On 18 July the Barngarla traditional owners for the Kimba region in South Australia were successful in their court case against the federal government regarding the proposed site of a national radioactive waste management facility.
On emerging from the Federal Court building in Adelaide, chair of the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation Jason Bilney hailed it as a ‘David and Goliath’ victory.
Former Coalition resources minister Keith Pitt declared in 2021 that the Commonwealth had acquired Napandee, a property west of Kimba, to establish a nuclear waste facility. It would be used to consolidate the storage of low and intermediate-level radioactive medical waste that is currently stored in more than 100 locations across the country. While the land of the Napandee site itself is freehold, the Barngarla people hold native title in surrounding areas.
Although opponents of the proposed site hoped the plan would be abandoned following the Labor party’s 2022 federal election win, federal resources minister Madeleine King instead said the new Labor government was committed to progressing the facility.
Following the announcement of their court ruling preventing the construction of the facility, Bilney delared, ‘It’s the fight that we continue, and you feel it from the heart no matter where we are, whether it's our Country or other people's Country’. Barngarla elder Aunty Dawn Taylor, who was born at Kimba, was delighted at the result: ‘I am so happy for the women’s sites and dreaming on our country that are not in the firing line of a waste dump. I fought all this time for my grandparents and for my future generations as well.’
On presentation of the verdict four months after the Barngarla complaints were presented at the March court sessions, Judge Natalie Charlesworth upheld the most significant: that there was ‘apprehended bias’ in the decision-making process by former Coalition resources minister Keith Pitt in the formal selection of the site.
In her report the day following the decision, ABC News reporter Josephine Lim wrote: ‘In upholding the apprehension of bias argument, Justice Natalie Charlesworth found that the Coalition minister, who formally declared the site in 2021, could be seen to have a "foreclosed mind" on the issue "simply because his statements strongly conveyed the impression that his mind was made up".’
'It’s a significant victory on the long journey of the Barngarla to protect their country, waters and culture and future generations.'
Outside the Court, lawyer for the Barngarla Nick Llewellyn-Jones said findings of apprehended bias against a minister were ‘very rare’. ‘It's set a precedent for Aboriginal groups to take a stand; it's set a precedent also in terms, I believe, of what standards are required of Commonwealth ministers,’ Mr Llewellyn-Jones said. ‘Our clients have won, and it's obviously a great victory for them, but in fact it's a vindication of the entire system that we have that people out there do have options when government affects their lives.’
A few hours later, on the local (891) ABC Evening Show, host Peter Goers conducted his post-Court radio interview with Dave Sweeney, nuclear campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation, and Jim Green, nuclear campaigner for Friends of the Earth.
As Sweeney summarised: ‘This declaration was quashed, with the verdict that this was a politicised choice rather than an evidence-based choice.’
Jim Green, while warning that the victory was not the end of the campaign, remained optimistic: ‘The government might yet appeal the decision. However it seems likely that the plan for a nuclear dump on Barngarla country will instead be abandoned.’
Rowan Ramsey is the Member for the vast federal district of Grey, which now takes in most of the geographical region of South Australia. In 2015, Ramsey was one of the initiators of Kimba as the site for the proposed federal nuclear dump. He declined an offer to participate in this radio session, but from overseas cited elsewhere his disappointment.
In response to proponents of the waste facility reportedly ‘gutted’ by the outcome of the court case and the loss of the $32 million promised to the district for the 100 years of the project, leading anti-Dump grain farmer Peter Woolford pointed out that last season’s bumper crop brought in many times that amount in just one year.
And what did former minister Pitt have to say of the verdict? In his interview with Chris Kenny on Sky News, there was no reference to ‘apprehended bias’. He referred to a selective list of low level radioactive waste items that would have been disposed of at the facility — gloves, gowns, needles — presumably to assure listeners that opposition to the project had been overblown. A conspicuous omission was the fact that over 90 per cent of the waste planned for storage (not disposal) at the Kimba facility was intermediate nuclear waste, including spent fuel rods from the former nuclear reactor (with a half-life of 10,000 years of radioactive toxicity). In a further interview, Pitt made the patently false claim that Australians’ access to nuclear medicine was at risk following the court decision preventing construction of the facility.
In the Sky News interview, Mr Pitt also declared that Australia would ‘run out of space’ to store low and intermediate-level nuclear waste by 2030. This, despite the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) having declared to the 2020 Senate Committee that the Lucas Heights site of Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), producer of the waste, has space enough ‘for decades’.
In his speech to the same Committee, federal Labor Member for Freemantle Josh Wilson noted ARPANSA’s lack of concern at any delay in building a new facility. Wilson’s own admonition was that the nation’s intermediate-level waste should stay where it is ‘until the government of Australia identifies and resources an appropriate permanent disposal site for intermediate-level waste’.
Dr Susan Close, now the Labor deputy premier of South Australia, has consistently opposed the Kimba nuclear waste facility, while SA State Labor has long supported a veto by the traditional owners. Even Federal Labor, while in opposition, ensured that the Barngarla would be permitted the judicial review.
It’s a significant victory on the long journey of the Barngarla to protect their country, waters and culture and future generations.
Michele Madigan is a Sister of St Joseph who has spent over 40 years working with Aboriginal people in remote areas of SA, in Adelaide and in country SA. Her work has included advocacy and support for senior Aboriginal women of Coober Pedy in their successful 1998-2004 campaign against the proposed national radioactive dump.
Main image: Deputy Chair Jonas Dare, Senior Elder Maureen Atkinson, Jason Bilney, BDAC Lawyer Nick Llewellyn-Jones. Credit: Conservation SA