End Olympic Dam special treatment

June 6, 2007: Greens want to end Olympic Dam's special treatment - The Greens will move in the South Australian Parliament to scrap exemptions to state laws given to BHP Billiton's Olympic Dam mine in outback SA. The $7 billion BHP Billiton Olympic Dam project is planned to become the world’s biggest uranium producer, the third or fourth largest copper mine, and one of Australia’s largest gold mines...

Greens MLC Mark Parnell will introduce a private member's bill to remove the mining company's exemptions from laws on Aboriginal heritage, environment protection and natural resource management. He says the exemptions were granted 25 years ago and times have changed.

Mr Parnell is also concerned that BHP Billiton is not bound by the same water use laws as other companies, giving it an unfair advantage. "I think that there are certainly problems with water resources. This mine does not have to comply with the same regime as everyone else and they're also not bound by the same pollution laws that other companies have to operate under," he said. "If the company is as good as the Government says then there should be no problem in removing these special exemptions.

"I think now that the only fair way is to make sure that all industrial players in this state operate under the same rules. You shouldn't have special rules for your favourite companies and other laws for the rest."

A spokesman for BHP Billiton says the indenture legislation does not allow the company to evade its legal obligations and the Olympic Dam mine is the most intensively regulated operation in SA.

BHP Billiton is considering a further major expansion of Olympic Dam to more than double its current production capacity - proposing to expand its mining and processing from around 200,000 tonnes per year of copper to approximately 500,000 tonnes per year. BHP Billiton would then be the world's biggest spender on an open cut mine. It would be a bigger hole than Kalgoorlie's "Super Pit", with more than a pit 3.6km x 3.65km and 1km deep.

Olympic Dam has long term contracts for the sale of uranium oxide concentrates to customers in the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Canada and the United States.

It is expected that at least 160 million tonnes of radioactive waste will be produced over the life-span of Olympic Dam mine. The waste includes radioactive wash water known as tailings which are stored in 75 hectare retention ponds with levees 30 metres high.

The Olympic Dam operations secured exemptions to the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988, the Development Act 1993, the Environmental Protection Act 1993, the Freedom of Information Act 1991, the Mining Act 1971, Natural Resources Act 2004 (including the Water Resources Act 1997)

This raft of exemptions embodied in the Roxby Downs Indenture Act effectively places this mine outside the law protecting accepted social, environmental and cultural values, and makes the company’s commitments to complying with strict standards manifestly unbelievable.

Radioactive and highly acidic tailings are a by-product of the milling process at Olympic Dam. Currently these are stored in a Tailings Dam called the Tailings Retention System (TRS). This system is vast, covering more than 500 hectares and standing 10 metres in height. More than 10 million tonnes of tailings per year are added to this massive reservoir.

In 1994 a massive leak from the TRS was reported. Over four years, three million cubic metres of liquid leaked through the aquifer.

Meanwhile, Safework SA is investigating an explosion at the Olympic Dam site in May. Contact was made with explosive during drilling work, causing the explosion. A worker was treated for injuries caused by rock debris.

In July 2005, a worker died while blasting a tunnel at the Olympic Dam mine.

SOURCES:
ABC News
Mine Web
ABC News
BHP
BHP: olympic dam eis
Wikipedia - Olympic_Dam
Olympic Dam Mine
MPI
ANAWA

Street Action - Blocking the G8 - Germany

JUNE 6, 2007: Tens of thousands of people have marched through the north-east German port of Rostock, 25 kilometres from the Baltic resort of Heiligendamm, where invited leaders of the world's richest nations will begin their three-day G8 meeting. More blockades have been planned to disrupt the conference of global leaders.

Why block the G8 meeting? "Neoliberal capitalist globalisation – for which the G8 stands – increases the gap between the poor and the rich every day. The G8 claim they are combating global destitution, whereas they and those whose interests they represent are responsible for hunger, wars and environmental destruction.

That is why we will deny the G8 any legitimacy. We are not addressing the G8 with any demands, but say "No!". In order to express our clear "No!", we will not simply demonstrate. Instead we will actively thwart the G8 and block the access roads to the meeting place, which is used by numerous diplomats, translators and supply vehicles in order to get to Heiligendamm where the G8 summit will take place..."

On Monday, June 4th, anti-G8 actions and protest focussed on the demands for freedom of movement and equal rights for all.

Several decentralised actions took place: a demonstration with several thousand participants at the Immigration Centre in Rostock and another at the Sonnenblumen House in Lichtenhagen, where the Nazis attacked refugees in 1992. These were followed by a big march and rally in Rostock, which police restrictions and delays, but finally made it to the final rally at the city harbour. Decentralised actions also took place in other cities throughout the world.

On Sunday 3rd June, organisers said 80,000 people had taken part in a big demonstration, while Police put the figure at 30,000. Police sent in two anti-riot squads which led to clashes. "There is no justification for such violence against people and we formally distance ourselves from it," one protestor said.

The Rostock march was the biggest event of a week of demonstrations against the meeting of the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States. Sunday's march began in a peaceful atmosphere. Protesters carried banners reading "Make Capitalism History". Others called for the world's most industrialised nations to fulfil their pledges to increase aid to Africa.

Protesters intend to block roads around Rostock airport from Wednesday to prevent the leaders and their delegations from reaching the summit venue. Organisers said they were expecting up to 100,000 people from anti-poverty and anti-corporate globalisation groups to demonstrate near where the leaders will gather. At a meeting of European and Asian foreign ministers in the northern city of Hamburg police used tear gas and batons to disperse a crowd of demonstrators.

All around the G8 venue tented camps have sprung up as affinity groups organise an alternative summit to highlight poverty and inequality. Dirk Mirow, a 37-year-old German taking part in the demonstration, said he was hoping the summit would achieve a major breakthrough on capping greenhouse gases. "I am here to protest for the climate because I have a two-year-old daughter and I'm wondering what sort of world we are creating for her," he said.

Tthe luxury beachfront hotel on the Baltic coast where the meeting will be held is surrounded by a heavily guarded fence topped with barbed wire. An underwater barrier has been erected to prevent ships approaching the hotel. German authorities have mounted an extensive security operation, with up to 16,000 police on duty.

Authorities can become brutal at G8 summits, most notoriously in the Italian city of Genoa in 2001 when a demonstrator was shot dead by police.

Check the Indymedia Timeline for immediate updates

SOURCES:
Resistance Against the G8
Why do you want to blockade?
G8 Protests Timeline
ABC News
ABC News
de.indymedia.org
Call for Action: June 5th, 2007
Germany: Pics from G8 protests - INFOSHOP

Australia not ready for nuclear; WA to ban uranium mining/power plants

June 5, 2007 - The head of ANSTO, Australia's peak nuclear science body, Dr Ziggy Switkowski, says Australians are not yet convinced of the need for a nuclear energy industry. He says building a nuclear energy industry in Australia would take at least 15 years to implement. Despite 50 years into the best funded development of any energy technology - nuclear energy is still beset with problems.

WA Premier Alan Carpenter has said the WA Government’s position is very clear: "we are against uranium mining and nuclear energy. I will do all I can to ensure WA remains free of nuclear power facilities."
Dr Ziggy Switkowski says building a nuclear energy industry in Australia would take at least 15 years to set up a regulatory regime, do the appropriate environmental checks and vendor selection process - "getting into the queue, ordering reactors and building them, which we know takes a number of years... 10 at the earliest, 15 more likely," he told ABC television.

Dr Switkowski - chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), reported to Prime Minister Howard last year on the viability of a nuclear industry in Australia. He also cast doubt on the effectiveness of a planned government advertising campaign to push nuclear power.

"It would be unprecedented to take a national community, such as we have in Australia, that starts out feeling wary about nuclear power and making them positive about nuclear power within a year or two," Dr Switkowski said. "This is a journey that countries usually take over several years and I think it will take more than one electoral cycle..."

As the nuclear power issue radiates across the country, some say Howard is deliberately diverting funds and attention away from real solutions - by insisting that Australia consider domestic nuclear power generation.

Mr Howard seems intent on pushing something currently illegal, inordinately expensive, reliant on massive government subsidies and far too slow to respond to the immediate challenges of climate change. Indeed, the Federal Government continues to force the issue of nuclear power into the States and Territories, having recently claimed it could override the States on the development of nuclear reactors.

However, the WA Premier says nuclear power stations will be banned in Western Australia under new legislation to be introduced. The Premier said the legislation would also include a referendum trigger if the Commonwealth Government ever tried to override the new State laws. Premier Carpenter said the "anti-nuclear legislation", to be introduced when Parliament resumes in June, would:

"prohibit the construction or operation of a nuclear facility in WA; prohibit the transportation of certain material to a nuclear facility site; and prohibit the connecting of nuclear generation works to an electricity transmission or distribution system..."

"To thwart any attempt by John Howard to override WA, there will be a trigger in the new laws which will see a referendum held if the Commonwealth tries to override the State’s anti-nuclear stance," he said. "“The people of WA will then be able to have their say on the issue if the Commonwealth moves to develop nuclear power facilities in this State. In other words, it could be at the Commonwealth’s political peril if they ever proceeded with such a move."

Mr Carpenter said the State Government is committed to developing natural gas, clean coal and renewable energy sources including geothermal, solar, wave and wind as future energy sources.

Elsewhere in Australia, the possibility of nuclear power is hindered. In Victoria the Nuclear Activities (Prohibitions) Act 1983 prohibits the construction or operation of any nuclear reactor, and consequential amendments to other Acts reinforce this. In NSW the Uranium Mining and Nuclear Facilities (Prohibitions) Act 1986 is similar. In 2007 the Queensland government enacted the Nuclear Facilities Prohibition Act 2006, which is similar (but allows uranium mining).

Other countries using nuclear energy are discovering problems with the industry. In the USA, direct subsidies to nuclear energy totalled $115 billion between 1947 and 1999, with a further $145 billion in indirect subsidies.

In contrast, subsidies to wind/solar combined during the same period amounted to only $5.5 billion. During the first 15 years of development, nuclear subsidies amounted to $15.30 per kWh generated. The comparable figure for wind energy was 46 cents per kWh during its first 15 years of development.

Professor Ian Lowe - Australian Consevation Foundation President - says that despite being 50 years into the best funded development of any energy technology, nuclear energy is still beset with problems.

"Reactors go over budget by billions, decommissioning plants is so difficult and expensive that power stations are kept operating past their useful life, and there is still no solution for radioactive waste. So there is no economic case for nuclear power," said Professor Lowe in 2005.

Dr Jim Green - national nuclear campaigner for Friends of the Earth - says the problem of radioactive waste management is nowhere near resolution. "Not a single repository exists for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste, which is produced at an annual rate of about 10,000 tonnes in nuclear power reactors worldwide," says Dr Green.

"Technologies exist to encapsulate or immobilise radionuclides to a greater or lesser degree, but encapsulated radioactive waste still represents a potential public health and environmental threat that will last for millennia," says Dr Green.

A recent study, conducted by a research team from Georgetown University, Stanford University and UC Berkeley, analysed the costs of electricity from existing US nuclear reactors. It reports that no new nuclear power plants have been built in the United States in nearly 30 years years, in part because they've proved to be poor investments, producing far more expensive electricity than originally promised.

The US nuclear industry provides a direct link to the perils of nuclear weapons. "During my eight years in the White House, every nuclear weapons proliferation issue we dealt with was connected to a nuclear reactor program," says former US Vice President, Al Gore. In 2005, about 19 percent of U.S. electricity generation was produced by 104 nuclear reactors.

Neverhteless, renewable energy is a growing industry. According to Dr Jim Green, renewable energy, mostly hydroelectricity, already supplies 19 per cent of world electricity - compared to nuclear's 16 per cent.

"The share of renewables is increasing," he says, "while nuclear's share is decreasing. Wind power and solar power are growing by 20-30 per cent every year.
In 2004, renewable energy added nearly three times as much net generating capacity as nuclear power," says Dr Green. "In Australia, only 8 per cent of electricity is from renewable energy - down from 10 per cent in 1999."

SOURCES:
WA Premier Media Release
The Age
Sunday Times
The Australian
Lateline - ABC
UIC - Briefing Paper 44
ACF
Azom
Beyond Nuclear - PDFNuclear power: no solution to climate change

Stolen Wages taskforce a win for WA Aboriginals

Stolen Wages taskforce a win for WA Aboriginals

May 31, 2007 - The WA Government has announced that it will establish a taskforce to investigate wages and Commonwealth benefits stolen from Aboriginal people. In some cases, up to 75 per cent of their income was held in Government managed trust funds but never repaid. Brian Wyatt from the Goldfields Land and Sea Council says the compensation owed to Indigenous workers in the Goldfields alone could be up to $150 million...

The announcement coincided with the 40th anniversary of the 1967 referendum that changed the Commonwealth Constitution to allow the Commonwealth Parliament to make special laws regarding indigenous people and enable indigenous people to be included in the national census.

The term 'stolen wages' refers to entitlements and other moneys that should have been paid to indigenous workers but were not. Regulations allowed the Government of the day to hold in trust up to 75 per cent of an indigenous person's wages. There is evidence that some of the workers did not receive their full entitlements.

Greens Senator Rachel Siewert welcomed the announcement having pushed hard for the state to act on the findings of a Senate inquiry: "The West Australian economy was built on the back of the unpaid and under-paid labour of our Aboriginal people," Senator Siewert said. "They were systematically excluded from the benefits of the wealth they created."

"The Senate inquiry found ample evidence of monies being withheld, monies diverted in WA to missions and station coffers, and widespread rorting of trust funds by trustees," said Senator Siewert.

But there is concerned by the announced timeframe as many of the people affected are now elderly and another year of delay will see more of them passing away before justice is achieved.

Brian Wyatt from the Goldfields Land and Sea Council says justice must be done for the people who suffered. "Indications are that the annual indigenous payroll for Goldfields pastoral properties in the 1960s was in the order of $9 million, said Mr Wyatt.

"There were curfews in towns, you know. You had to be out of town by six o'clock, you had to live on designated areas outside of towns and, on top of that, you worked for next to nothing, particularly in the pastoral industry. So it was very, very demeaning I would have thought," he said. "At one mission, in return for a ten shilling a week government accommodation subsidy, Aboriginal people were provided bush shelters and tents with no toilet facilities, and were expected to hunt their own food."

Indigenous Affairs Minister Michelle Roberts said the task force would investigate and make recommendations to try and correct some of the injustices of the past. Mrs Roberts said many of the people affected were likely to have died and a broad repayment scheme, potentially encompassing the families of deceased workers.

The NSW Government set up a trust fund scheme in 2005 to repay wages which were lost between 1900 and 1968 to living claimants and their descendants. In Queensland, Aboriginal people lodged a multi-milliondollar claim for lost wages and entitlements in 2002 and the Government set up a $55.5 million fund which capped claims at $4000 a person.

Mrs Roberts said stolen wages remained an issue for indigenous people. “This is not a report we would be setting up unless we were prepared to take some action and prepared to extend some money at the end of the process,” she said.

Aboriginal Legal Service chief executive Dennis Eggington said the inquiry was overdue and the Government needed to provide meaningful relief by acting on its findings.

----

Recommendation 4 of the Senate Unfinished business inquiry

The committee recommends that:
(a) the Western Australian Government:
(i) urgently consult with Indigenous people in relation to the stolen wages issue; and
(ii) establish a compensation scheme in relation to withholding, underpayment and non-payment of Indigenous wages and welfare entitlements using the New South Wales scheme as a model, and
(b) the Commonwealth Government conduct preliminary research of its archival material in relation to the stolen wages issues in Western Australia.

---

Sources:
Greens Media
GLSC Media
Inquiry into Stolen Wages - Senate
Sunday Times
The West
ABC
PERTH INDYMEDIA

Pine Gap 4 on Trial

From the newswire: Pine Gap Trial begins
MAY 30, 2007 - The "Pine Gap 4" were arrested after breaking into Pine Gap US Spy base to do a ‘Citizens Inspection’ in December 2005 - to highlight the secret base's role in the war in Iraq. They now face a possible seven years in prison after the Attorney General, Philip Ruddock, consented to charges under the cold-war Defence (Special Undertakings) Act 1952. Under the previously unused law, the Attorney-General can declare any area a prohibited zone. Anyone in breach of the law faces a maximum of seven years in jail.

While much of its operation is secret, Pine Gap is known to be involved in numerous military satellite operations including the sattelite targetting used for U.S. bombings in Iraq and Adfghanistan.

The group say Pine Gap does not actually belong to the Commonwealth - in fact Traditional custodian (Arrente man Patrick Hayes) had given the group permission to be on the land time of the "inspection". Donna Mulhearn, one of the accused, said the charges are clearly political and reflect the Government's persecution of citizens who challenge their agenda of war. "This case shows that the level of control they are seeking is excessive, and we must curb the actions of Governments in attempting to control," she said in 2006.

Three of the group pleaded not guilty in the Supreme Court in Alice Springs this week as the trial began with an application for the defendants to be placed under house arrest. But this was quickly thrown out of court. Judge Thomas upheld the constitutional rights of the Pine Gap Four by rejecting the "extreme" bail conditions the Crown had requested.

Christians Against All Terrorism (CAAT) say they cannot distinguish between the terrorist acts of a suicide bomber in Baghdad, or of a jet bomber in Fallujah. In both cases innocents are murdered and maimed for a political objective. The defendants will be representing themselves in court, as they feel this is the best way to connect with members of the jury. "We want them to understand why we did what we did," said Bryan Law. "We are in the hands of the jury." PINE GAP 6 Website

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