The bipartisan nuclear war against Aboriginal people

Marlene Nungarrayi Bennett said: "Today will go down in the history books of Indigenous Australia on par with the Wave Hill Walk-off, Mabo and Blue Mud Bay. We have shown the Commonwealth and the NLC that we will stand strong for this country. The NLC tried to divide and conquer us but they did not succeed."

Dianne Stokes said: "We will be still talking about our story in the communities up north so no one else has to go through this. We want to let the whole world know that we stood up very strong. We want to thank the supporters around the world that stood behind us and made us feel strong."

After the celebrations, one immediate challenge for Muckaty Traditional Owners is to continue their campaign to have land council boundaries shifted so they can be represented by the Central Land Council instead of the NLC. Kylie Sambo said: "Hopefully we can continue to try and push the boundary for the NLC back up north a bit. We had a good trust there but then they broke it. It's going to be tough, we stood and fought for eight long years and I think we can take on anything now."

What did self-styled Aboriginal leaders such as Warren Mundine and Noel Pearson have to say about the Muckaty dispute? Nothing. In eight years they never once spoke up in support of Muckaty Traditional Owners. Likewise, Australia's self-styled 'pro-nuclear environmentalists' − Adelaide University's Barry Brook, uranium industry consultant Ben Heard, and others − never once voiced concern about the imposition of a nuclear dump on an unwilling Aboriginal community and their silence suggests they couldn't care less about the racism of the industry they so stridently support.

Dumping on South Australia

The failed attempt to establish a dump at Muckaty followed the failed attempt to establish a dump in South Australia. In 1998, the Howard government announced its intention to build a nuclear waste dump near Woomera in South Australia. Leading the battle against the dump were the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, a council of senior Aboriginal women from northern SA. Many of the Kungkas personally suffered the impacts of the British nuclear bomb tests at Maralinga and Emu in the 1950s.

The proposed dump generated such controversy in SA that the federal government hired a public relations company. Correspondence between the company and the government was released under Freedom of Information laws. In one exchange, a government official asked the PR company to remove sand-dunes from a photo to be used in a brochure. The explanation provided by the government official was that: "Dunes are a sensitive area with respect to Aboriginal Heritage". The sand-dunes were removed from the photo, only for the government official to ask if the horizon could be straightened up as well. Terra nullius.

In 2003, the federal government used the Lands Acquisition Act 1989 to seize land for the dump. Native Title rights and interests were extinguished with the stroke of a pen. This took place with no forewarning and no consultation with Aboriginal people.

The Kungkas continued to implore the federal government to 'get their ears out of their pockets', and after six years the government did just that. In the lead-up to the 2004 federal election − after a Federal Court ruling that the federal government had acted illegally in stripping Traditional Owners of their native title rights, and with the dump issue biting politically in SA, the Howard government decided to cut its losses and abandon the dump plan.

The Kungkas wrote in an open letter: "People said that you can't win against the Government. Just a few women. We just kept talking and telling them to get their ears out of their pockets and listen. We never said we were going to give up. Government has big money to buy their way out but we never gave up."

The Kungkas victory had broader ramifications − it was a set-back for everyone who likes the idea of stripping Aboriginal people of their land and their land rights, and it was a set-back for the nuclear power lobby. Senator Nick Minchin, one of the Howard government ministers in charge of the failed attempt to impose a nuclear dump in SA, said in 2005: ''My experience with dealing with just low-level radioactive waste from our research reactor tells me it would be impossible to get any sort of consensus in this country around the management of the high-level waste a nuclear [power] reactor would produce.'' Minchin told a Liberal Party council meeting that ''we must avoid being lumbered as the party that favours nuclear energy in this country'' and that ''we would be political mugs if we got sucked into this''.

Nuclear War