Federal Government Continues Northern Territory Nuclear Dump Plans

Member for Lingiari and Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs Warren Snowdon today called on Federal Science Minister Julie Bishop to think again before writing the Territory off as an unpopulated wasteland fit only for nuclear dumps.

Mr Snowdon said the Minister's assertions that no-one was living close to the three Sites proposed for a nuclear waste dump revealed a lamentable ignorance about life beyond the leafy suburbs of Canberra and the beaches of Perth.

'The Minister is obviously blissfully unaware that Aboriginal communities and pastoral families have lived close to each of the proposed sites long before this Government picked them out of a hat,' he said.

'That hardly qualifies them as being some distance from any form of civilisation, as the Minister so crassly puts it.

'This illustrates only too clearly that this is a government that keeps making decisions without any reference to the people who might be affected by them.

'And it shows us that, yet again, the CLP's voiceless men in Canberra have squibbed it.

'I can't imagine any Minister making such an inane statement unless they hadn't been properly briefed and it's simply beyond belief that she had the facts before her and went ahead and said this anyway.

'Whatever she might believe, the people who are responsible for the country chosen for these sites don't want a bar of them – and that goes for the pastoralists as much as the Aboriginal landowners.

'It's one thing to talk about the need for scientific research over these sites, but you don't ever write off the people who will be affected.

'Ignorance, Minister, is no excuse,' Mr Snowdon said.

2007-01-31