In the long ago past when I was at school, we learned about the classifications of sin: broadly speaking, there were things that you did or said that were wrong, and then there were things that you didn’t do or didn’t say but should have — ‘sins of omission’.
The former Minister for Resources Keith Pitt proved to be particularly proficient in the latter. In the long-running attempt to gain support for the previous government’s proposed federal radioactive dump project for the Kimba farming region in Barngarla country, South Australia, omission seemed to be common practice. There was no reference to the long-lived intermediate radioactive waste which, measured by radioactivity, would form over 90 per cent of the nuclear waste proposed to be transported across country and ‘temporarily’ stored above ground. Instead, low-level nuclear waste took centre-stage, along with grossly exaggerated claims of the necessity of the facility for the future of nuclear medicine.
The last seven years of the Coalition government’s attempts to establish a National Radioactive Waste Management Facility (NRWMF) can be summarised thus: a desktop survey led to 26 sites throughout the country (with the exception of Tasmania and WA) being proposed, with three in South Australia. The shortlist announced in 2015 only listed the three South Australian sites (despite the ‘rolled gold assurance’ in 2004 from the same Coalition government that the federal government would never again attempt to build a radioactive waste dump in South Australia). The first declared site in the Kimba area was ruled out by Minister Josh Frydenberg due to ‘insufficient community support’. Attention then shifted to the Wallaberdina site in the iconic Flinders Ranges, but with fierce opposition from the Adnyamathanha Traditional Lands Association and the Flinders Ranges Action Group (FLAG), that site was eventually abandoned as ‘physically unsuitable’.
With attention now on the second Kimba site of ‘Napandee’, a restricted vote of just 824 people ensured the exclusion of Barngarla’s traditional owners and some other opponents. With a narrow community majority, Minister Matt Canavan announced Napandee as the chosen site in 2020. However, opposition from certain Labor and cross-bench members ensured that the Barngarla were able to exercise their right to judicial review.
'How is the new Labor Government likely to respond, particularly in facing the unprecedented debt of $1 trillion bequeathed by the Coalition?'
On 15 June this year, the first stage of the Barngarla court case against the government was initiated in the Federal Court