Australian government sinks to a new low

(Above: No Nuclear Waste Dump rally, Adelaide 2016.    Photo by Bill Doyle)

 Written by: Bill F. on 19 March 2023

Just when many people thought that the AUKUS deal and nuclear submarines was the limit to Australia’s subservience to US imperialism! Now the Albanese Labor government has not only agreed to the US ‘neither confirm or nor deny’ policy for nuclear weapons on its visiting B-52 bombers and nuclear submarines, they have also agreed to “manage” the nuclear waste from “our” submarines at the end of their use-by date.

So, in addition to the proposed nuclear medicine waste dump in Kimba, South Australia, which is hotly opposed by the Barngarla people and local farmers (see Barngarla court case begins with early morning rally), there will be another site on Defence land somewhere not yet declared. Safe storage of high grade radioactive waste for hundreds of thousands of years is unproven, but the huge risks of removing and transporting this material are well known and will alarm the workers, towns and farming and indigenous communities that have to cop this environmental crime. Already the Western Australian and South Australian state governments are bluing over this.

And it’s not as though Australia will have the necessary skills and expertise to do this, possibly within the next ten or twenty years. Nuclear submarines are the thin edge of the wedge for the corporations to line up and lobby for a full nuclear industry, complete with uranium mining and export, nuclear power stations and contracted international nuclear ‘waste management’.

This is the essence of US imperialism – the military hand and the industrial hand clapping over the prospect of new profits and new missile bases for their hegemony over the Indo-Pacific. They don’t give a damn for the millions of people threatened by their war plans, or for the environment polluted by their chemicals and fossil fuel emissions, or for the cruel loss of biodiversity they cause across the planet. Their class rule is enforced by the US government which bullies, sanctions and bribes other governments/leaders to cower before it, in pursuit of “US interests”.