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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2017-06-21 Daily Xml
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Bills

Nuclear Waste Storage Facility (Prohibition) (Public Money) Amendment Bill

Introduction and First Reading

The Hon. M.C. PARNELL (16:22): Obtained leave and introduced a bill for an act to amend the Nuclear Waste Storage Facility (Prohibition) Act 2000. Read a first time.

Second Reading

The Hon. M.C. PARNELL (16:23): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

As members know, in November last year the citizens' jury emphatically rejected the idea from the nuclear royal commission that South Australia could host an international nuclear waste dump. More than two-thirds of jurors said no, this was not a good idea for South Australia and should be abandoned.

Shortly afterwards, the opposition leader, Steven Marshall, came out saying that the Liberal Party would oppose the dump. In doing so, they lined up behind the Greens, who have consistently opposed this ridiculous project that had the potential to cause so much harm to our state, including financially and through reputational damage.

The government responded by dumping on the opposition, and the Premier called for a statewide referendum, even though he had previously opposed such a move. The Premier also conceded that a referendum had no chance of success. He would not be drawn on a date, but accepted that it would be at least a decade. Mr Weatherill was quoted in the media as saying:

I believe it’s a matter the South Australian public should continue to discuss, and I am framing up a way for those discussions to continue.

We won’t be pushing ahead with a referendum until there’s bipartisan support. We will not pursue a change to our policy, but if the mood in the community shifts and bipartisanship is re-established, we will remain open to this question.

This was a situation of limbo that the government has left us in for the last six months. It has only been in the last few weeks that the Premier has expanded on where this issue is going. Following his answer to a question from a member of the public at a meeting in Victor Harbor earlier this month, he declared the dump dead.

Subsequent media interviews resulted in a spate of headlines, such as 'Weatherill rejects SA nuclear-waste dump plan once and for all' from The New Daily; 'Nuclear dump idea dead in SA' from news.com; and '"There's no foreseeable opportunity for this": Jay declares nuke dump "dead"' from InDaily. A headline from ABC news reads 'South Australia's nuclear dump proposal abandoned'. Do the headlines reflect what the Premier has actually said? What he said was:

This is a matter that requires inter-generational support over decades and decades, if you don't have both major parties behind this, it's never going to go anywhere, I've always said that.

Another quote from the Premier:

And the other day when I was asked about it I just simply repeated the same thing.

So my position hasn't changed and this was never advanced as a short or even a medium-term proposition for South Australia. It was a discussion I believed should occur and that's why we had a royal commission, and that's been a valuable source of evidence.

So, until very recently, the official government line was that this debate was not yet over. It might be parked for a while, but the government's official position was to bring it back onto the agenda at some future unknown time if circumstances change.

I would like to think that the dump is dead and buried, but what has escaped most commentators is that the door has been left wide open for the government to again spend millions of dollars of taxpayers' money reinvigorating the nuclear dump project. The door that has been left open is a result of the changes that were made last year to the Nuclear Waste Storage Facility (Prohibition) Act 2000. As members will recall, that act contains section 13, which provides:

Despite any other Act or law to the contrary, no public money may be appropriated, expended or advanced to any person for the purpose of encouraging or financing any activity associated with the construction or operation of a nuclear waste storage facility in this State.

That provision has stood in the act for many years, but last year it was changed, through an amendment made by parliament to add an exemption to that general provision. The insertion, which is now section 13(2), provides:

Subsection (1) does not prohibit the appropriation, expenditure or advancement to a person of public money for the purpose of encouraging or financing community consultation or debate on the desirability or otherwise of constructing or operating a nuclear waste storage facility in this State.

What this means is that, without any further reference to parliament, the government of the day can bring this matter back and they can use our money to again spruik the case for a nuclear waste dump.

While subsection 13(2) remains, the government can bring back the debate over the dump. It would need to be in the guise of public consultation, but we know from experience that there is no requirement for consultation to be fair or balanced. The bottom line is that this legislation gives the government the ability to bring back the nuclear dump debate at any time.

So, what is the solution? It is actually quite simple. We need to reinstate the act to its pre-2016 state; that is, with a general prohibition on spending public money and with no wriggle room or escape clause that allows the government to spruik a dump whilst claiming that the money was only being used for consultation.

The amendments made last year were designed to ensure that the government spending program on the nuclear waste dump consultation program was lawful. The government wanted protection that its nuclear dump consultation and response agency, its market research, its citizens' jury and even the royal commission itself could not be regarded as infringing section 13. That was the protection that the government wanted and that was the protection that the parliament gave the government. There was some debate about whether it was really necessary, but the government insisted that it was. It needed the law changed to undertake its consultation program.

Now that the consultation program is over there is no need for the exemption to remain. The bill removes the exemption. The bill reinstates the act to its pre-2016 state. It removes the wriggle room for the government to bring this debate back using public money. On my calculation, the government has wasted over $13 million on this folly so far and I want South Australians to now be able to draw a line under this matter and to move on with projects and programs that deliver real benefits to the people of our state, not this ridiculous get-rich scheme that was a disaster in waiting from the outset.

Whilst I always reserve the right to be dismayed at how matters are resolved in this parliament, I fully expect that the bill will pass, because if it does not, those who voted against it will have some explaining to do. What part of the nuclear waste dump is not dead and buried and which part do they want to bring back? That will be the question that people will ask those who do not support the bill. The Labor government should support it because they want us to believe that the issue is dead and that they will not be bringing it back anytime soon, including in the next term of government, if they are lucky enough to win the next election.

Similarly, if the Liberals want people to believe that they too have ditched any idea that they might have had about supporting a nuclear waste dump, then they too will vote for this bill. If they do not, people will quite rightly wonder whether former Senator Sean Edwards, one of the most vocal backers of the dump, is in fact running the South Australian Liberal Party.

Some people might be happy to just trust the word of the old parties' political leaders that the dump is dead, but I do not. We know that there are prominent people in both the Liberal and Labor parties who want to keep this going, and you know who they are. We need to close the door on this chapter now. We need to get rid of the wriggle room and make sure that if any government of any persuasion wants to reactivate the idea of an international nuclear waste dump for South Australia, then they need to come back to parliament to do so. That is the effect of the bill. It takes both the Liberal and Labor parties at their word and it invites them to put their votes where their mouths are. If they fail this test, then they are making sure that the nuclear waste dump will continue to be an election issue right up until March 2018.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. J.E. Hanson.

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