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Green Left – Indigenous activist speaks: Outback communities and the nuclear industryI

Indigenous activist speaks: Outback communities and the nuclear industry Green Left IPeter Robson21 November 2008 Jillian Marsh is a member of the Adnyamathanha community in the Flinders Ranges and active in the Australian Nuclear-Free Alliance. She recently traveled to Germany to receive the 2008 Nuclear-Free Future award, and is writing a thesis entitled A look at the approval of Beverley Mine and the ways that decisions are made when mining takes place in Adnyamathanha country. Marsh spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Peter Robson about the expansion of the nuclear industry in South Australia and the Northern Territory.

What are the main issues with the nuclear industry at the moment?

At a national level and a global level there is a lot of pressure from the nuclear industry to expand. This targets governments, local communities and local councils.

Nuclear expansion is made up of the mining component, the transport and processing component, where the product is distributed and what it’s used for — weapons, power plants, reprocessing, enrichment and then what you do with the waste.

The main components we have to deal with in my area are the mining, processing, transport, waste and storage and management of the waste. It’s quite possible that nuclear power will also be a key factor. There is a big push on governments to adopt nuclear power as a progressive step forward.

The details of that don’t stack up, from what I’ve seen. In terms of replacing coal-fired power stations with nuclear power stations, the economics don’t stack up, the environmental issues don’t stack up and [uranium is] still a fossil fuel. There’s the huge issue of waste, and what do you do with the waste. That hasn’t been resolved.

Those are the key issues in Australia but also there’s the legacy of what the nuclear industry has already done in Australia: there’s the detonation of bombs, the contamination of land that has caused, the chronic health issues that people suffer from as a result of radiation sickness.  There’s never been any compensation for, or recognition of, the people [in remote communities] that through suffered that. With the detonations at places like Emu Junction and Maralinga the black clouds could be seen all over our country and further over to the east. The winds carried the contamination from the detonation thousands of kilometres to the east.

Again there’s never been any compensation put forward by the government and never been any research or investigation done that could see how widespread or serious the contamination is.  What are the specific proposals being debated?

In South Australia, there’s the expansion that’s on the table for the Roxby Down Olympic Dam mine. The expansion of the Olympic Dam process has already excluded Aboriginal people from consultation and decision making.

WMC [Western Mining Company] sought an indenture agreement from the government to have exemption from the Aboriginal heritage legislation in South Australia. The state government allowed WMC this exemption.  That stands for the lifetime of the mine. Indigenous people have been discriminated against by the SA Aboriginal Heritage Act. Legally that means they have no power to have any say over what happens as a result of the expansion.

Under Native Title legislation, people have the right to negotiate an agreement for compensation, but they still don’t have any decision-making power legally.

Now you have the land rights legislation in the Northen Territory — which allows Indigenous people to veto development for five years — which is still only a temporary arrangement.

But then development or mining companies can come back with a new package with new people, with new strategies or rework the same ones they used previously, and they can pressure people again and they can do that every five years, for eternity. They just wear people down, because communities don’t have the same level of resources that mining companies have access to. This sets up a major inequity between the negotiating parties. At every stage of the game, Indigenous communities are always under-resourced and placed in an impossible situation.

Then you have the mining companies working very closely, very comfortably with governments. Again, governments have a lot more resources than Indigenous communities…………………Has the new federal government improved the situation much?

The new government has actually intensified the problems by opening the doors for the nuclear industry to expand and by saying that they will continue to seek a place in Australia to store nuclear waste. It’s going to be somewhere in remote or rural Australia, it won’t be in Sydney or Adelaide or Canberra.

It will be somewhere in the vicinity of Alice Springs or Port Augusta. It’s remote and rural communities getting a kick in the arse all the time and getting the raw end of the deal from the commonwealth government………………….rural and regional Australia is being targeted by the nuclear industry, by the mining companies and by our own government people. It’s got to stop.

Green Left – Indigenous activist speaks: Outback communities and the nuclear industryI

Tags: aboriginal, indigenous, nuclear, antinuclear, uranium, radiation

November 23, 2008 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues