Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of an answer given by the Minister representing the Prime Minister, (Senator Abetz), to a question without notice asked by Senator Ludlam today relating to the Prime Minister leading a uranium industry delegation to India.

There may be a lot more afoot. He might be doing all sorts of other things while he is there. But all we are really hearing about is the Australia-India uranium deal. This parliament has an authority that looks at these international agreements, whether they be trade agreements or treaties, assesses them and provides a view to the parliament. The parliament can then make of it what it will. The key flaw in this process—and it is about to be vividly demonstrated in this place—is that the deals get done and then the parliament gets asked its opinion. The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties in 2008 submitted a damning report on the subject of uranium deals to Russia. Everything that we wrote in that report—which, I think, was the first one that I signed when I arrived here—has been vindicated this week, with the government suspending future uranium exports to the Russian Federation in the same week that the Prime Minister leads a delegation of uranium executives and lobbyists to New Delhi, or to Mumbai, to seek to open yet another avenue of this toxic trade.

The question that I put to Senator Abetz was based on a quote. I have lost track now of how many times I have put this one on the Hansard record—one more for good luck and maybe it will get through. The question was premised on the following piece of information. A gentleman named K. Subrahmanyam, the former head of Indian National Security Advisory Board, said:

It is to India's advantage to categorise as many power reactors as possible as civilian ones to be refuelled by imported uranium and conserve our native uranium fuel for weapons-grade plutonium production.

That is the basis on which I put the question to Senator Abetz. How on earth do you write a safeguards agreement that protects against that kind of behaviour when it is right out in the open? We are now complicit, or we will be complicit, if this trade commences with a subcontinental nuclear weapon's arms race that has been in play for at least 30 years. We will not be able to say that we were not warned. That is why I put this quote on the record again.

If Senator Abetz wants to come back in here again and explain how the safeguard agreement can prevent the Indian government from using its dwindling and quite low-grade uranium supplies in a weapons program, having freed up those domestic supplies with uranium from Australia, then let us see it. But it cannot be done. We know it cannot be done. So the Australian government might be going into this issue with a blindfold on. The Australian Greens are not and neither are very large numbers of the Indian people.

I want to quote briefly from some correspondence that I received earlier in the week from Bhargavi and Sundaram on behalf of very large numbers of people who have been campaigning against the construction of a Russian nuclear power plant on the south coast of Tamil Nadu in an area, which, by coincidence, was flattened by the Tsunami in 2004. They write:

This deal endangering the lives of the aboriginal people of Australia and the poor, working-class masses of India is an unacceptable one. The Indian state has a track record of repression, violence and resorting to undemocratic means in dealing with the people's movements and hence it needs of global attention to embarrass both the governments on their ill-informed deal.

'An ill-informed deal'—I could not have put it better myself. You will not be able to say that you were not warned. Why, for example, rather than backing up the Indian government's repressive attempts to build further nuclear power plants on the Indian mainland, which have been met with stiff resistance—I am talking about tens of thousands of people massing on that coast in Tamil Nadu to try and prevent the construction and commissioning of these plants, because they have to live next to the damn things and they do not want their kids growing up in the shadow of atomic reactors when they know the damage that is being done elsewhere in India: the near misses, this spills, the misadventures, the near meltdowns, the fires, the floods, the containment vessel collapses. This is all on the public record. You will not be able to say that you were not warned.

Let us look at what the Indian authorities, technologies and industry are doing in the solar sector. When Senator Milne proposed this during question time, people laughed at her. On the coalition benches there was giggling and harassment about 'Why don't we just sell them candles?' You purely do not get it. You are extraordinarily out of step with what the Indian government is doing with solar technology. At a small-scale, it is much better suited to the micro-grids and the village-scale electricity infrastructure, or lack of infrastructure, that prevails for much of the regional Indian subcontinent. There are also large industrial-scale solar power stations that power the industry in the big cities. It is real. You can ignore it all you like, but it is real. That is why you are being so profoundly wrong-footed in your miscalculation of Indian energy needs. This deal is something that the Australian and the Indian people will come to regret. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.