Prime Minister John Howard should be enlisting the help of his Labor predecessor Bob Hawke as he seeks to find political advantage in suggesting that Labor’s new position on uranium, nuclear energy and global warming is more than a little hypocritical.

For whereas Mr Rudd is opposed to Australia having any involvement other than shipping yellow cake overseas, Mr Hawke, like Mr Howard, can see an advantage in Australia doing much, much more. For Mr Hawke, in fact, having a leader advocating Australia as a nuclear waste dump for the world is an issue of leadership. John Howard could not agree more as he presses on with his determination to consider Australia’s role in every part of the nuclear cycle.

Mr Hawke’s view about storing waste was given in September 2005 at a gathering of Oxford University alumni held in Sydney. The unscripted discussion by a panel of ex-Oxford graduates that included Hawke, the Opposition Leader and Liberal Health Minister Tony Abbott included the following remarks as reported by the ABC’s AM program:

BOB HAWKE: Australia has the geologically safest places in the world for the storage of waste. What Australia should do in my judgement as an act of economic sanity…

ALUMNI: …is bury at all.

BOB HAWKE: …and environmental responsibility, say we will take the world’s nuclear waste.

BOB HAWKE: If we were to do that, we would have a source of income – forget about current account deficit – we would have a source of income which we could hypothecate to environmental issues in this country, salinity, also to Aborigines… because this would be in an area where the Aboriginal people would be, and I have reason to believe that we could negotiate with them. We can revolutionise the economics of Australia if we did this.

KIM BEAZLEY: Look, Bob is the father figure of the Labor Party, that’s well outside the platform.

(sound of raucous laughter from audience)

TONY ABBOTT: I think Bob does make a very interesting…

ALUMNI: I agree. I agree.

TONY ABBOTT: It is a visionary suggestion, but unfortunately…

BOB HAWKE: Always buts…

TONY ABBOTT: There are a lot of politics in this. Now right at the moment we can’t even get agreement on where to put a nuclear repository for Australia ‘s waste, let alone a repository for the world’s waste.

Now that is the kind of parochialism that would need to be overcome if Bob’s suggestion were to…

BOB HAWKE: That’s right, but look this is, I mean this is revolutionary, I started off saying it’s revolutionary, but it’s the sort of thing, you sit down, there are intelligent… I’ve talked with some of the Greens. And there’s one of them, I’m not going to talk about his name, but his initial reaction Alan was “oh sh-t”, and then when I went through these things and what it could mean, he said this should be talked about.

Now I know in our party, in the Labor Party, there’ll be people just, who’d be horrified. But they were horrified about some of the things I proposed with my colleagues in ’83, ’84, tariffs and so on.

You talk them through, I mean, politics is not about decibel democracy, you know, all the people that make the loudest noise and that’s what determines your decision. The responsibility of leadership is to lead.

Go in and say look, this is what it means for Australia , this is what it means for the world. And I genuinely believe that if we’d sat down your mob would be the least difficult…

(sound of laughter from audience)

TONY ABBOTT: As always, as always…

BOB HAWKE: The Greens… although you’ve got some mugs who’d be difficult…

(sound of laughter from audience)

…but basically the problem would be the Greens and the Labor Party, but these people are not un-Australian, you sit down and talk with ’em.