by Dr. Alison Broinowski
(Published with permision from the Author for not-for-profit public awareness purposes)

“In late June and early July, just as the Howard Government was dispatching the army to Aboriginal communities to deal with sexual abuse, the U.S. military was involved for two weeks in northern Australia in the biggest ever joint exercise, Talisman Sabre.

Most Australians saw no connection.

Military training areas, uranium mines, sites for future nuclear waste dumps and now Aboriginal land seized by the Commonwealth are dots across the Australian map.

Several of them are connected by the Adelaide-Darwin railway. Having been many times promised, the $1.3 billion link from Alice Springs to Darwin was surprisingly found viable in 1999. By January, 2004, the train was running. The only tenderer, according to research at University of Technology Sydney, was the FreightLink consortium led by Halliburton (then headed by US vice-president Dick Cheney), with state, territory and federal contributions.

FreightLink owns the railway and can operate it for 50 years. It has contracted UK firm Serco, to staff and service the train.

Serco, which manages British nuclear power plants, gained a reputation in 2000 for sacking workers without AWAs at Australian naval bases in Jervis Bay.

In November, 2006, FreightLink was reported to be facing its third annual loss in a row. It tried to sell a majority stake in the railway for $360 million, without success. The owners promised to invest an additional $14 million over three years, presumably betting on the line’s long-term profitability.

It must expect – or have been promised – the railway will serve the potentially lucrative nuclear and defence industries.

Between 2004 and 2006, the Australian and U.S. governments announced more collaboration between American forces and the ADF, including missile defence (Star Wars) training, and interoperability. Several defence facilities in northern Australia have been built or expanded:

at Bradshaw and Delamere in the Northern Territory, Shoalwater Bay in Queensland and Yampi Sound and Geraldton in Western Australia.

The railway passes near several bases, the biggest uranium deposits in the world and the mines at Olympic Dam (Roxby Downs), Beverley, Ranger and Honeymoon.

Freightlink’s main business now is transporting iron ore, manganese and uranium to Darwin for export. In June, 2006, just before Prime Minster John Howard set up a nuclear power inquiry, businessmen Hugh Morgan, Robert Champion de Crespigny and Ron Walker registered Australian Nuclear Energy. It later emerged they had discussed with Mr Howard a plan to build a nuclear plant near Port Augusta.

(Learn more about Hugh:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Morgan_%28Australian_businessman%29
> snip from Wikipedia

In June 2006, Hugh Morgan formed the company Australian Nuclear Energy with Fairfax chairman Ron Walker and fellow mining executive Robert Champion de Crespigny, planning to build nuclear power plants in Australia. Morgan has a 20% stake in the company.

Controversially, Prime Minister John Howard revealed that he had a discussion with Mr Walker about the company days before he announced an inquiry into nuclear power (the inquiry predicted that Australia could have 25 nuclear reactors producing a third of the country’s electricity by 2050)

Formerly an outspoken opponent of Aboriginal Land Rights (Morgan claimed Native Title threatened Australia’s sovereignty), Morgan has more recently spoken of reconciling mining with Aboriginal welfare. With newly introduced, less transparent conservation agreements under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act , Morgan has flagged how an internationally owned nuclear waste repository could now be built (such as the one recently announced on Aboriginal land).

see more about Ron and Robert
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Walker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Champion_de_Crespigny

The railway would take uranium ore to Darwin for export, enrichment and fabrication, and bring it back to Port Augusta as nuclear fuel for the reactor. The spent fuel
would then go back by rail to Darwin for export, or return to the NT for disposal at a waste site.

The only “suitable” sites for disposal of nuclear waste under federal government control are in the NT. If the Commonwealth takes control of as many as 80 Aboriginal communities through five-year leases in the name of
protecting children, it will put vast land areas at the Federal Government’s discretion.

The Government has begun to repeal parts of its 1999 legislation prohibiting nuclear activities.

But it is unlikely before the 2007 election to say where or how Australian nuclear waste will be stored.

The U.S., meanwhile, has more than 47,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste to get rid of, because its new site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, does not meet safety requirements.

The controlling American interest in the railway indicates Australia will store American waste too.

It takes more than the Ghan railway to connect the dots in an election year. A lot more is happening than Australians are being told.

..........

Dr Alison Broinowski is a former Australian diplomat
and is now a visiting fellow at the Australian National
University’s Faculty of Asian Studies. Her latest book
is Allied and Addicted.