A timely look backwards
Stop Uranium Mining! Australia's decade of protest, 1975-85
By Greg Adamson
Resistance Books, 1999
47pp., $4.95 (pb)
Available at Resistance Bookshops, or send payment (plus $2 postage) to PO Box 515, Broadway 2007
Review by Jonathan Singer
This pamphlet describes the rise of mass opposition to uranium mining in Australia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and discusses the origins and development of the movement up to today's campaign against the Jabiluka mine in Kakadu National Park. It is based on a series of articles published earlier this year in Green Left Weekly.
Using street marches, industrial bans and educational and other activities, the movement grew steadily in the late '70s, tying the hands of the federal Coalition government. In the ALP and the trade unions, fights raged about what to do.
By 1981 the uranium industry needed to defuse the issue if it was to guarantee long-term profits. The ALP leadership moved to split and destroy the anti-uranium movement in preparation for its election in 1983.
The pamphlet's introduction states: "The nuclear industry in Australia owes its survival and massive expansion to Labor governments from 1983". Labor's "three mines policy" did not limit the industry, but allowed it to flourish.
Once in office, the ALP ignored party policy and supported uranium mining. The leadership was willing to risk a split in the party, although its left faction had no such perspective. Many of the ALP members who left the party at this time joined the newly formed Nuclear Disarmament Party.
The NDP was undone, however, by pressure from the corporations, including the establishment media, which denied the party the breathing space it needed to unify its socially and politically diverse membership. A core of high-profile NDP leaders began to doubt the possibility of building the party.
Today, the nuclear industry is projecting a major expansion of its activities. The pamphlet provides many lessons about how to renew the fight to stop this expansion and eliminate the industry altogether.