A business case to establish a nuclear submarine base at Port Kembla or Newcastle is being prepared for the NSW Cabinet, but the public is being kept totally in the dark. Transparency Warrior Rex Patrick reports.
It’s a radioactive issue in more ways than one, with no one in either the Federal or NSW government prepared to talk about it with the people they govern.
Discussions between the two parties are clearly well advanced, with a final NSW Cabinet submission in preparation – a fact that has been kept secret until the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure inadvertently revealed it in NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) proceedings.
The Cat’s Out of the Bag (Source: NSW Government)
When confronted with this revelation, Senator David Shoebridge remarked, “Two levels of Labor government are secretly planning to dump a nuclear submarine base on NSW residents and neither of them has the guts to even discuss it. The Albanese government is shovelling hundreds of billions of public dollars into the AUKUS funnel, and
what we will end up getting is zero submarines but a bunch of new US bases.
AUKUS is big business
Announcements over the weekend show that AUKUS is big business, with $12 billion to be spent on shipyard and naval facilities in Western Australia.
No doubt NSW Premier Chris Minns is salivating.
It’s clear that the question of basing nuclear submarines in NSW is an important one. There will be opinions for and against, but one thing is for sure: without information, public debate won’t occur, or if it does, it will be ill-informed.
“The two shortlisted sites for wildly unpopular nuclear submarine bases, Port Kembla and Newcastle, are both Labor heartlands,” remarked Shoebridge, a former member of the NSW Legislative Council and now NSW senator.
“Port Kembla and the Illawarra would go into open revolt if the Labor government was honest about their plans, and this explains a lot about the secrecy”.
“This secrecy risks deep generational betrayal of Labor voters in both these regions and
all to keep on the right side of Donald Trump’s America.
Shoebridge seems rather unimpressed. So too does his counterpart in the NSW Legislative Council, Sue Higginson, who told MWM, “Premier Chris Minns is picking up where Peter Dutton left off with a plan to dump nuclear waste at sites in regional NSW. Minns is going further by hosting nuclear subs; he’s making us and our ports vulnerable military targets, and it’s all happening behind closed doors.”
Transparency flip-flop
In May this year, I used the NSW Government Information Public Access (GIPA) Act to ask the NSW Government for access to correspondence they’d had with the Federal Government that related to the use of Port Kembla or Newcastle as a future submarine base, and any briefs prepared for NSW’s Ministers.
The response, received in June, indicated that there were 24 “internal emails” and an “Advice”, but stated that I couldn’t have them because they were “Cabinet information”.
I appealed the decision to NCAT, arguing, as per the NSW Cabinet Practice Manual, that Cabinet privilege is waived when documents are shared with officials from another polity.
That caused a backflip from the NSW Government, with them writing to the Tribunal asking that the decision be remitted back to them to allow them to reconsider their position.
Port Kembla? more nuclear submarine base secrecy. What’s the scam?
The Tribunal heard their request and ordered them to reconsider the access refusal, and to do so, pronto.
And so it was on 08 September that they sent me a new decision. They’d reconsidered their position … and … the public are still not allowed to see any of the documents, for new and different reasons.
The matter will now proceed to a contested hearing on 18 December in Sydney.
NSW fait acompli participation
Everything the NSW Government does it does for the people of NSW. Everything the NSW Government does is paid for by the people of NSW. The GIPA Act recognises this and allows NSW citizens to part the curtains on the windows of Government buildings to see the information that belongs to them and affects them.
But the NSW Government is having none of that … their arguments for secrecy amount to a desire not to prejudice their relations with the Federal Government, not to prejudice the way ministers in NSW go about their business, and not to have the internal deliberations of public servants subject to public review.
It’s a case of ‘officials’ interest over public interest’.
Whether you think a nuclear submarine base at Port Kembla or Newcastle is a good or bad idea, the NSW public has a right to participate in such a decision. But the way this is lining up is that the NSW Government will look at the business case , make a decision, and then present the people of NSW with a fait accompli.
Democracy comes from the Greek word ‘demos’, meaning ‘the people’, and ‘kratia’, meaning ‘rule’: that is, ‘government by the people’. Maybe someone should remind Chris Minns of this.
Radioactive secrets. Fight to hide AUKUS nuclear waste sites gets absurd