Senator David Shoebridge was one of the amazing speakers at the recent IPAN national conference. All presentations will be available to view on the IPAN website ipan.org.au
A great interview to read in whole but here is the final section.....
So, Senator Shoebridge, despite the full throttle AUKUS developments that the constituency has been subjected to since March 2023, you’re continuing to say that there is a way out of AUKUS and the imposition of these nuclear waste dumps?
If we get to a dystopian future, where we start receiving thousands of tonnes of other countries’ nuclear waste, there will be no path back from that. They will never accept that waste back.
That’s the kind of cruel bargain that the Albanese government is opening up.
I say this especially for First Nations peoples, who have been protecting this continent for tens of thousands of years. This is a particularly cruel bargain that the Albanese government is opening up.
I remain incredibly hopeful that the Australia public are increasingly seeing this for what it is.
Each time political support for AUKUS is tested, it falls and falls. And that is because people can see that we have a political class in both the Labor Party and the Coalition, who are willing to sell out our national interest – poison our land, poison our water – because they’re so keen to follow the US lead and be seen as a sub-imperial power, as a deputy sheriff, they can rely upon.
This latest piece of legislation, that opens up this country to the dumping of US and UK nuclear waste, is just the most recent example of that surrender of our sovereignty: the surrender of our national interest to these so-called great powerful friends.
It is an incredibly dangerous pathway, but it is one that we can still step aside from.