Christopher Pyne: Senator Penny Wong and her South Australian Labor team should be putting Kimba above kale

Senator Penny Wong and her South Australian Labor team should be putting Kimba above kale, writes Christopher Pyne.

SA Labor Senator Penny Wong. Picture: Dean Lewins

In the dim dark passages of time, back in 1998 after I had been in the House of Representatives for five years, then prime minister John Howard asked then senator Nick Minchin and me to run the media campaign to support a nuclear waste facility in outback South Australia.

It seemed like the most obvious thing in the world. Outback South Australia is bigger than central Europe. The Europeans have never lost a moment’s sleep about the storage of nuclear waste, so long as it is done safely and securely. It seemed to me that such a nuclear waste facility would be preferable to the more than 40 sites in the Adelaide Central Business District where nuclear waste is stored, let alone the myriad more across the other, more populous state capitals.

Well, it’s still there in the CBD – 22 years later. We are still arguing about it. Politics is still killing common sense.

Minchin and I were both surprised by the outpouring of unfettered ignorance about the nuclear cycle. Seemingly intelligent men and women argued with a passion usually reserved for discussing the weekend’s AFL games over the water cooler on Monday morning, that the state would face Armageddon on a scale matched by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion in the Soviet Union if we embraced a low-level nuclear waste facility in the middle of nowhere.

This week in the Senate, a Bill to enable a nuclear waste facility to be built on a property 20km from Kimba on the Eyre Peninsula looks set to be defeated because of that same “not in my backyard” NIMBYism that has beaten similar proposals before.

There has been an exhaustive process to get to the point where the Australian Government introduced this Bill.

After a similar proposal was defeated through the courts at Mukaty Station in the Northern Territory in 2007, the current national government undertook a process to locate several sites and then seek community consultation.

Other localities chose not to embrace the opportunity. The residents of Kimba voted, with 62 per cent in favour, for the facility to be in their local council district. Sixty-two per cent is certainly not close.

Of course there are always people against something. We live in a democracy – everyone has the right to a different viewpoint.

The majority of people in Kimba have seen their population decline as those without jobs, due to mechanisation and technology replacing many of the drearier jobs on the land, have drifted away to find new livelihoods.

They could see the 45 jobs in the construction phase of the new facility, and the 25 permanent jobs it will create, being transformative for their town. The government also plans to spend $31m on other projects in Kimba to support the community. The facility itself is a $200m project. It’s a big deal for Kimba and for South Australia.

All those jobs in Kimba would feed more jobs – at the hairdresser, the local pub and cafes, the school and council. They would create demand for new housing and inject fresh ideas and ambition into a community that has been doing it tough.

Why on earth would the senators blow that all away like so much chaff in the wind? Who do those that oppose a modern nuclear waste facility think should be taking Australia’s waste? As a first-world, developed country, surely they don’t think we should dump it on someone else?

We aren’t talking about the waste from the production of nuclear material for weaponry here. This nuclear waste that is needing to be stored is from the production of medical isotopes for the treatment of cancer and other diseases.

Would those who oppose Australia taking responsibility for our nuclear waste suggest that it would be preferable for Australia’s nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, in the Sutherland Shire in Sydney, to not create lifesaving treatments for otherwise terminal patients? I bet they wouldn’t if they were the person sitting across from the doctor being told they have inoperable brain cancer.

The Labor Party should be supporting this Bill next week in the Senate. Rather than hanging on to some outdated leftie ideology about nuclear weapons (which has nothing whatsoever to do with this debate anyway), Senator Penny Wong and her South Australian Labor team should be putting Kimba above kale.

They won’t though. Labor in Canberra and North Terrace are captives of the Left on this one.

Senators Rex Patrick and Stirling Griff should be putting SA’s interests ahead of politics and supporting Kimba too.

They should then convince Senator Pauline Hanson and the other One Nation representatives to join with the government in Canberra next week and get this done.

This issue has hung around too long and been captive to too much politics. It’s time to make the hard decisions that we elect our politicians to make.