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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 | Leave a comment

Green Left – Pilger: NT intervention a new land grab

Pilger: NT intervention a new land grab
Green Left John Pilger5 November 2008 With its banks secured in the warmth of the southern spring, Australia is not news internationally. It ought to be. An epic scandal of racism, injustice and brutality is being covered up in the manner of apartheid South Africa.

Many Australians conspire in this silence, wishing never to reflect upon the truth about their society’s untermenschen, the Aboriginal people……No other developed country has such a record. A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leach off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on Indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights………………….This was during the decade-long rule of the conservative coalition of John Howard, whose coterie of white supremacist academics and journalists assaulted the truth of recorded genocide in Australia, especially the horrific separations of Aboriginal children from their families.

They deployed arguments not dissimilar to those used by David Irving to promote Holocaust denial………………….What is unique about Australia is not its sun-baked, derivative society, clinging to the sea, but its first people, the oldest on Earth, whose skill and courage in surviving invasion, of which the current onslaught is merely the latest, deserves humanity’s support.

Green Left – Pilger: NT intervention a new land grab

Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, radioactive, uranium

November 3, 2008 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues | Leave a comment

Justine Reilly: A new TV show tells the colonial history of Australia from an indigenous point of view | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The tragedy of Australia’s past
A new TV show tells the colonial history of Australia from an indigenous point of view – a bravely ambitious undertaking
The Guardian Justine o’Reilly October 28 2008 – “……………………..I feel compelled to report back to the motherland, who colonised this continent of indigenous nations more than 200 years ago, about a recent development with the potential to shift the Australian consciousness. First Australians is a new television series commissioned by SBS, Australia’s multicultural broadcaster. It tells the colonial history of Australia from an indigenous point of view. This was a bravely ambitious undertaking……………The seven-part series, which can be viewed online, begins with the Dreamtime creation story, cuts to the landing of the First Fleet at Botany Bay in 1788 and follows through to prime minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to Australia’s “stolen generation” earlier this year………………….Australians are becoming more aware that while indigenous people were being denied the right to grow up with their biological families, the broader Australian community was being denied the right to know the whole truth about its past.

Justine Reilly: A new TV show tells the colonial history of Australia from an indigenous point of view | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Tags: aborigines.aboriginal, Australia, indigenous

October 29, 2008 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues | Leave a comment

Traditional owners disappointed in Ferguson’s no show – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Traditional owners disappointed in Ferguson’s no show

ABC News 27 Oct 08 A group of traditional owners from the Northern Territory say they’ve travelled to Melbourne to deliver a petition against a nuclear waste dump to the Federal Resources Minister, but he was unavailable when they arrived.

The traditional owners from the Muckaty Land Trust are opposing a proposed nuclear waste dump on their land, about 100 kilometres north of Tennant Creek.

The Federal Government is currently considering changes to a law which forces such a dump on the Territory…………………………Diane Stokes from the Yapa Yapa clan at Muckaty says the Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson was told the group were coming to see him today………………….

“We need a letter from him saying that he’s not going to dump this dump in our country and we don’t want no more information going out secretly.”

The previous Howard Government passed legislation which allows the Commonwealth to force such a dump on the Territory.

Traditional owners disappointed in Ferguson’s no show – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, rafioactive, uranium

October 28, 2008 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues | Leave a comment

John Pilger: Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia | Comment is free | The Guardian

Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia
Claims of child abuse are proving a fertile pretext to menace the Aboriginal communities lying in the way of uranium mining
The Guardian John Pilger 24 Oct 08 – “……………….An epic scandal of racism, injustice and brutality is being covered up in the manner of apartheid South Africa. Many Australians conspire in this silence, wishing never to reflect upon the truth about their society’s Untermenschen, the Aboriginal people…………………………….A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leech off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3bn was underspent “or the result of creative accounting”, reported the Sydney Morning Herald……………………..Having let a few crumbs fall, Rudd is picking up where Howard left off. His indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, has threatened to withdraw government support from remote communities that are “economically unviable”. The Northern Territory is the only region where Aborigines have comprehensive land rights, granted almost by accident 30 years ago. Here lie some of the world’s biggest uranium deposits. Canberra wants to mine and sell it…………………………..Foreign governments, especially the US, want the Northern Territory as a toxic dump. The Adelaide to Darwin railway that runs adjacent to Olympic Dam, the world’s largest uranium mine, was built with the help of Kellogg, Brown & Root – a subsidiary of American giant Halliburton, the alma mater of Dick Cheney, Howard’s “mate”. “The land grab of Aboriginal tribal land has nothing to do with child sexual abuse,” says the Australian scientist Helen Caldicott, “but all to do with open slather uranium mining and converting the Northern Territory to a global nuclear dump.”

John Pilger: Under cover of racist myth, a new land grab in Australia | Comment is free | The Guardian

Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, radioactive, uranium

October 24, 2008 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues | Leave a comment

Resolving Environmental Injustice on a Local Level | Newsweek Project Green | Newsweek.com

And Justice For All
NewsWeek 22 Oct 08 An environmental expert talks about the challenges of helping disadvantaged communities deal with pollution and climate change at a local level……………A report released today by two environmental organizations, the Blacksmith Institute and Green Cross Switzerland, found that localized pollution is the leading contributing factor to disability and disease in communities across the world. Even in the United States, air pollution and contaminated water sources result in death, persistent illness and neurological impairment for millions of people. And children, researchers found, are usually disproportionately affected.

Resolving Environmental Injustice on a Local Level | Newsweek Project Green | Newsweek.com

October 22, 2008 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues | Leave a comment

Uranium mining jeopardizes well-being of Navajo Nation – News

Uranium mining jeopardizes well-being of Navajo Nation
New Mexico Daily Lobo Hunter Riley 10/21/08 The Navajo Nation has struggled for years to keep uranium mining off its lands.

However, with two leading presidential candidates now supporting the expansion of nuclear energy, American Indians may soon lose the power to decide who uses their land and its resources.

Community members considered the controversies surrounding uranium mining in the Navajo Nation last week, as guest lecturer Traci Voyles spoke about her research on the topic.
She said past uranium mining on Navajo land in New Mexico is an example of environmental racism, …………Uranium mining has negatively effected the Navajo population, Voyles said. The pueblos near Gallup and Crown Point have seen an increase in respiratory health problems and other diseases related to mining, she said.

The Navajo Nation placed a ban on uranium mining and milling on its lands in 2005, but Dina Gilio, co-chairwoman of the Native American Studies program, said the ban may be lifted if the government decides to expand nuclear energy initiatives.
Voyles said the first part of her dissertation focuses on the historical aspect of environmental racism and colonialism and the history of the federal government’s involvement in these problems. She will also investigate how native groups are facing these issues later in her project.

Uranium mining jeopardizes well-being of Navajo Nation – News

Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, radioactive, uranium

October 22, 2008 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues | Leave a comment

TheChadronNews.com – Chadron, Nebraska’s News Leader » Chadron » Headlines

Crow Butte uranium mine’s license renewal protested
The Chadron Record By GEORGE LEDBETTER, Record Editor Monday, October 13, 2008 Opponents of the Crow Butte Resources uranium mine near Crawford used a two-day hearing in Chadron last week to try and convince a panel of Nuclear Regulatory Commission judges that the mine’s operation poses a danger to area water supplies, and may be causing significant health effects on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation The 13 individuals and groups seeking to have operations of the In Situ Leach (ISL) mine suspended face a significant hurdle, however, as they first must convince the panel that they have the right to take part in the license renewal proceedings……………………….The mine is owned by Cameco Corp., a Canadian-owned company that is the world’s largest uranium producer, and ships its yellowcake to Canada for use in nuclear electric generation plants…………………………Opponents of the license renewal include several of the same people and groups who are seeking to block the mine’s expansion. Among those are the Western Nebraska Resources Council, the Oglala Sioux Tribe of South Dakota, Owe Aku/Bring Back the Way, a Lakota Indian cultural group, Tom Cook of Chadron, Debra White Plume of Pine Ridge, S.D., and other individuals from South Dakota and Nebraska.

The Oglala Sioux Treaty Council, a group separate from the tribal government, is also seeking to intervene in the license renewal.
Opposition to the mine is based in large part on the allegation that the water used in mining, which is drawn from the shallow Chadron formation, could contaminate deeper underground aquifers that provide water for the reservation, 30 some miles northwest of the mine. Further threats are posed by surface water drainage into the White River, which flows from the Crawford area to the reservation, they contend.

TheChadronNews.com – Chadron, Nebraska’s News Leader » Chadron » Headlines

Tags: indigenous

October 14, 2008 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues | Leave a comment

Criminalizing Indigenous Rights in Canada: | The Dominion

Criminalizing Indigenous Rights in CanadaDavid Parker The Dominion September 8th, 2008.HALIFAX – In September of 2007, the United Nations adopted the non-binding Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Four high profile countries notably voted against the declaration – namely Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.[1] All four countries are states that were established by white settlers on indigenous lands, and all four are currently in disputes with indigenous peoples over land and sovereignty.The Canadian state, built on the theft and occupation of indigenous lands, continues to benefit from its unjustly acquired assets…………………………Recent cases of indigenous protest in Ontario have been in opposition to government authorized resource extraction on native lands. Despite legitimate demands for sovereignty and decision-making power over their traditional lands, native protesters have been incarcerated:

Criminalizing Indigenous Rights in Canada: | The Dominion

Tags: indigenosu

October 14, 2008 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues | Leave a comment

Damning report on Aboriginal scheme – National – smh.com.au

Damning report on Aboriginal scheme
Sydney Morning Herald Stephanie Peatling and Joel Gibson
October 14, 2008

THE radical intervention into remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory has “fractured” the relationship between governments and indigenous people and led to an even greater sense of betrayal and misery among many people, an independent panel has found.

The board commissioned by the Federal Government to review the intervention after 12 months found it had not led to anyone being arrested for child sexual abuse – the grounds on which the previous government justified the intervention………………………….The board called for the intervention’s exemption from the Racial Discrimination Act to be removed and supported the reinstatement of the permit system for entry to lands…………………………………..

Pat Turner, of the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the Northern Territory, said she hoped the Government would take the report seriously and amend its approach.

She applauded its recommendations to compensate Aboriginal landowners on just terms for compulsory leases over their land and for its call for the intervention to be subject to the Racial Discrimination Act.

But Ms Turner, who has called the intervention a Trojan horse designed to seize Aboriginal land,

Damning report on Aboriginal scheme – National – smh.com.au

Tags: aboriginal

October 14, 2008 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues | Leave a comment

NT intervention unconstitutional, elders tell court | The Australian

NT intervention unconstitutional, elders tell court
THE AUSTRALIAN Nicola Berkovic | October 03, 2008

KEY aspects of the Northern Territory intervention, including the federal Government’s five-year takeover of Aboriginal townships, were unconstitutional, the High Court heard yesterday.

Traditional land owner Reggie Wurridjal and his sister Joy Garlbin, from Maningrida in western Arnhem Land, and the township’s Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation, have mounted a challenge to the intervention launched last year by the Howard government.

They say the forced five-year lease of their land amounted to an acquisition of their property rights and the commonwealth failed to do so on “just terms” as required by the Constitution.

Bawinanga chairman Peter Danaja, who was part of a delegation that travelled to Canberra for the hearing yesterday, said the intervention had “completely stripped” traditional owners of their land rights………………………………The NT Government has intervened in the case to support the group’s argument that the commonwealth must acquire NT property on just terms.

NT intervention unconstitutional, elders tell court | The Australian

Tags: indigenous, aboriginal

October 7, 2008 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues | Leave a comment

Land claim determination closer – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Land claim determination closer

ABC News 29/9/08 The Aboriginal land commissioner will today move a step closer to resolving the last land claim to be filed in central Australia.

In July, justice Howard Olney travelled to the northern part of the Simpson Desert, seven hours drive from Alice Springs.

He heard evidence from Eastern Arrente traditional owners and visited sacred sites in the area, one of the most remote in Australia.

The claim covers 18,000 square kilometres of land south of Atula homestead, some of which was part of an earlier land rights claim.

Today, the commissioner will sit in Melbourne to hear from anthropological experts.

Justice Olney will then call for written submissions before making a determination on the claim, which is expected to be the last for the central Australian region.

Land claim determination closer – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Tags: indigenous, aboriginal

September 30, 2008 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues | Leave a comment