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Monday, 27 February 2012
Page: 771

Senator LUDLAM (Western Australia) (13:35): I was hoping that Senator Scullion might leap to his feet and offer last-minute, unexpected support of what, to me, reads like a plain English and very sensible amendment. For the Hansard record, Senator Scullion is shaking his head, which I think is an enormous shame.

Nothing that the minister has said has gone to the basic premise of why we think this amendment is a good idea. To contend with the concept that we should not be talking about waste minimisation because it is already happening, Minister, with the greatest respect, if that really were the approach of the Australian government we would not have built the second reactor; we would have phased out reactor based forms of producing medical radioisotopes and we would not be producing this material at all. That was the argument that many ran with in the debate at the time you were in opposition. In fact, the reactor that we have at the moment is a patched, leaking, poorly fabricated $600 million white elephant that we did not need. It has nothing to do with waste minimisation, because we are still producing more of it.

Ionising radiation causes damage to DNA. It causes damage to the genetic material in living cells. The amendments that we are proposing to this bill go directly to the idea that we should not be producing this material any more than we absolutely have to. It does not dodge the argument that we have 60 years worth of this material's legacy to deal with. Before I proceed, I thank the minister for the material he tabled a short while ago on the basis of the joint convention on the quantities of material. I will just test the minister to see whether the advisers who are with him today are able to provide me with a breakdown or tell me where I can find in this report the proportions of the material that we already host here, that is already banked at Lucas Heights, relative to the amount of long-lived intermediate material, or reprocessed material, that has been returned from Europe.