“No!” to Weatherill’s nuclear referendum

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Nick G.

Opposition to SA Premier Jay Weatherill’s push for an international nuclear waste dump refuses to go away.

This is despite the Premier’s war of attrition against SA public opinion.

Weatherill had previously said that the dump would not go ahead without the support of Aboriginal communities, without broad public support, and without bipartisan political support.

Every Aboriginal community has rejected the proposal.  A Citizens’ Jury has rejected the proposal.  The State Liberals and key Independents (including the Xenophon Team) have rejected the proposal.

So Weatherill has now announced that there will be a referendum on the matter, but “not any time soon”.

He hopes that by playing for time he will be able to retrieve the doomed proposal.

“Weatherill is anti-nuclear, trust us” 

Weatherill’s “Left” faction members in the SA government are turning themselves inside out trying to rationalise Jay’s public support for the dump.

“Come on, you know that Jay is anti-nuclear,” one told me when challenged about Weatherill’s continuing push for the dump. 

“He just has to go through this process to get the nuclear lobby off his back.”

If that was his motive, he could simply stand up to the lobby and use existing State legislation that makes it a crime to transport, dump or argue for the transportation and dumping, of nuclear waste in SA.

Imperialist nuclear symposium opposed

Yesterday (Monday Nov 14), registration began for a Waste Management symposium hosted by the local office of the University College London (UCL). 

The symposium was obviously timed in anticipation of a pro-dump outcome from the much-manipulated Citizens’ Jury process.  The timing would have enabled Weatherill to tie a pro-dump outcome into the agenda of some of the world’s biggest imperialist corporations and their military connections.

UCL, as a foreign private tertiary institution, is heavily backed by multinationals and local corporations.  They include SANTOS and BHP-Billiton, one of whose shareholders is Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commissioner Kevin Scarce.

Included in the participants at the symposium is US imperialist giant Westinghouse, a major player in the military-industrial complex, a builder of nuclear plants and nuclear submarines.  French state-owned nuclear industry utility AREVA is also there.

Another US giant, Lockheed Martin, is represented by its wholly-owned subsidiary Sandia National Laboratories (SNL).  According to Wikipedia, it “is Sandia's mission to maintain the reliability and surety of nuclear weapon systems, conduct research and development in arms control and non-proliferation technologies, and investigate methods for the disposal of the United States' nuclear weapons program's hazardous waste”.

About 80 concerned citizens stood outside the UCL office in the central Adelaide square, Tarndanyangga, during business hours, to show their opposition to the symposium.

The Anti-Nuclear Coalition, the No Dump Alliance and a host of other organisations and individuals will ensure that the level of struggle is lifted against this disgraceful proposal.

If Weatherill continues to pursue his “softly, softly catchee dumpee” tactic, he will have no-ne to blame but himself when he is finally dumped from office.

 

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