 issue #803 19 July 2009
Oppose Garrett’s sell out leave uranium in the groundLeslie Richmond
Scroll down to also read Garrett says he "set the bar to the highest level" to protect the environment" [What about setting the bar to the highest level to protect the land and culture of the First Australians Mr Garrett????] and "Death a reminder of nuclear's deadly power" He occupied a (somewhat self-appointed) position as a hero of Australia’s environment and Indigenous rights movements for decades. Yet these days, former Midnight Oil frontman and current ALP environment minister Peter Garrett works overtime to prove his credentials as a defender of big business and the big polluters.
Indeed, his sell-outs of the environment and Aboriginal people have become so common you could be forgiven for thinking the whole Midnight Oil thing was some extended, Chaseresque joke that no-one twigged on to.
His latest exercise in political surrender was his approval of the Four Mile uranium mine in northern South Australia. The deposit is the biggest uranium discovery in 25 years. It is just a few kilometres from Beverley uranium mine, the expansion of which Garrett approved last year.
 Four Mile will be run by Quasar resources, a company owned by US weapons dealer and nuclear energy corporation General Atomics. General Atomics makes the Predator aerial drone vehicles the US is using so effectively to kill civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
James Neal Blue, a US billionaire who was a strong supporter of the United States’ covert wars in Latin America in the 1980s, chairs the company.
The Four Mile mine decision has also affected the traditional owners, the Adnyamathana people. Some in the community have welcomed the potential royalties from the mine. Yet many feel they have been left out of the process and that the development will destroy significant sites.
Once again, an Indigenous community is being forced to give up its heritage to have access to basic services and living standards. Garrett is dividing a community where people would have expected the Midnight Oil-era Garrett to be promoting Indigenous empowerment and ownership.
Yet the decision is not so surprising if you look at the other decisions he has made since becoming the federal environment minister.
He approved the unpopular Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania, and gave the go ahead to the dredging of Port Phillip Bay.
As arts minister, he cut all funding to the Australian National Academy of Music without notice. He backed away from the proposal to stop tourists climbing Uluru and backed away from a logging ban in the Riverina-Murray.
He approved the Sugarloaf pipeline, which will take scarce water from the Goulburn River and approved the Huntlee development in endangered scrubland in the Hunter Valley. He also approved the expansion of the McArthur River Mine, requiring the diversion of the McArthur River, sacred to the Borroloola people.
And he's accepted that far from being a setback for our country, US forces are, in fact, a positive boon. In 2004, he reversed his long-standing opposition to the US-run Pine Gap military facility. In 2007, he supported the establishment of a new US military spy facility near Geraldton.
Many people have had fun trotting out old Midnight Oil lyrics to wave in his face, but, as Garrett says, that was years ago. So, to be fair, what's he been saying more recently?
In 2002, when he was still the Australian Conversation Foundation president, he said: “The Australian nuclear story is a tale of woe” and “a tale of staunch resistance”. He said: “We support Aboriginal peoples having a right of veto over nuclear projects on their traditional lands."
Three years ago, he told Sixty Minutes: "Nuclear is a dirty word because the stuff ends up in nuclear weapons, because the waste is highly toxic, highly carcinogenic, lasts for incredibly long periods of time ... it’s not the right path for Australia to take."
And at the ALP national conference two years ago he said: “I have long been opposed to uranium mining and I remain opposed to it. I am unapologetic about this. In fact, I am proud of it.”
Garrett may have forgotten the strong arguments against uranium mining, but there are many who still proudly oppose it. And with good reason. Apart from the risks associated with actual mining, such as groundwater contamination, the significant and still unsolved problem of nuclear waste remains: there is no safe, lasting way to dispose of it.
Similarly, who can know that the resources company Quasar owned by military hardware company General Atomics will run the mine without thinking immediately of the potential the uranium will end up in nuclear weapons? The only safe place for uranium is in the ground, undisturbed.
But such matters as environmental threats and nuclear proliferation are apparently not the issue: faced with accusations of hypocrisy, Garrett told the media he was following ALP policy that it showed he was a “team player”.
Party solidarity and discipline is fine when it is coupled with real processes of internal democracy and political honesty, when policy is properly debated and voted on by the membership then clearly and openly presented to the public.
The ALP, however, is a party whose leadership has complete contempt for democracy. Decisions made at ALP conferences are often overridden, and the opinions and desires of its members denigrated or ignored. The insertion of Garrett as the candidate for Kingsford-Smith in 2004, against the wishes of the local ALP branch, is just one example.
And as for political honesty, the ALP has shown it is willing to do tricky preference deals with anyone to ensure that progressive candidates don't get near electoral victory. One such deal was done with the Nationals in 1984 that made sure Garrett, then a Senate candidate for the Nuclear Disarmament Party, just missed out on a Senate seat.
Disdainful and dismissive of old supporters who believed in him, rolling in money, and willing to keep trading on his past activity for political and personal gain, Garrett may not hold much political sway within the modern ALP, but he and it are a perfect match.
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SYDNEY MORNING HERALD Wednesday July 15, 2009
Uranium mine decision not taken lightly: Garrett Dead Heart ... Environment Minister Peter Garrett sings with Midnight Oil. (Paul Rovere)
Approving a uranium mine in South Australia was not a decision taken lightly, federal Environment Minister and former anti-nuclear campaigner Peter Garrett says.
The former Midnight Oil frontman - whose repertoire includes songs against the nuclear industry, such as Dead Heart - announced yesterday the approval for the Four Mile Mine, 550 kilometres north of Adelaide.
The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has condemned the mine, saying its chemical and radioactive waste would leach into groundwater.
But Mr Garrett said he had "set the bar to the highest level" to protect the environment, and would apply world's best practice to regulation.
"I made absolutely sure before taking what was a difficult decision that I received expert advice from Australia's best scientists," he told reporters in Melbourne today.
"The supervising scientists and Geoscience Australia have both provided independent reports attesting that this will be world's best practice in terms of disposal and that the monitoring regime is an absolutely rigorous one."
Standing on the stage of the Esplanade Hotel in Melbourne, Mr Garrett denied he felt compromised by the decision.
"I joined the Labor Party, I became a member of the Government," he said.
"And I said at the time that I would accept as a team player the decisions that Government took.
"This was a matter that was determined by the national conference of the party two years ago, and the Government's policy's been clear ever since."
He admitted he had "strong views" about uranium mining.
"We had the opportunity to canvass those views ... that debate has been settled by the national conference and the policy of the Government is clear," he said.
He refused to rule out approving further uranium mines, but said that was a matter for state governments "as to whether other proposals come through".
AAP
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THE AGE Melbourne Wednesday July 16, 2009
 Death a reminder of nuclear's deadly power
Larry Buttrose
- There are much safer ways to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
A FEW weeks ago, a neighbour from our street left a message in our letterbox informing us that his wife A, had died, and that a memorial service would be held.
It was very sad to read. A was a delightful young woman. The couple had come to parties at our home, and she was elegant, charming and witty, even though she had little voice, weakened by the cancer in her throat. The reason she had cancer, and would eventually die, leaving her husband and child, was Chernobyl.
 A and her husband had come to Australia from Poland. After one of the reactors at Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power station blew up in 1986, its plume of lethal fall-out was carried on the winds far and wide. Poland was next door; it shares a border with Ukraine, and A had been affected by the radiation.
After they came to Australia and re-settled, she fell ill. Her husband said the doctors had told him that they had never seen such a cancer. Last year he took A to Germany for special treatment, but, after a decade of fighting the cancer with enormous bravery, A died.
We were unable to attend the memorial service because we had a sick newborn. Instead one night I placed a sympathy card in their letterbox. It felt a pathetically small gesture in the face of the tragedy that had occurred inside their home.
Former prime minister John Howard, towards the end of his time in office, began promoting nuclear power for Australia. It was put forward as a solution to global warming something he never believed people were causing anyway but in reality it was a scheme business saw a buck in and still does.
The threat of nuclear power, like the threat of nuclear weapons, has not gone away simply because we have other things on our minds now such as the global economic crisis.
Big business will keep telling us there is no other solution to the problems created by its extremely profitable burning of fossil fuels, other than for it to generate more profits through dangerous, waste-creating, weapons-proliferating nuclear power, which at the very least will create a profound toxic hazard for thousands of generations to come, if we don't blow ourselves up first.
They will assure us that people like A died because of an old reactor, a Soviet reactor, a commo reactor nothing like the turbo-charged ultra-modern ones they want to foist on us, clean enough to eat your lunch off. They will try to explain away Three Mile Island, blasts at Japanese reactors, the leaking of radon gas, and all the rest. They will tell us, wrongly, that only nuclear energy can step in to provide the baseload power that coal now provides. They will tell us that the world in which men like them have profited through warming up, now needs their nuclear power plants to cool down.
The Rudd Government also sees a buck in nuclear power, albeit overseas for now, where we can see no evil. This week it opened the door for further expansion of uranium mining and royalties from it with Environment Minister Peter Garrett approving the Four Mile mine in South Australia.
But there is another way. Recently, I received a letter informing me that the solar cells I had applied for and gained approval for under the Federal Government's rebate scheme would be installed early next month. We expect these cells to provide nearly all the power we need for our home. On a yearly basis we expect minimal or no net draw of electricity from power stations, and our greenhouse gas quotient to fall to an effective zero.
I believe A would have been delighted to see those solar cells go up on our roof.
In a better, smarter world, every home and building would be generating solar power from its roof and fuelling the coming plug-in electric cars from them too.
We do not need risky nuclear power. Rather, we need the imagination to see there are so many other, safer, ways to generate electricity, without the risk of more Chernobyls, and the deaths of thousands of people like our neighbour.
A major component in this smart energy mix is power from the sun, which is indeed our only safe nuclear reactor.
The death of A was a terrible tragedy. Our task is to ensure that B, C and D do not follow her.
Larry Buttrose is an author and journalist.
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