Sam Wainwright, Fremantle
The development of a uranium mining industry in Western Australia would happen "over my dead body", said veteran anti-nuclear campaigner Jo Vallentine on October 9. She was chairing a public meeting of 200 people at the Fremantle Town Hall titled "Don't nuke the climate".
Called by the Anti-Nuclear Alliance of Western Australia, the public meeting was seen by its participants as an overdue and necessary response to the push by mining companies, the Howard government and sections of the Labor Party to dramatically expand uranium mining. The meeting itself was designed to coincide with the Australian Uranium Conference held on October 11 at Fremantle's Esplanade Hotel.
Particular attention was devoted to the need to expose the attempt by the nuclear industry to cast itself as a global warming saviour. WA Greens state MP Giz Watson said: "Global warming is being used as spin in this debate. They are the same old lies; the issues of nuclear waste have not been solved."
The stampede in ruling circles toward more uranium mining has been accompanied by the suggestion, most recently by former Labor PM Bob Hawke, that Australia should be the dump-site for the world's nuclear waste.
The description by federal government ministers of potential waste sites as being in the "middle of nowhere", over the objections of Indigenous owners, were labelled as "radioactive racism" by Australian Conservation Foundation nuclear campaigner Dave Sweeny.
Fremantle anti-Nuclear Group (FaNG) activist Scott Ludlam directly disputed the claim that a switch to nuclear power could slow global warming, quoting research by Dutch scientists demonstrating that once the small richer uranium ore deposits have been exhausted, the extraction of uranium from low ore deposits will generate more greenhouse gases than those saved by switching to nuclear power.
Ludlam argued that stopping global warming was not primarily a technical challenge but a social one concluding that "we need to reshape society and we need to do it soon". Confirming this, Matthew Rosser from the WA Sustainable Energy Association pointed out that while Western Australia has some of the best conditions in the world for generating renewable energy only 1% of its electricity comes from such sources.
Watson welcomed the affirmation by Premier Geoff Gallop that his government is opposed to uranium mining in WA. She said this policy needed to be reinforced by legislation, something Gallop has declined to do.
In accepting Watson's criticism, Dave Kelly, the WA secretary of the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union, affirmed his union's opposition to uranium mining and said he would continue to advocate this position within the ALP.
A number of WA Labor backbenchers, including Vince Cattania and Shelly Archer, have joined other ALP figures including federal Labor resources spokesperson Martin Ferguson in calling for an expansion of uranium mining. At the uranium industry conference, Ferguson hinted at the possibility that there would be change to federal Labor's three-mines-only position at the ALP's 2007 national conference.
Many speakers at the meeting referred to the large public protests against uranium mining in the late 1970s and early '80s, saying that such protests would have to be organised again.
From Green Left Weekly, October 26, 2005.
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