Labor's Norm Foster votes against his party's anti-uranium stance in 1982 to allow the Olympic Dam mine
Labor party member of South Australia's Legslative Council, Norm Foster (right), took a rebel stand against his party to cast the deciding vote for the Olympic Dam mine project. The mine's uranium output contined to be the target of anti-nuclear protestors.
The uranium aspect of the Olympic Dam mine, in South Australia’s north, made it controversial from the start and the target of continuing protests. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) was divided over uranium mining generally, and Olympic Dam in particular, up to the early 1980s.
One of those who pronounced the Olympic Dam project a “mirage in the desert” was Mike Rann a New Zealand anti-uranium campaigner from New Zealand who came to work for South Australian premier Don Dunstan in 1977.
Liberal Party premier David Tonkin, who succeeded Dunstan, advocated mining and the Olympic Dam indenture agreement to the state parliament in 1982. Its passing in the Legislative Council upper house came down to one man: Labor’s Norm Foster. The former wharf worker Foster had sat on the select committee into Olympic Dam and wasn’t convinced uranium mining was an environmental or ethical scourge. On the day before a final vote on the project he resigned from the Labor party “following threats on his life, and abuse to his wife during debate on the Bill”, The Advertiser reported.
The next day, “Stormy Normie” crossed the floor of parliament to give his vote to the government and clear the way for the new mine.
Labor returned to office later in 1982 but by then it had taken on the pre-election pro-Olypic Dam stance through incoming premier John Bannon. At a federal level, the ALP amended its ban on uranium mining at its annual conference in Hobart, clearing the way for the three mines policy that gave the Bob Hawke government the flexibility to approve Olympic Dam.
Mike Rann, who worked for Bannon and later, entered in parliament in 1985, would later, as premier, champion Olympic Dam’s expansion. Foster’s role also was later acknowledged positively by the Labor party who restored his membership.
The first of physical protests against the Olympic Dam mine and its workers’ town called Roxby Downs were widely publicised in 1983 and 1984. Students, lawyers, teachers and environmentalists joined the cause, many recently returned from the Franklin Dam protests in Tasmania. The protests mostly targeted the nuclear industry but another issue was the impact on the water supply from the artesian basin and the Mound Springs north of the town.
