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Monday, 27 February 2012
Page: 757

Senator DI NATALE (Victoria) (12:42): I suppose that, in Territory terms, 120 kilometres is 'around the corner'. I appreciate Senator Crossin's comments and I appreciate the fact that she has acknowledged the widespread opposition to this site. My own view is that sometimes a small group of desperate people will do desperate things, but that in and of itself is not a justification to push ahead with this sort of proposal. The fact that one person is concerned about the prospect of a facility being built next to them is certainly not a justification for imposing this on the traditional owners.

I will correct one thing that Senator Crossin said. I do not think anyone mentioned volcanoes. I certainly did not put forward the proposition that the earthquake zone was a reason not to build at that site. That was the view of a traditional owner; it was not my view. I think it is incumbent on the minister to ensure that he is able to assuage the concerns of the traditional owners. It is important that he carry through with the recommendations from the Senate committee and that he talk to the traditional owners who have concerns.

The main thing I want to respond to in Senator Crossin's comments is the notion that this thing has to be built and that that is essentially the crux of the matter. Senator Crossin's words were, 'We have to build this thing.' One of the arguments put forward to ensure that we have this facility built is that somehow we need it because, without it, Australia's nuclear medicine industry is in some trouble. We heard from the minister that 500,000 patients annually benefit from radioisotopes. In the typical divide-and-conquer approach, he says that anybody who opposes it is seeking to deny people diagnoses and treatment. As somebody who spent a number of years working in the health profession, I have to say it is pretty offensive to hear from the minister that by opposing the site of this facility you are in fact denying people access to important diagnostic medicine. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I am not the only health professional to reject this idea. It serves nobody's interests to try to advance the proposition that you either support this facility or you reject the use of radioisotopes in medicine. It is not a simple and straightforward proposition; the truth is much more complex than that, and I am not the only doctor who rejects that simple dichotomy. In fact, it is incredibly misleading to claim that a large-scale nuclear waste repository such as this one is necessary to handle the minuscule amount of nuclear medicine generated in Australia. It is a tiny amount. It makes up a very small proportion of the waste that will be located in this facility. Of the 500,000 nuclear medicine cases performed every year in this country, most of the isotopes that are used degrade very quickly—within a few days. In fact they are degraded by the time they would be taken to the Northern Territory, and the waste is disposed of pretty safely. There are secure sites in hospitals right around the country, and those storage areas are going to continue regardless of whether this facility goes ahead. So this idea that somehow we need this site in order to continue to have a nuclear medicine industry in this country is just misleading. The fact is that ANSTO would continue to store the waste at Lucas Heights, where Australia's nuclear expertise already exists.

This is a position that is shared by a number of other health professionals. The Public Health Association of Australia, for example, shares this view, as does the Medical Association for Prevention of War and a number of eminent specialist members of that association. The AMA, which is hardly a bastion of bleeding-heart activism, has called for an inquiry into how we source our radioisotopes in the future. There are widespread questions around this notion that we need this to enable our nuclear medicines industry to continue.

Internationally, we know the experience is heading down a very different route to the one proposed here. Canada has made a decision recently to shift towards particle accelerator generation, for example, for all major medical radioisotopes. Right around the world this is happening. Belgium, Germany and other countries are all heading down a very different path to the one that we are pursuing.

I would be keen to know whether there has been any work done on quantifying the exact volume and nature of medical waste presently in storage—and of the expected volume in the future—as a justification for this proposed site.