The Federal Government is refusing to release any details of the land purchase for radioactive waste management. Rex Patrick follows the money trail.
In 2023, the current Minister for Resources confessed to the Senate that the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) had spent $108.6 million not finding a place for a National Radioactive Waste Management Facility (NRWMF).
In July 2023, Federal Court Justice Natalie Charlesworth set aside a November 2021 declaration made by then Minister Keith Pitt that Napandee, a 211-acre property near Kimba in SA, was to be the future site of the NRWMF. Pitt’s declaration for this site was nine years in the making, but he and the Department had botched the site selection process.
Not the way to select a facility
If you wanted to select a site for a national facility to store radioactive waste, you’d look to the storage requirements, including technical, environmental, geological (such as earthquake tendency), social, and indigenous cultural and heritage considerations. And then you’d look for sites that met all those requirements.
That’s not what DISR did.
In September 2012, the Government released a notice of intention to conduct a nationwide request for land owners to nominate land for the NRWMF. The official call for nominations was conducted between 2 March and 5 May 2015.
A sweetener was added to entice landowners; the successful land seller would get four times the market value. It was quite an extraordinary proposition – it wasn’t as though the Government was intending to compulsorily acquire land from an unwilling seller.
But, why not? The geniuses who concocted the plan in DISR knew only too well that the extra money was just taxpayers’ money.
Buy, and then sell back
On 26 November 2021, the Government declared land in Napandee, owned by the Baldock family*, would be the site for the facility.
Minister’s Decision (Source: DISR)
Three days later, the Minister issued a press release stating the Government had acquired the land.
MWM is trying to get access to the land sale contract and the purchase price, using FOI. But access to it has been refused. You paid, but are not allowed to know.
FOI Refusal (Source: DISR)
The FOI decision is now the subject of challenge, where the Information Commissioner will be the adjudicator.
Last week, the Minister for Resources also refused to answer a formal “how much” question asked by Senator Lambie.
What we do know is that, after the Federal Court overturned Pitt’s site selection decision, the Government sold the land back to the Baldock family for $1.27m.
Local scuttlebutt is that the Department spent $10m of taxpayers’ money buying that land – almost 8 times the market value. The refusal by the Department and the Minister to give sale price answers under FOI or, respectively, to the Senate adds suspicion that this is correct.
Given previous examples, it doesn’t take much effort to believe this sort of thing can happen when you look back on other problematic procurements by Departments under the Coalition Government, like when Eastern Australia Agriculture Pty Ltd insisted on an optimistic $2,000 per megalitre for a Murray-Darling water buyback and the Government haggled the price up to $2,745 per megalitre.
Or when the Department of Infrastructure acquired the Western Sydney Airport ‘Leppington Triangle’ land for $30m, when it was only valued at $3m.
Leppington Triangle scandal: taxpayers stump up $30m for land worth $3m
Maladministration or something more sinister?
It’s unheard of that the Senate would be denied past expenditure information on land at Napandee.
The Government has surely overpaid for the site, even after meeting their own unexplained ‘4x price’ rule, by $4 million, but possibly by $9 million if the scuttlebutt is correct.
At best, the Government has engaged in a farce. The Department knew that the path they had taken to select Napandee was flawed.
On 1 February 2020, Senator Matt Canavan, who preceded Pitt as the Minister for Resources, announced Napandee as the site to host Australia’s NRWMF. But the Canavan decision was informal.
“I only looked backwards”: A letter to my great grandchildren
Realising the process would be found wanting by a Court, the Government changed tack and on 13 February 2020 introduced legislation into the House of Representatives that would have the Parliament select Napandee as the site.
On 6 March 2020, a senior departmental official, Sam Chard, met with the Mayor of Kimba, during which he said words to the effect that (as recorded in Justice Charlesworth’s decision) ,
parliamentary scrutiny would replace the mechanism for legal challenge under the NRWM Act.
(Disclosure: Ms Chard and the author had a run-in in September of that year in a related controversy MWM can’t publish for legal reasons – but you can read about it here).
DISR and the Government thought they were onto a winning solution because the proposed legislation would shut down the option of challenging the decision in a court (Courts can’t overturn the decisions of Parliament unless they are unconstitutional). The problem was the Senate refused to pass it. So, they went back to the original plan, and Minister Pitt formally made the ministerial site decision on 26 November 2021.
What the FOI has revealed is an extraordinary fact – the land was actually purchased on 11 November 2021, 15 days before Pitt made the decision that it was the Minister’s chosen site.
* Editor’s note: MWM makes no allegation of wrongdoing by the Baldock family. They are merely a beneficiary of DISR maladministration or of their farce.
Rex Patrick is a former Senator for South Australia and, earlier, a submariner in the armed forces. Best known as an anti-corruption and transparency crusader, Rex is also known as the "Transparency Warrior."