Thursday, 23 November, 2006

by Liz Minchin and Lindsay Murdoch
The Age

CANCER cases among Aborigines near Australia's biggest uranium mine appear to be almost double the normal rate, according to a study by the Federal Government's leading indigenous research body.

The study also found there had been no monitoring in the past 20 years of the Ranger mine's impact on the health of local indigenous people. Yet since 1981 there have been more than 120 spillages and leaks of contaminated water at the mine, located in the World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park.

The Age believes the paper by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies will be submitted to the Government's nuclear energy taskforce, which this week released a draft report backing the expansion of uranium mining in Australia.

Prime Minister John Howard strongly supports increasing uranium mining and exports, while Labor leader Kim Beazley is pushing to overturn his party's policy of no new mines.

The study compared Aborigines diagnosed with cancer in the Kakadu region with the cancer rate among all Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory from 1994 to 2003.

It found the diagnosis rate was 90 per cent higher than expected in the Kakadu region, with 27 cases reported. If the diagnosis rate had been proportional to the territory's overall Aboriginal population, there would have been 14 cases.

The authors of the study said the higher cancer rate was "a cause for serious concern, and further investigation is clearly warranted". They called for ongoing health monitoring of all indigenous communities living near current and proposed uranium mines, at $450,000 a year.

Energy Resources of Australia, which operates Ranger, yesterday denied that people living in Jabiru and other communities near the mine were being exposed to abnormal levels of radiation.

"Research and monitoring by ERA and the Commonwealth Supervising Scientist demonstrate that doses to residents of Jabiru and surrounding communities have always been a very small fraction of recommended limits," ERA said in a statement.

Last month ERA, which is majority-owned by mining giant Rio Tinto, announced it would extend the life of Ranger by six years to 2020.

In 2003, after almost two years of hearing submissions, a Senate committee concluded that regulation of the Ranger mine was "flawed, confusing and inadequate". Three years later, the Howard Government has not responded to the committee's recommendations.

Last night the traditional owners of the land on which Ranger operates backed independent monitoring of the health effects of uranium mining. A spokesman for the Mirarr people said while the Office of the Supervising Scientist monitors the mine's environmental impacts, "scant attention has been paid to the health effects of this development".

A spokeswoman for federal Health Minister Tony Abbott said the study's findings on cancer rates were questionable.

NT health department chief executive Robert Griew was also sceptical. "The excess cancers found are not typical of cancers caused by radiation but rather cover the range of cancers that reflect lifestyle issues such as smoking, diet and infection."