Thursday, 15 November, 2007

by Emma King
Environment Centre of the Northern Territory

Environment groups will today step up their campaign against a planned federal radioactive waste dump in the NT with a series of advertisements in newspapers across the NT and WA.

The ads aim to highlight the controversial dump plan ahead of next weekend’s election and will appear in newspapers in Darwin, Palmerston, Katherine, Tennant Creek, Alice Springs and Perth.

“The radioactive waste dump plan is bad policy based on a broken promise,” said Environment Centre of the NT (ECNT) uranium campaigner Emma King.

“The Government may have gone silent on its nuclear agenda during the election but it still plans to impose this dump on Territorians. We are calling on all the parties to come clean about their views on this dirty industry.

“A healthy democracy depends on a good information flow and we hope that these ads will help inform the community on the political parties’ policy on nuclear issues.”

The newspaper ads follow a series of radio advertisements recently aired in Darwin and an information leaflet highlighting the threat posed by the dump to Darwin Harbour that has been distributed across the Solomon electorate.

The ads and leaflet all promote a web-based election tool – www.votenuclearfree.net – which analyses the nuclear policies of all the political parties and rates their performance.

The Coalition has not met any of the 18 key assessment criteria, Labor has scraped a pass and the Greens and Democrats share the highest rating.