Written for an assignment.

Partners Political Hard News Story on 2019 Federal Election.

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Gabriela Caeli Sumampow

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It was May 17, the day before the Australian Federal Election. Jim was seated at the back of Preston Library. He was working on a report about Generation IV Reactors and the outrageously large and expensive reactors currently in operation.

 

Having only one day of Scott Morrison left, Jim was happily anticipating a Labor government win. However, he was as shocked and disappointed as everyone else while he watched the Liberals tip the scale to their favor, seat after seat, and won the election once again.

 

Jim Green is a National Nuclear Campaigner for Friends of the Earth Australia. He has an Honors degree in Public Health and a PhD for his work about Lucas Heights Nuclear Research Reactors.

 

Friends of the Earth Australia is one of the 73 national member groups of Friends of the Earth International, the world’s largest grassroots environmental network aiming to create environmentally sustainable and socially just societies.

 

Jim stumbled across examples of countries using nuclear power as a cover for nuclear weapon programs when researching for his PhD. He eventually grew concerned about the nuclear industry’s “secrecy and dishonesty”, thus beginning his involvement with anti-nuclear movements.

 

“It wasn’t just the occasional rouge state, as they’d like to call them. This is a systematic pattern, and you can see it all around the world,” he said.

 

Although nuclear power is no longer a concern because it got “ridiculously expensive”, Jim is still as actively involved in anti-nuclear campaigns as he has been in the past 20 years. His biggest campaign is against the dumping of nuclear waste to the Aboriginal land of South Australia.

 

Jim was walking outside Preston Library. He stopped to look at a mural of the late Yami Lester, an Aboriginal man whose eyesight was taken away by the British Nuclear Bomb Tests.

 

“20 years ago, the Federal Government wanted to build a nuclear waste dump on Aboriginal land in South Australia and there were people who were still suffering the impacts of the British Nuclear Bomb Tests,” he said, “The psychological trauma just ripples through generations."

 

The British Government, with support and agreement from the Australian Government, carried out nuclear tests between 1952 and 1963 at Western Australia’s Monte Bello Islands, and at South Australia’s Emu Field and Maralinga, according to the National Archives of Australia. 

 

The nuclear industry, according to Jim, has become “so desperate in the last couple of years” that instead of denying the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, they openly and positively acknowledge them.

 

Despite facing a lack of resources resulting in “unfair" battles and “almost all of the workers being left unpaid”, Jim has won all of his campaigns against nuclear waste dumps and some of his campaigns against uranium mines. He said it’s because of the campaigners’ hard work and “partly because the economics don’t stack up”.

 

However, the Liberal government, a government against renewables and in support of coal, gas, and fracking, won the 2019 Federal Election held on May 18 - which makes Jim’s fight to stop nuclear dumps a lot tougher.

 

“At the moment, I’m still shocked,” Jim said, recalling the shocking election results on Saturday night.

 

“Even though nuclear power is totally uneconomic, and I think the Prime Minister understands that, there’s a relentless push to repeal federal laws which ban nuclear power in Australia,” Jim said. “It's only the far right who are promoting nuclear power, with very few exceptions,” he added.

 

There was a “growing progressive sentiment” in Australia, Jim said, and that is why “we've had the first progressive Australian Labor Party for 40 years”. But he was wrong. “There was not a progressive sentiment in Australia, it is still a conservative country,” he said.

 

If a Labor government won, Jim would not have to fight. He said he would be one hundred percent sure the bans against nuclear power will remain. 

 

Jim acknowledged that the nine Greens senators and the small number of Independents is “one of the very few good things that came out of the election". He said this means the government will have to come up with legislations supported by either the Labor party or the Greens. “They'll pass legislations to the lower house of Parliament, but they won’t be able to get through the senates,” Jim added.

 

Jim is very optimistic about the future. He is still persistent on being anti-nuclear rather than pro-nuclear because “everything they try just fails”, he said. “Nuclear waste is the issue we are going to have to deal with most in Australia. That’s a battle that’s been going on for decades and will continue to go on for decades, unfortunately,” he added.

 

“As long as there are nuclear battles to be won in Australia, I’m quite happy to keep fighting it,” Jim said.