CLP Maintain Vision Of NT As Nuclear Waste Dump

Member for Lingiari and Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs Warren Snowdon said today the Prime Minister's deception over the proposed NT nuclear dump was beginning to unravel.

Mr Snowdon said Mr Howard's apparent emergence as an advocate of nuclear energy put increasing pressure on the NT to accept more than just a low-level waste dump.

'The Prime Minister's latest statements raise a number of serious questions for Australia and for the Territory,' he said.

'He's now in favour of developing nuclear power for peaceful purposes and sees it as the only way beat global warming.

'The fact that he's parroting George Bush in declaring nuclear power clean and green is a real worry.

'These are the kind of born-again statements we've come to expect from a man who refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol and remains appallingly ignorant of the need to support truly sustainable alternative energy sources.

'Australians will be worried that such an endorsement comes before the release next month of the draft findings of the Prime Minister's own taskforce on uranium mining, enrichment and nuclear energy.

'But Territorians will be deeply concerned that this ups the ante on the dump Canberra is trying to force on us, particularly since we now also have a company spruiking the NT as the place for a "small” nuclear reactor.

'The only people in the NT who now believe that the dump will be for low level waste seem to be the CLP's Dynamic Duo.

'And as my colleague Marion Scrymgour has discovered after repeated enquiries, we'd be getting high level waste anyway.

'Deceiving Territorians about the Government's intentions – as they have done since before the last election - is one thing.

'But it takes breathtaking cynicism to collude with John Howard in using the threats of Greenhouse to set us up to take high level waste from nuclear energy plants,' Mr Snowdon said.

2006-10-19