Steven Marshall: Let election decide South Australia’s nuclear dump future
UPDATE: Steven Marshall has challenged the Premier to take plans for a nuclear waste dump to the 2018 State Election to “let the people of SA decide”.
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OPPOSITION Leader Steven Marshall has challenged the Premier to take plans for a nuclear waste dump to the 2018 State Election to “let the people of South Australia decide”.
In The Advertiser today, Mr Marshall declared the push to establish a nuclear waste dump in South Australia is “all but dead and buried”.
Premier Jay Weatherill then called a press conference at 9am to condemn the Liberal leader for shattering bipartisanship over the proposal before an extensive community consultation program was complete.
But a defiant Mr Marshall then faced the media declaring the “waste dump is now dead” and said the proposal “has got State Bank written all over it”.
Despite being a staunch critic of the citizen’s jury process, which handed down a damning report on Sunday, he said that was the “death knell” of the proposal.
“It’s now time for Jay Weatherill and the Cabinet to move on with matters which are more important,” Mr Marshall said.
Mr Marshall said the Premier could have walked away from the project this morning because it did not have bipartisan support.
“He (Mr Weatherill) didn’t. He’s keeping the door open on this project (and) he would like to proceed with it.
“I’m very pleased with that decision. I think this will become the defining issue of the 2018 State Election.”
Mr Weatherill this morning said the State Government would reveal its view soon, which he previously has said would be in a detailed report to Parliament.
“What we saw overnight ... was the Leader of the Opposition express his opposition, and we expect the opposition of the Liberal Party, to any further steps along the nuclear fuel cycle,” Mr Weatherill said.
“We’ve always said that bipartisanship is an important part of progressing any further steps in relation to this area.
“We’ll now obviously take into account the attitude of the Leader of the Opposition as we formulate our position.
“The Labor Party’s position is clear. We will respect this process. There are many tens of thousands of South Australians who have decided to reach out to us and express their views.”
Asked if Mr Marshall had given him an escape method to ditch the waste dump proposal, Mr Weatherill said the Government would make up its own mind and did not yet have a concluded view.
He sidestepped a question over whether he retained his view, expressed in September, that the Government likely would decide to “proceed with caution” on the proposal.
Mr Weatherill emphasised the extensive consultation other than the citizens’ jury, which on Sunday rejected the idea of nuclear waste storage in South Australia by an overwhelming two-thirds majority, citing a “lack of trust” as the deal-breaker.
Speaking at a hastily scheduled press conference in the east parklands, Mr Weatherill declared the consultation program the most comprehensive ever undertaken in this state, saying it reached tens of thousands of people across the breadth and width of SA.
Mr Weatherill stressed this had included visits to about 100 communities and 50,000 “contacts” with people. This included 30,000 online and 12,500 face-to-face discussion, along with “rolling surveys” which were being consolidated and would be published soon, as would a report from an advisory panel supervising the process.
But Mr Marshall told The Advertiser today it was clear from Finland’s experience that the public had to be on board.
“Personally, I have a much greater ambition for SA than becoming the world’s nuclear dump,” he said.
Mr Marshall said the decision that two-thirds of the citizen’s jury did not want the proposal pursued under any circumstance was “a complete failure to get the public onside”.
“Finland is the world leader in creating a permanent repository for nuclear waste. They have spent 40 years getting to this point. And that’s just for their own waste,” Mr Marshall said.
“The clear message here is that this policy from (Premier) Jay Weatherill — that he could receive a Royal Commission report and then make a decision within a matter of months — was ill-conceived. The things they (Finland) have achieved took decades, not months.
“The Citizen’s Jury result showed that Jay Weatherill could not be trusted to deliver on such a significant project. He couldn’t even get Gillman right.”
Today, a group of environmentalists will hand Mr Weatherill a petition with 35,000 signatures calling on the Government to abandon plans for a nuclear waste dump.
The group includes indigenous leaders Enice Marsh, Lesley Coulthard, Regina and Vivianne McKenzie, Tony Clark, Karina and Rose Lester and representatives from conservation groups.
Australian Conservation Foundation campaigner Dave Sweeney said burying nuclear waste in SA would leave an “unwelcome toxic legacy for hundreds of thousands of years”.
Mr Marshall said Finland’s Onkalo nuclear waste disposal facility was “impressive”.
He said that while he was not worried about the safety of such a facility, he had “serious concerns” about economic return.
“The longer we look at this issue, the more questions are raised about the viability of this project,” he said.
“Nothing I saw in Finland waylaid those concerns.”
A Liberal joint party room meeting would be held on Monday to discuss Mr Marshall’s report from Finland and to hear from Liberal MPs Rob Lucas and Dan van Holst Pellekaan, who were members of the parliamentary committee investigating the proposal.
Earlier this week, Mr Weatherill said the Government would wait for a community views report that includes results from 30,000 online surveys and in-person feedback provided by 16,000 people, before making a decision on how to proceed.
He said the jury decision would be given “substantial weight” in the final government position to be announced to Parliament before the end of the year.
The Government expects to receive the community views report, compiled by consultants, early next week.