Despair and Defiance
Blog Post | Blog of Scott Ludlam
Wednesday 3rd September 2008, 8:26am
by ScottLudlam in
I was privileged to camp with Aboriginal elders and environment groups recently at the ‘Australian Nuclear Free Alliance' meeting, which took place at Mary River, about 100 km south east of Darwin.
This was a remarkable gathering of Traditional Owners and campaigners impacted by uranium mining, weapons testing and radioactive waste dumping, supported by environment groups from around the country. It got started in 1997 as the ‘Alliance Against Uranium' when the campaign to stop a uranium mine in Kakadu at Jabiluka that combining the strengths of Green and Black organising.
The stories I heard were of the cruellest form of dispossession: the day black rain fell at Maralinga; the expanding groundwater sacrifice zone around the Beverley uranium mine; the cultural and ecological tragedy of Olympic Dam.
Trauma is not too strong a word for what people here are feeling. The Australian community at large holds a distant but healthy suspicion about all things nuclear, but for the people gathered this weekend, the insidious poisoning of country and culture by nuclear blasts, nuclear waste and uranium mining are matters of direct personal experience.
I heard about the brain tumours and breast cancers growing inside people far too young, of the legal entrapments of the Native Title Act which has set families against each other, and now the NT Intervention which has simply compounded and aggravated the despair.
At the meeting there was a huge hand-painted map on the wall showing the rash of proposed uranium mines from Meekatharra to Mount Isa and everywhere in between. One participant observed: ‘there's just nowhere left to run.'
In the back of everyone's minds in the Territory is the spectre of 60 years of nuclear waste from the Lucas Heights reactor. The Howard Government passed the highly coercive ‘Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act' in 2005 which suspended all forms of due process and democratic oversight in order to dump Australia's radioactive waste in the Northern Territory. In opposition, the ALP promised to repeal this bill and start again.
Now the Federal Government is burning bridges up here. First it was Martin Ferguson's thuggish repudiation of Kevin Rudd's election promise on the waste dump. Last week it was the awful spectacle of former Oils frontman and anti-nuclear activist Peter Garrett meekly signing off on the expanded violation of groundwater at the Beverley Uranium Mine.
Where will it end?
According to the hardened campaigners, it ends with final silencing of culture and language, and contamination of country for all time.
In 2008, the year of the apology, we still have elders and law people willing to share their knowledge with us, and ‘open doors to the country' as Kevin Buzacott puts it. The language is still alive. The law is still being passed on to the kids, and people want to get on with the healing that ‘Sorry' goes some way to enabling. Why, with so much potential, are we still crushing Aboriginal people between chequebooks, bulldozers, police and Acts of Parliament?
The health treatment costs of police and military personnel present at Maralinga during British nuclear testing - those of them left - have been provided for through a Bill that passed through the Senate in June. Will there ever be a ‘sorry' and compensation for Aboriginal people? Too many forget that an area the size of England itself was fenced off by the British who then poisoned an area the size of metropolitan London forever with seven nuclear blasts and hundreds of "minor trials" with plutonium among other long-lasting radioactive substances. Aboriginal people did not give prior and informed consent to such activities and were not even warned that the black rain was toxic, that the flash of light would blind.
Ten years ago this year, the Jabiluka uranium mine was fought to a standstill by the Mirrar and thousands of their supporters. The Kungkas defeated the South Australian waste dump despite the full force of the Federal Government being brought to bear. The Territorians working against the waste dump and their supporters are going to win as well, but only with a determined mobilisation made up of thousands of individual actions - everything from writing out a surprisingly generous cheque to sending a spiky letter to Martin Ferguson or picking up the phone and finding out how you can help more directly.
The people gathered in this shed have things they'd much rather do than fight these undemocratic and toxic projects, but fight they will, and they deserve our support.
The nuclear industry has no place in a sustainable Australia - there is still time to bring some sanity back to this 60-year old conversation and institute a properly democratic and informed process for curing the country's radioactive migraine.
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Comments
Uranium Mining
A responsible parent would not actively harm their children. A responsible citizen would not actively harm their community's children. Why then does this society actively seek to harm its future children, and their children's children, and so on for many many generations, by actively seeking the mining of uranium?
Is it because the love for their children supercedes all other concerns to the extent that they wish harm onto future children in order to maximize the benefits for their children alone, and not forgetting of course, and most importantly, themselves?
When waste from a resource is made not to occur, then extract and use that resource.
A need is never fulfilled until it rewards! The need for making uranium extraction and its use benignant will never manifest entrepreneurialism to find a solution if it is allowed to occur without the contingency of making its extraction and use benign ‘before’ mining permits are issued.
Society and its leaders need to act responsibly and make the market economy ‘work’ to benefit all now and in the future. It is possible to entice entrepreneurialism to deliver a benign process if society is strong and responsible. Viable solutions do exist if made and enticed to venture forth.
Nuclear power and uranium mining
Congratulations to Senator Scott for supporting the campaign against uranium mining near Alice Springs - and against nuclear power in general.
As a member of the Greens, in NSW, I was alarmed to find recently that even some Greens seem to be having second thoughts about nuclear power - and are considering it as a semi-viable alternative to CO2 emitting coal and gas fuelled power generation.
I believe this is a dangerous path - as each stage of the nuclear cycle - but especially uranium mining and radioactive nuclear waste disposal - are environmentally unacceptable and can only leave a legacy of further contamination and disease for later generations.
The human cost of the Native Title Tragedy
Well spoken Scott,
Personally, I have come to the viewpoint that the most pressing issue surrounding the uranium industry is the corruptive nature of the Native Title Act and the inevitable results it ensures for the industries which most likely lobbied for its existence. To turn members of a family against each other on the promise of gold is by its very nature 'evil' and tapping into knowingly and with purpose the most base aspects of human nature - its an easy win strategy for within any community (white or black) there will exist those that are both weak and strong - and as we are seeing with the abuse of the Kokatha are Adnyamathana communities ( Andrew Starkey and Vince Coulthard) so does the Native Title Act work to its pre-defined perfection when the weakest members of such communities are approached and offered gold in defiance of the lore and majority view of otherwise strong communities - a very sad situation indeed.
Herein lies the greatest weakness of the Rudd government which entertains such folly foolishly at a time when Australians are waking up to the divide and conquer nature of such abhorrent policies which need to be urgently scrubbed from the Australian statute books. That Rudd and his colleagues have not woken up to the tremendous tide of opinion will be to their detriment, as we now know these racist bits of legislation are attracting the attention of the international courts.
The ongoing racism of Australian governments toward indigenous Australia is the number 1 issue, the poisoning and detrimental effects to land is number 2.
Keep up the good work - we will prevail and resolve this situation.
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