipyards.
Hellyer, the Australian defense analyst, said it is hard to envision a scenario under which Australia would receive its first nuclear submarine before 2040. With the Collins-class vessels scheduled for retirement a decade from now, that could leave Australia without submarines for eight years.
“I can’t really see what the way forward is at the moment,” he said. “The whole thing has been completely disastrous.”
About this story
Photos used in the card illustrations from Department of Defense.
Editing by David Fallis and Sarah Childress. Research by Alice Crites. Copy editing by Martha Murdock and Christopher Rickett. Photo editing by Robert Miller and Wendy Galietta. Video editing by Jason Aldag. Design and development by Frank Hulley-Jones, Stephanie Hays and Talia Trackim. Design editing by Christian Font and Matt Callahan. Project management by Wendy Galietta. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/australia-nuclear-submarines-us-admirals/?itid=ap_craigwhitlock
Concerns in outback SA grow as federal government plans to store defence waste at planned Kimba nuclear dump
ABC By Sara Tomevska, 18 Oct 22,
The federal government is facing questions over how it will dispose of highly-radioactive waste produced by Australia’s future nuclear-powered submarine fleet, as concerns about a controversial nuclear dump in outback South Australia grow.
Key points:
- The federal government chose a site near Kimba for its nuclear waste site in 2021
- Locals are now concerned high-level nuclear defence waste could be stored at the site
- There are two legal challenges underway to block the site from going ahead
After 40 years of searching, the federal government last year announced it had chosen Napandee, a 211-hectare property near the town of Kimba, to consolidate Australia’s low-and-intermediate nuclear waste……….
last June, the federal parliament passed a range of amendments to the National Radioactive Waste Management Act.
One of the changes allows defence waste to be stored at the site too.
Fourth generation wheat farmer Terry Schmucker has long opposed the dump, fearing the site could lead to contamination.
“As a farmer have become connected to the land and I’ve come to realise how precious topsoil and agricultural land are,” he said.
He said the changes to legislation had added to his anxiety. “I always expected that the dump was the thin end of the wedge … but it’s disappointing that the government hasn’t come straight out and said ‘this is how it is’,” he said.
A Department of Defence spokesperson said Australia’s defence programs already generated a “range of low-level radioactive waste” which was currently stored in two temporary facilities.
In September 2021, three months after the amendment bill passed through parliament, former Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Australia would acquire nuclear-powered submarines as part of the AUKUS defence pact.
Mr Schmucker said the deal raised “serious questions” about how and where the federal government would dispose of high-level radioactive waste generated by the submarines.
“I think it’s going to come here, that’s just the way it is,” he said.
“If the waste site is set up at Kimba, there’s nothing to stop [the government] from bringing even worse stuff than what’s going to come out of the submarines and putting it here in agricultural land.”
Could submarine waste really end up in Kimba?
The legislation explicitly prevents high-level radioactive waste or spent nuclear fuel — which is what the submarines would produce — from being dumped at the Napandee site.
Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation (BDAC) chairman Jason Bilney said he was concerned that could be changed with the stroke of a pen.
“We all know what the government is like, the government can change that at any given time and try and slip it through,” he said.
Former senator and submariner Rex Patrick was part of the parliament that passed the legislation, and said he believed it was unlikely that protection would ever be removed.
“The parliament that passed the facility were of the clear understanding that high-level material would not be stored at the site,” he said.
“Now, of course, [legislation] can be changed by a future parliament. And so, there is a risk there. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-18/kimba-dump-controversy-continues/101537270?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=facebook&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web&fbclid=IwAR2plCSj2ctHNmhZEHJTvacBN5nsIb-LVQD-pyhMIcnEDkQh0OMdFOCp-Ec
The previous Liberal government lied about its Kimba nuclear waste dump plan, but be wary of the new Labor government, too.
I strongly suggest that particularly the Barngarla but the general Kimba community should be extremely cautious of the so- called support by Malinauskas and Maher for the opposition to the waste facility at Kimba as their demands for the nuclear powered submarine fleet to be built or just based in South Australia will generate significant volumes of nuclear waste which will need Kimba its storage and disposal.
Peter Remta, 17 October, While Minister Madeleine King began with great promise as a knowledgable and realistic minister for resources unlike her ministerial predecessor I have been singularly disappointed by her comments in various media outlets including in particular the Saturday’s edition of The Guardian
To say that she is allowing the Barngarla litigation to run its course is ludicrous and none of what she says can in any way justify the continued planning for the facility at Kimba
In view of this I have arranged for the ARTEMIS peer review service of IAEA to undertake a comparative study of the Kimba proposal to other suggested facilities.
What is more they will undoubtedly embarrass the government by showing up its ignorance and incompetence in the realm of nuclear waste which has previously been disguised by a barrage of
disingenuous comments and information.
I am aware that one person of interest in this review is to be Pitt as the former minister since he has shown to have little if any real knowledge of nuclear issues but was happy to disseminate incorrect and even untrue information for presumably his self importance.
However in the meantime it is necessary to ensure that the federal government will grant unfettered entry to Australia for both the ARTEMIS team and the UNHRC special rapporteurs since they have already been stopped on two occasions
Finally I strongly suggest that particularly the Barngarla but the general Kimba community should be extremely cautious of the so- called support by Malinauskas and Maher for the opposition to the waste facility at Kimba as their demands for the nuclear powered submarine fleet to be built or just based in South Australia will generate significant volumes of nuclear waste which will need Kimba its storage and disposal.
Perhaps someone should question him and Maher about their reluctance for an intervention by the State in such a significant national and international issue.
Opponents of nuclear waste facility march as one in Port Augusta to protest.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-17/opponents-of-nuclear-waste-facility-march-in-port-augusta/101541898?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=link&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web&fbclid=IwAR2tHJX04BCnlWAkP9YKEhyTBs2_nm5OLroG0jA5KDZl4OhOB8SFyIiTMh0 ABC North and West SA / By Bethanie Alderson and Nicholas Ward, 17 Oct 22
More than 100 opponents of a plan to build a national nuclear waste facility on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia have rallied in Port Augusta.
Key points:
- Scores of people have marched to protest a nuclear waste facility being built in Kimba
- Traditional owners say they were never consulted about the plans by the federal government
- The government has spent almost $10 million on legal fees in support for the facility
Barngarla traditional owners, farmers and community members marched from Port Augusta’s wharf to Gladstone Square to protest the federal government’s proposal to build a nuclear waste site near Kimba.
The chair of the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation (BDAC), Jason Bilney, said if the new government was serious about supporting an Indigenous
voice to parliament, it should listen to their argument.
“It took us 21 years to win our native title; we’ll fight it for another 21 or 25 years if we have to,” he said..
“We are very strong and very passionate about preserving our culture and our heritage as well as protecting our land.
“We don’t want nuclear waste on our country.”
The federal government confirmed detailed investigation work was about to start at the site.
Mr Bilney insisted Barngarla people were never consulted about the plan and found themselves excluded from a community vote.
“Within six months of winning our native title and fighting for 21 years in the Federal Court to get a determination to then be told there’s a nuclear waste dump being built on our country — we had to go out of our way as Barngarla and contact the government,” he said.
“The government’s come out and announced they’ll commit to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
“How can they on one hand say that and then on the other hand break the heart of the First Nations people?”
The Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn a mining exploration company’s authorisation to drill at Lake Torrens means Mr Bilney is confident that Barngarla will succeed again.
“It was a very proud moment, and we know that they’re going to appeal it but winning one case for judicial review puts us in a good position for the federal case with the nuclear waste dump,” he said.
‘Huge’ legal spend
Greens Senator Barbara Pocock revealed the federal government had spent almost $9,905,737 on legal fees for the waste facility and the Australian Radioactive Waste Agency.
“Ten million dollars is a huge, unnecessary legal spend, much of which has focused on fighting local Kimba residents and a vulnerable First Nations community,” Senator Pocock said.
Since litigation began in December 2021, the government has spent $607,613 directly against BDAC and a further $247,806 on in-house legal salaries.
The Barngarla people spent approximately $124,000 on legal fees over the same period.
“This mega-spend is immoral. It is wasteful, and it is against the spirit of the Uluru statement.”
“We need to find a solution to dispose of our own nuclear waste, but it needs to be safe, it needs to be long term and it needs to not be in the middle of our clean green agricultural land.”
Fight for sacred site
Barngarla elder Linda Dare says Kimba is a site of great significance to traditional owners, and especially for women.
“We have the waters there, the lakes there … and if this goes on it’s actually going to affect our waterways all the way to the Flinders and surrounding areas,” she said.
“It’s very significant because along the way we’ve lost a lot of family members that have been fighting for native title for years when we were little.”
“We know we can fight this, and we know we’ve got the backing of every Indigenous tribe in Australia because it affects everybody in South Australia if there’s any damage.”
Ms Dare and Aunty Dawn Taylor met with Premier Peter Malinauskas and Aboriginal Affairs Minister Kyam Maher during the state government’s country cabinet forum in Port Pirie.
Mr Malinauskas said while the state government did not have the power to stop the planned facility, he would express his support for the Barngarla people to have the right to veto to the federal Labor government.
Mr Bilney believes the Barngarla community needs the whole country to support them in their fight.
“The more support we have locally, state and federally the stronger we become as one,” he said.
70 years since Operation Hurricane: the shameful history of British nuclear tests in Australia
Red Flag, by Nick Everett, Sunday, 16 October 2022
At 9.30am on 3 October 1952, a mushroom cloud billowed up above the Monte Bello Islands, 130 kilometres off the coast of Western Australia. The next day, the West Australian reported: “At first deep pink, it quickly changed to mauve in the centre, with pink towards the outside and brilliantly white turbulent edges. Within two minutes the cloud, which was still like a giant cauliflower, was 10,000 feet [three kilometres] high”.
Derek Hickman, a royal engineer who witnessed the blast aboard guard ship HMS Zeebrugge, told the Mirror: “We had no protective clothing … They ordered us to muster on deck and turn our backs. We put our hands over our eyes and they counted down over the tannoy [loudspeaker]. There was a sharp flash, and I could see the bones in my hands like an X-ray. Then the sound and the wind, and they told us to turn and face it. The bomb was in the hull of a 1,450-ton warship and all that was left of her were a few fist-sized pieces of metal that fell like rain, and the shape of the frigate scorched on the seabed.”
Operation Hurricane was, up until that moment, a closely guarded secret. ……………………….
Throughout 1946, negotiations took place between the British and Australian governments, culminating in an agreement to establish a 480-kilometre rocket range extending northwest from Mount Eba (later moved to Woomera) in outback South Australia.
On 22 November 1946, Defence Minister John Dedman informed parliament of cabinet’s decision to establish the rocket range. Peter Morton, author of Fire Across the Desert: Woomera and the Anglo-Australian Joint Project 1946–1980, explains that Dedman reiterated claims made in a report by British army officer John Fullerton Evetts that related to the original proposed site at the more remote location of Mount Eba, not Woomera. Dedman told parliament that Australia was the only suitable landmass in the Commonwealth for such testing, the designated area was largely uninhabited and that impacts on the Aboriginal population in the Central Aboriginal Reserves would be negligible. According to Morton, there were approximately 1800 Aboriginal people living on the reserves at the time. The Committee on Guided Projectiles would immediately begin consultations with the director of Native Affairs and other authorities, Dedman told parliament.
Dedman’s announcement ignited fierce opposition. In her book Different White People: Radical Activism for Aboriginal Rights 1946-1972, Deborah Wilson describes the independent Labor member for Bourke, Doris Blackburn, spearheading a peace movement strongly supported by the Australian Communist Party. She published her speeches in the CPA newspaper, Tribune. Blackburn was the widow of lawyer and parliamentarian Maurice Blackburn, whose left-wing views resulted in his expulsion from the ALP.
Blackburn insisted that the rocket range amounted to a grave injustice against a “voiceless minority”, Australia’s First Nations people. In March 1947, medical practitioner Charles Duguid told a 1300-strong Rocket Range Protest Committee meeting in Melbourne that he was appalled by the government’s blatant “disregard” for the rights of Aboriginal people. According to a Tribune report, he asked those present: “Shot and poisoned as they were in the early days, neglected and despised more lately, will most of our Aborigines [sic] now be finally sacrificed and hurried to extinction by sudden contact with the mad demands of twentieth century militarism?”
Dedman, supported by the Menzies-led opposition, dismissed concerns expressed by Duguid and anthropologist Donald Thompson that contact between military personnel and Aboriginal people living in the military zone would have devastating consequences for their traditional way of life. Deploying assimilation arguments, Dedman insisted that contact between military personnel and “natives” in the area would simply accelerate an inevitable process of detribalisation.
Meanwhile, Liberal and Country Party politicians railed against Duguid and other opponents of the project, labelling them dupes of communism with a lax attitude to the nation’s security, according to Wilson. They called on the Chifley government to follow the example of the Canadian royal commission established to weed out alleged communist spies in public sector employment…………….
In June 1947, federal parliament rushed through the Approved Defence Projects Protection Bill, a gag tool preventing critical commentary about the government’s defence policy. Transgressors were threatened with fines of up to £5,000 or a 12-month prison sentence.
Under the cover of “national security”, federal bans were imposed on union officials visiting the Woomera rocket range site, now a no-go area for anyone other than sanctioned military personnel. Anti-communist fearmongering helped set the scene for the Chifley government’s establishment of a new and powerful security organisation, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), in 1949.
In mid-1947, 446 kilometres north of Adelaide, the Woomera township was swiftly constructed on the traditional lands of the Kokatha people. By mid-1950, its population had grown to 3,500 and, over the following decade, doubled to 7,000. Roads gouged through Aboriginal country. Electricity and telegraph lines soon followed, connecting the military base with centres of political power.
The nature of the missile testing remained a top secret to all but those firmly ensconced within the upper echelons of the Department of Defence. However, rumours of a nuclear testing program abounded. The detonation of a 25-kiloton nuclear weapon off the Monte Bello Islands made Britain’s nuclear ambitions, and the Australian government’s complicity, visible for the world.
In the film Australian Atomic Confessions, witness May Torres, a Gooniyandi woman living at Jubilee Downs in the Kimberley, described observing a cloudy haze that remained in the sky for four or five days. At the time she did not know that it carried radioactive particles that were to contribute to cancer and an early death for many of her community, including her husband, in the early 1960s.
Another witness, Royal Australian Air Force pilot Barry Neale, described aircraft operating out of Townsville identifying nuclear particles in the air three days after the detonation. Two days later, New Zealand Air Force aircraft similarly observed radioactive particles that had emanated from Operation Hurricane. Still today, signs on the Monte Bello islands warn visitors about the dangers of elevated radiation levels.
In October 1953, two nuclear tests (Operation Totem) took place at Emu Field, 500 kilometres northwest of Woomera. In May and June 1956, nuclear testing returned to the Monte Bello Islands. Operation Mosaic detonated the largest ever nuclear device in Australia: a 60-kiloton weapon four times as powerful as that which had destroyed Hiroshima.
My aunt was among the children who witnessed the Monte Bello explosion from the jetty in the Pilbara town of Roebourne. The spectacle left her and her siblings covered in ash, oblivious to the toxicity of the fallout they were exposed to.
Meanwhile, west of Woomera, Aboriginal people were being relocated from their traditional lands. In preparation for Operation Buffalo, a series of four nuclear tests at the Maralinga Testing Ground, an 1,100 square kilometre area was excised from the Laverton-Warburton reserve and declared a no-go area.
Two patrol officers, William MacDougal and Robert (Bob) Macaulay, were given the nearly impossible task of keeping Aboriginal people out of the no-go area. The pair’s reports to the range superintendent were frequently censored, according to Morton.
In December 1956, a Western Australian parliamentary select committee, led by Liberal MLA William Grayden, visited the Laverton-Warburton Ranges. The select committee’s report (the Grayden Report) identified that displaced Aboriginal people suffered from malnutrition, blindness, unsanitary conditions, inadequate food and water sources, and brutal exploitation by pastoral interests.
News reports in the Murdoch-owned Adelaide News dismissed the committee’s findings, insisting that the claims could not be substantiated. Responding to the Murdoch media whitewash, Tribune reported on 9 January 1957 that the committee had “ripped aside the screen that has veiled the cruel plight to which our [g]overnments condemn Australian Aborigines”.
Tribune asserted that “huge areas of the most favourable land are being taken from [Aboriginal] reserves and provided for mining interests, atomic and guided missile grounds, and other purposes”.
A subsequent Tribune article reported a week later on the observations of Pastor Doug Nicholls, who accompanied the West Australian minister for native welfare, John Brady, on a tour of the Warburton-Laverton district. According to Tribune:
“Pastor Nicholls said that at Giles weather station, deep in the heart of the best hunting grounds in the Warburton reserve—a region that the Government had stolen as part of the Woomera range—the white people lived like kings, and the Aboriginal people worse than paupers … The Commonwealth had spent a fortune on Woomera, but has not even supplied a well for the Aboriginals.”
The Grayden Report deeply shocked the public. A film documentary produced by Grayden and Nicholls, Their Darkest Hour, further exposed these crimes. Wilson describes scenes from the film:
“Images of malnourished, sick and poverty-stricken Aboriginal people bombard the viewer. A mother’s arm has rotted off with yaws. A blind man with one leg hobbles grotesquely on an artificial leg stuffed with furs and bandaged into an elephant-like stump. Malnourished children with huge swollen bellies stare blankly at the camera. A baby lies deathlike beside a mother too weak to walk. A sickening close-up of a toddler who fell into a fire reveals cooked flesh covered with flies. Skeletal remains of a man, dead from thirst, lie beside a dried-up waterhole. As the film concludes, his body is buried in an unmarked grave.”
The detrimental impact of British nuclear testing in Australia wasn’t limited to traditional Aboriginal people. It also exposed thousands of military personnel and their families to nuclear radiation, survivors still feeling the effects seven decades on, according to submissions received by the 1985 McClelland Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia.
In 2001, a group of Melbourne scientists made a startling discovery: thousands of jars of ashed human bone that all contained strontium 90, a by-product of nuclear testing that can cause bone cancer and leukaemia. All had been collected from autopsies without the consent of family members, according to a 2002 report by the Australian Health Ethics Committee. This officially sanctioned “body-snatching” provided vital, and until then hidden, evidence of radioactive contamination with widespread effects on human health.
In the mid-1950s, CSIRO scientist Hedley Marston was tasked by the Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee (AWTSC) with studying the radioactive iodine uptake in sheep and cattle as part of wider effort to monitor the biological effects of radiation caused by atomic-bomb testing in Australia. Marston argued that radioactive iodine found in the thyroids of animals indicated the presence of radioactive strontium in the food chain, which would endanger the health of humans, particularly children. Marston’s discovery put him in conflict with the AWTSC, who denied the tests resulted in significant radioactive contamination.
According to the Australian Health Ethics Committee, between 1957 and 1978, the AWTSC and its successor, the Australian Ionising Radiation Committee, covertly took samples of bones from 22,000 human remains during autopsy to test for the presence of strontium 90. The surviving samples located in 2001 suggested that radioactive contamination was far more widespread than previously admitted.
The winding down of the British nuclear testing program in Australia in 1953 did not bring an end to the Australian government’s role in the global nuclear industry. Since 1954, Australian uranium has supplied nuclear reactors around the world, including to the Fukushima reactor in Japan, which in 2011 was the site of the most severe nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown. Australia has also committed to acquiring nuclear-powered submarines to better pursue its imperial interests, and those of its allies, in the Asia-Pacific. And the nuclear industry is trying to promote itself as a viable alternative to polluting fossil fuel industries.
Its shameful history, and the dire threat it poses to humanity, must not be forgotten. https://redflag.org.au/article/70-years-operation-hurricane-shameful-history-british-nuclear-tests-australia
Most of Australia’s nuclear waste comes from Lucas Heights – should it stay there?
Opponents of proposed dump site at Kimba in South Australia say it would be safer to keep the waste where it mostly is
Guardian. Tory Shepherd, 17 Oct 22.
he vast majority of Australia’s future radioactive waste will be produced by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (Ansto) Lucas Heights facility in Sydney, the latest figures show.
For 40 years governments have pushed for a national radioactive waste storage facility, often claiming it is because currently waste is held at more than 100 sites across the country.
But the latest statistics show almost all of it is in that one facility.
A new inventory of Australia’s radioactive waste, published in September by the Australian Radioactive Waste Agency, shows a larger than expected increase in waste in the future.
Australia’s waste is either low level (LLW), which is mainly from laboratories, or intermediate level (ILW), which is from nuclear medicine. ILW emits more radiation and requires more shielding.
There are many variable factors, but the report notes that “the estimated volumes of Ansto’s future LLW and ILW are substantially greater than previously reported”. It estimates the levels of LLW in 100 years and ILW in 50 years.
For LLW, that is a change in how future levels are measured. For ILW, it was a matter of having to revise existing estimates………………………..
Ansto’s waste is estimated to make up 12,972 cubic metres of the country’s 13,287 cubic metres LLW (97.6%) in the next 100 years, and 3,753 cubic metres of the country’s 3,887 cubic metres ILW (96.8%).
Dave Sweeney, the nuclear free campaigner from the Australian Conservation Foundation, is opposed to the federal government’s plan to move the country’s waste to a single facility near Kimba in South Australia.
He says it should stay where it (mostly) is.
“It’s Ansto’s waste facility,” he says. “Ansto’s 97% of intermediate and low level waste. It’s not a national facility. It’s Ansto’s facility.
“It’s absolutely striking.”
Sweeney says Ansto has the capacity to store the waste indefinitely, especially considering a recent $60m investment to expand its storage capacity.
The local Aboriginal people, the Barngarla people, are also opposed to the site being on their traditional lands.
The South Australian Greens senator Barbara Pocock says there is “no pressing problem” with waste storage, so they may as well leave it where it is.
“They’re better off leaving it safely,” she says, “well protected, with all the right safeguards in place, than to pull it out and have a double-handling non-solution.”
Pocock is also concerned about the transport of waste from Lucas Heights and other facilities to the planned South Australian site.
“There hasn’t been a proper discussion in the SA community on the views of the transport of nuclear waste through our communities,” she says.
An Ansto spokesperson says having a single facility is “in line with international best practice”, and moving the waste is in line with commitments given to the Lucas Heights community………………….. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/17/most-of-australias-nuclear-waste-comes-from-lucas-heights-should-it-stay-there
Australia’s nuclear waste is growing as battle over dump site heats up
Government says nuclear waste cannot continue to build up and it will work with traditional custodians of proposed Kimba site
Guardian Tory Shepherd 14 Oct 22,
Australia is accumulating more intermediate-level nuclear waste than previously thought, a new inventory has found, as the battle over a nuclear waste dump heats up.
After 40 years of different governments talking about a national nuclear waste facility, the Morrison government chose a site near the town of Kimba in South Australia. But the local Barngarla people are united against the plan, and have vowed to keep fighting to stop it happening.
The federal resources minister, Madeleine King, said the waste “cannot continue to build up” and she would continue to work with the Barngarla people to protect the cultural heritage of the site and deliver economic benefit to the traditional custodians.
Opponents of the site hope the new Labor government will be more likely to abandon the plan, but King said the government was committed to “progressing the facility”……………..
The Australian Radioactive Waste Agency (ARWA) recently updated its inventory of waste, to inform the development of the Kimba facility. It found there was 2,061 cubic metres of intermediate-level waste in 2021, compared to 1,771 cubic metres in 2018. And it projects 4,377 cubic metres in the next 50 years, compared to 3,734 cubic metres projected in 2018.
ARWA notes that more waste categories and holders were included in 2021, increasing the current levels of waste, and that estimates for future years were revised.
Currently waste is stored in more than 100 places around the nation, but most of it is held at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (Ansto) facilities in Lucas Heights, Sydney.
The Australian Conservation Foundation and others argue that Ansto should be expanded to become the national storage site.
The chief executive of Arwa, Sam Usher, wrote in the report that Kimba would be used to dispose of Australia’s LLW, and to hold ILW temporarily while a permanent solution was found.
“To ensure the facility has capacity to house Australia’s current and future waste holdings, ARWA has undertaken extensive work to provide an updated national inventory of radioactive waste,” he wrote.
The Kimba site was announced after an Australian Electoral Commission ballot found the majority of the people in the council area were in favour. However, that ballot did not include Aboriginal people who count the area as part of their traditional lands.
The Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation chair, Jason Bilney, said his people were never consulted, and they are unanimously opposed.
“We were excluded,” he said. “Unanimously, we do not want it on our country.
“We’ll keep fighting this.”
Bilney said his people were organising a rally in Port Augusta on Saturday to remind people what is happening. He said his concern was that the site would start accepting waste from outside Australia. He also said it made more sense for the Lucas Heights facility to expand into waste storage, because the proposed Kimba site was only meant to be temporary storage for ILW anyway, with a permanent site yet to be determined.
“Why would you keep kicking the can down the road?” he said.
There was an ongoing court process with Barngarla people fighting for access to government documents, and King said she would not “pre-empt” the outcome of that. She said nuclear medicine, which most Australians benefit from at some point, produced radioactive waste…………
“While there is no native title on the site, the government is committed to progressing the facility in a way that protects cultural heritage and delivers economic benefit to the traditional custodians.”
The site is freehold, but on the traditional lands of the Barngarla.
Dave Sweeney, the ACF’s nuclear free campaigner, said there was room at Lucas Heights, and pointed to $60m awarded to Ansto in 2021 to expand its storage.
“That’s approved,” he said. “It’s been through the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (Arpansa).”
“Arpansa has said that it’s consistent with international best practice and that means that material can be safely stored there for decades to come. So they’ve got the capacity, they’re actually growing the capacity.”
The South Australian Labor premier, Peter Malinauskas, supports the Barngarla people, and says he will try to influence the federal Labor government. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/14/australias-nuclear-waste-is-growing-as-battle-over-dump-site-heats-up?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
A conversation with Paul Keating: Australia’s strategic interests, alliances and standing up for ourselves
Stability in Asia can no longer be imposed by a non Asian power, and least of all by direct application of US military power.
On Taiwan, Keating said again that it is not a vital interest for Australia. ‘Why would we want to be part of a US defeat over Taiwan?’.
https://johnmenadue.com/a-conversation-with-paul-keating-australias-strategic-interests-alliances-and-standing-up-for-itself/ By John Menadue, Oct 14, 2022,
Not many were given a continent, says Keating on the challenges and opportunities that Australia faces. We have to stop ignoring the realities of the region in which we are positioned.
More than 4,000 people from Australia and around the world tuned in to A Conversation with Paul Keating, held by La Trobe University’s Ideas and Society Program. The online discussion between former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, and James Curran, the Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney and author of Australia’s China Odyssey, uncovered issues fundamental to the future of Australia, such as our relations with China and the United States.
Key to the discussion was the negative impact of our current view of China and the region in which Australia is positioned. Ignoring the historical elements that underpin the issues of the 21st century including the importance of identity and culture, puts Australia in a position of having to make choices.
The rise of China and the escalating tensions driven by the US have been front and centre. Australia can no longer ignore the geopolitical forces in our region and decision makers need to make a stand against geo strategic enmeshment with the USA and AUKUS, akin to outsourcing our sovereignty, security and strategic relationships. This leaves Australia isolated.
Opening the conversation with the fall of Singapore 80 years ago, Keating reminded the audience that it was WWll that dragged Australia into Asia, showing us that we could not depend on the UK.
He reminded us of Wilson and Roosevelt and the multi-polar world that each envisaged through the League of Nations and the United Nations and the dream to end colonialism. The end of the Cold War saw the US declaring victory. What followed was the failure of the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations who instilled a unipolar view of the world that had no place for China and Russia.
Instead of settling the world’s issues with war and then afterwards asking for conversation, we should be able to have the conversation first.
“There will never be a peaceful, well-operating world while there are western structures like the G7”, Keating reminded us.
He went on to say that there needs to be a place of respect for China:
- According to the IMF, their GDP is 20 percent larger than the USA
- They have 20 per cent of the world’s humanity
- They have a very large navy
- They have solved hunger for 20 per cent of the world’s population
- They are not exporting an ideology
Stability in Asia can no longer be imposed by a non Asian power, and least of all by direct application of US military power.
The USA could run the world alongside China, where the US consolidates the Atlantic, including Russia, while China provides the balance in the East and the Pacific. It is naive to assume China’s interests lie only in the Pacific. In fact they have more interest in the Asia continent and the Stans and Turkey.
China doesn’t want to be a stakeholder in a proprietary system run by the US and why should it? Keating asked.
On the US in Asia, Keating said that ‘the US has no idea what to do with itself in Asia’. He bluntly added that the US is not interested in ‘thinking allies’. It wants ‘dummies’.
He described the QUAD as a strategic nonsense and a waste of time.’Can anyone seriously think that the Indian Navy is going to confront China in the South China Sea?’
On Taiwan, Keating said again that it is not a vital interest for Australia. ‘Why would we want to be part of a US defeat over Taiwan?’.
On Australian strategic commentators and advisors Keating said: ‘The problem with the immaturity of the Australian international debate is that people as ordinary as Medcalf (Head of the National Security College at the ANU), who fail to understand basic things, should not be supported by editorial managers in any of the newspapers’. Medcalf he said wants Australia to try and persuade India to change its national interests!
Keating said that he hoped the Australian Government did not listen to Andrew Shearer, the Director of the Office of National Intelligence.
Australia can do its own foreign policy, its own security arrangements and pacts, and develop its own defence capability without being owned by anyone else. But ‘our strategic sovereignty is being out sourced to another country, the US’.
AUKUS should be an exchange of ideas and no more than that. It is not too late for the Australian Government to back out of the agreement. ‘Keeping Australia in the AUKUS alliance would be a tragedy for Australia. I mean going to Cornwall (in the UK) to find our security in Asia. James Cook and Arthur Philip left 230 years ago. Do we really need to go back there?’.
This doesn’t mean we don’t need friends like the US. And Indonesia on our door step is vitally important.
The challenge of governments is to make their own stories. That is what the present day government should be brave enough to do. Tone needs to become substance.
Australia currently has a very poor idea of itself, not sure what it should be, yet we have a continent.
It is time to consider a republic. King Charles might welcome it, Paul Keating said.
Australia needs a leader like Paul Keating. View the conversation with Paul Keating here.
Friends of the Earth call on Madeleine King, Minister for Resources to overturn the declaration on Kimba nuclear waste site.
The Hon Madeleine King MP
Minister for Resources
Dear Ms King
Kimba Nuclear Waste Dump
We are writing in regard to the proposed construction of a National Radioactive Waste Management Facility (nuclear waste dump) at Napandee, near Kimba in South Australia. Napandee was declared on 26 November 2021 by Liberal National Party MP Keith Pitt, then Minister for Resources and Water, as the chosen site for the permanent disposal of low level radioactive waste (LLW) and temporary storage of intermediate level radioactive waste (ILW).
We urge you to overturn the declaration of this site by the previous government.
1. First Nations Voice to Parliament
We were greatly encouraged when Prime Minister Albanese, in his election night speech, embraced the Uluru Statement from the Heart, including its call for a First Nations Voice to Parliament enshrined in the constitution. A voice to parliament would enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to provide advice to the parliament on policies and projects that impact their lives. The clear advice from the Barngarla people, the Traditional Owners of the area, is that they don’t want it. The Barngarla people were excluded from a community ballot conducted by the Kimba District Council in November 2019, so they conducted their own independent poll. Not a single Traditional Owner voted in favour of the dump.
We wish to lend our support to the Barngarla people’s call for their voices to be heard and for the nuclear waste dump proposal to be cancelled. We note that the Premier of South Australia Peter Malinauskas recently reiterated SA Labor policy that Traditional Owners should have a right of veto over nuclear projects. South Australia has a law prohibiting the establishment of nuclear waste storage facilities in this state (Nuclear Waste Storage Facility (Prohibition) Act 2000), which, while not binding on the Commonwealth, should be respected.
2. Process
While a majority of those who were actually allowed to vote in the Kimba community ballot supported the dump, a substantial minority opposed it and the proposal has divided the community. Furthermore, besides the Barngarla people, significant other affected communities have not been consulted. A facility that would involve transportation of radioactive waste to the storage and disposal site should involve consultation with all communities along the transport route and with the wider public. No such consultation has occurred. In fact, transport of repatriated reprocessed intermediate level waste was excluded from the March 2022 Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act referral.
3. Better alternatives
In a submission last year to a public consultation about the National Radioactive Waste Management Facility (NRWMF), Friends of the Earth Australia stated (1):
‘Moving LLILW [Long-Lived Intermediate-Level Waste] to an above-ground ‘interim’ store adjacent to a repository for lower-level wastes makes no sense given that much of the waste is currently located at ANSTO’s Lucas Heights site, which is properly secured and home to much of Australia’s nuclear expertise. ANSTO also enjoys considerably higher access to nuclear monitoring, security, waste management expertise and emergency response capacity than any other site in the nation.’
and
‘Successive governments have assumed that a shallow, remote repository is the best solution for low-level radioactive waste (LLW). That assumption needs to be tested as no federal government has attempted to demonstrate the net benefit of a remote repository. Measured by radioactivity, a large majority of LLW is stored at ANSTO’s Lucas Heights site; measured by volume, ANSTO manages about half the total volume. ANSTO expects to continue to operate at the Lucas Heights site for many decades into the future and it is by no means clear that a remote repository is preferable to ongoing storage at Lucas Heights, especially given the continuing uncertainty around the long-term future management options for LLILW.’
The Australian Radioactive Waste Agency’s National Inventory of Radioactive Waste released on 6th Sept 2022 shows that ANSTO is the predominant source of existing and future radioactive waste to be disposed and stored at Kimba.
When asked if ANSTO could continue to manage its own waste, Dr Ron Cameron (ANSTO) said, ‘ANSTO is capable of handling and storing wastes for long periods of time. There is no difficulty with that. I think we’ve been doing it for many years. We have the capability and technology to do so.’ (2) More recently, CEO of Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA), Dr Carl Magnus Larsson, confirmed that ‘Waste can be safely stored at Lucas Heights for decades to come.’ (3)
In light of the above circumstances, you should not feel under any obligation to honour the decision of the previous government. The sooner you cancel this project, the better.
Yours sincerely,
Philip White 12 October 2022
On behalf of Friends of the Earth Adelaide
adelaide.office@foe.org.au
1. Friends of the Earth Australia, ‘NRWMF public consultation: Published response: Submission re Proposed Nomination of Napandee (Kimba, SA) for a National Nuclear Waste Dump and Store’, 22 October 2021:
https://app.converlens.com/industry/nrwmf/survey/view/30
2. ARPANSA forum, Adelaide, 26 February 2004:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040610143043/http://www.arpansa.gov.au/reposit/nrwr.htm#forum
3. Hansard, Parliament of Australia, Economics Legislation Committee, 30/06/2020:
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard/Hansard_Display?bid=committees/commsen/3ae991cf-74a3-4f9e-9f5c-fbc6fccebdf2/&sid=0000
7,000 form human chain in London to protest treatment of Assange
WSWS 9 Oct 22, Around 7,000 people formed a human chain around the Houses of Parliament in the UK Saturday, protesting the British government’s persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The chain ran continuously from Parliament Square along the Palace of Westminster, across Lambeth Bridge, along South Bank to Westminster bridge, then back over the Thames river to Parliament Square—roughly two miles. The event was organised by the Don’t Extradite Assange campaign.
Assange is currently held in Belmarsh maximum security prison in London. The United States government is seeking his extradition under the Espionage Act for exposing the war crimes and human rights abuses of US imperialism and its allies. It has plotted his assassination and levelled charges which carry a life sentence in solitary confinement. The WikiLeaks founder is seeking to overturn orders by the British judiciary and the home secretary approving his extradition. His legal team filed an appeal with the High Court in August.
Stella Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher’s wife, told protestors on Saturday, “Julian is suffering and part of the point of making this human chain was to show that what is happening here is not a legal process, it’s not a legitimate process. It is the instrumentalisation of the law in order to persecute a person, a journalist, in order to keep him in prison indefinitely.
“People around the world are witnessing this atrocity and that is what compels them to come here to show their solidarity, to show that they care about Julian. That they believe in justice, that they see what is happening here is a state that has committed crimes against innocent, that is now committing crimes against a journalist who exposed those crimes they committed.
“Let’s not forget that the US planned to assassinate Julian in the UK, while he was in the embassy and now they’ve put him in the harshest prison in the UK for almost four years.”
WikiLeaks editor Kristinn Hrafnsson said proceedings against Assange were “not a legal case,” because of the way the legal system has “bent itself to the demands and requests of the government… it’s appalling.”
He continued, “Julian is a political prisoner. He’s being politically persecuted. The chain around Parliament is sending a message to those inside. They are there to serve the people on the outside. And those are Julian’s supporters. Thousands of them here today, and millions around the world who know that this is a travesty.”
Labour MP and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell had the brass neck to announce, “As we go into the 18 months up to a general election, this will become a general election issue. Every MP will be asked: do you stand up for journalism, do you stand up for the rights of journalist to report freely, do you stand up for his basic human rights, do you stand up for justice?”……………………..
Reporters from the World Socialist Web Site spoke with some of the protestors……………………………………………
A number of those protesting travelled to London from other countries to do so. Mantas, who traveled from Lithuania that day to support Assange as part of the chain, told our reporters, “Assange told the truth about war crimes, and he fought for human rights and freedom of the press.”
The US and UK governments “want to make a clear and obvious example of Assange so that no-one attempts what he did. The powers that be are trying to impose their own world view, control how people think, to seduce them into thinking nothing can be done or that the world is as it’s supposed to be, when we are actually entering into wholesale madness in the world.”
He said of the war in Ukraine that the weapons manufacturers and businesses “want to promote a new war, and they don’t care about the consequences for the Ukrainian people or the Russian people. I don’t agree with Putin’s actions, but I think there was another option, but Zelensky was encouraged to take a hard line and oppose any deals from the Russian Federation.”
Listing the crimes exposed by WikiLeaks he said, “Where do you start? You can look at the video of an Apache helicopter shooting civilians. The Afghan and Iraq war logs and so on. People should look into it. There’s too much to go into herethat many crimes have been uncovered. People should look into what WikiLeaks has done what its expose and be objective about the matter.”
Assange’s case “shows that if anyone finds out something like this and tries to tell the public then they can be prosecuted for it. So obviously that can threaten everyone.” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/08/chai-o08.html?fbclid=IwAR0oU-kS9VcRD34qsOcy2SC2BTcKB2CmeY6IwAoPfyc-MniCzPt3xsgXEu4
1 This month
7 April – WEBINAR – Australia and the Doomsday Clock – Preventing nuclear war through NoFirstUse and other policies
Online | Tuesday April 7, 4:00-5:30pm, Australian Eastern Time / 8:00-9:30am Central Europe Time
– Access the registration link
15 April – Zoom –Nuclear Power is Not the Solution
Apr 15, 2026 01:00 AM in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney
Join the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) on Tuesday, April 14th for a timely webinar exploring the risks associated with nuclear power and challenging the myth that it offers a simple, safe, carbon-free solution to the climate crisis
21 April Webinar: No Nuclear Weapons in Australia
Start: 2026-04-21 18:00:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
End: 2026-04-21 19:30:00 UTC Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney (GMT+10:00)
Event Type: Virtual
A virtual link will be communicated before the event.
Host Contact Info: australia@icanw.org
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 