Daniel Wills: Nuclear waste verdict from citizens’ jury leaves Government’s grand plan in tatters
THE “bold” idea of nuclear waste storage in South Australia looks to have just gone up in a giant mushroom cloud, writes Daniel Wills.
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THIS “bold” idea looks to have just gone up in a giant mushroom cloud.
When Premier Jay Weatherill formed the citizens’ jury to review the findings of a Royal Commission that recommended that SA set up a lucrative nuclear storage industry, he professed confidence that a well-informed cross-section of the state would make a wise judgment.
Late Sunday, it handed down a stunning and overwhelming rejection of the proposal. Brutally, jurors cited a lack of trust even in what they had been asked to do and their concerns that consent was being manufactured.
Others skewered the Government’s basic competency to get things done, doubting that it could pursue the industry safely and deliver the dump on-budget.
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It seems almost impossible now to see a way through for those in Cabinet and the broader Labor Party who have quietly crossed their fingers and backed the idea of taking the world’s nuclear waste.
With the party planning a special convention which must endorse changes to policy so the industry can be more deeply considered, internal critics now have an extremely potent weapon.
Those outside the state party — including the SA Liberals, independent Senator Nick Xenophon and even senior federal Labor figures — now have clear public permission to start peeling away.
Perhaps worse than that, if Mr Weatherill now elects to continue down the nuclear path, it would be by actively ignoring the public will uncovered by a process he personally put in place to test.
Should this now fall over, Mr Weatherill will rightly deserve residual credit for taking on a highly controversial issue which was previously tossed in the too-hard basket.
But without it, the Government stares down an election in a year and a half’s time where its biggest plan for transforming a struggling state has vanished and there is precious little to take its place.