The ruling Australian Labor Party (ALP) national conference Sunday passed amendment 665 with a thin margin of only 21 votes to overturn the long standing party policy banning uranium sales to India. Thus far, the party policy has dictated that uranium can only be sold to countries which are signatory to Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and India has not signed the NPT.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard urged delegates to support her motion, emphasising that it would boost trade and enhance bilateral relationship.
“We should take a decision that is in our nation's interest, a decision about strengthening our strategic partnership with India in this, the Asian century. It's good for trade, it's good for jobs, it’s good for the nation," Ms Gillard said, adding that it was not rational that Australia should sell uranium to China but not India.
The move paves the way for talks on a bilateral nuclear safeguards agreement and resolves an issue that has strained diplomatic ties between the two nations, but actual exports won’t be happening anytime soon.
Welcoming the ALP decision, the Australian Uranium Association Chief Executive Officer, Mr Michael Angwin, said he did not expect that uranium sales to India would commence quickly even though the economic potential of a uranium trade relationship with India is considerable.
Australia could expect to sell around 2,500 tonnes of uranium a year to India by 2030, which on current values would generate around A$ 300 million in export sales. However, sales of this value were by no means guaranteed. “India already has access to uranium from countries who are competitors of ours, such as Kazakhstan. Australia will have to work hard to ensure we can compete with countries that already have uranium trading relationships with India,” Mr Angwin said.
Australia, which has no nuclear power stations, has almost 40 per cent of the world's known uranium reserves, but supplies only 19 per cent of the world market. Canberra has forecast uranium exports to rise from around 10,000 tonnes a year to 14,000 tonnes in 2014, worth around A$1.7 billion. Australia currently exports uranium to China, Japan, Taiwan and the United States.
Sub-Continent Friends of Labor Chairperson, Harish Velji told Business Standard, “It is a great victory for common sense. Now the safeguards agreement shouldn’t be difficult to achieve and the process should be fairly quick and fast”. The group with 100 members and 800 supporters has been actively campaigning since 2007 and had started putting lot of pressure on Ms Gillard in the last one year
to overturn the ban on uranium sales to India.
The move to allow sales to India follows a landmark U.S. agreement to support the civil nuclear program in India, signed in 2008.
“Australia sees India as an important counter-weight to growing Chinese influence and a way of diversifying Australian export markets. Lifting the ban won’t be a magic bullet to achieve these goals, but is an important step in that direction”, Nick Bisley, Professor of International Relations, Convenor, Politics and International Relations at Melbourne’s La Trobe University told Business Standard.
The decision will help fast track the free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations between the two countries and encourage Indian companies to invest in Australian uranium mines.
As Toro Energy's Managing Director, Greg Hall said, “the biggest impact will be willingness of Indian companies to invest in new Australian uranium projects, much as Japan, China, Canada etc have done, in exchange for off-take agreements”.
The party’s vote to amend an executive policy does not need parliamentary approval. In what was a passionate and at times heated debate, nine delegates spoke against the motion, receiving standing ovation, while seven delegates spoke in favour amidst jeers from protesters opposed to uranium mining and exports in the gallery.
The Prime Minister’s motion was finally endorsed by delegates with a small margin of 206 votes in favour and 185 against, revealing deep dissensions even amongst ministers in the Gillard Government.
So much so that when the Chair ruled the motion passed, a recount was called as many couldn’t believe the outcome.
While Defence Minister Stephen Smith, Resources Minister Martin Ferguson and South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill spoke of India as a 'close friend’ which deserves to be respected as a growing superpower and its citizens shouldn’t be denied access to clean energy.
“This is as much about trade and economics as trust”, said Michelle Rowland, who was elected to the House of Representatives from Greenway (New South Wales) in 2010. In her electorate of Blacktown, 'Singh’ is the most common surname.
Making an impassioned plea for the 400 million Indians who have the right to uninterrupted power, the Australian Workers' Union national secretary Paul Howes called the NPT a "dead-letter treaty" which had failed to stop nuclear proliferation.
However, Ministers Stephen Conroy and Peter Garrett vehemently opposed the move on the grounds that it was too dangerous to sell uranium to India, which is not a signatory to NPT, and it would undermine support for multilateral agreements. Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Conroy, who was almost in tears as he spoke about his family's experiences living near a nuclear plant in Cumbria (UK) said, “I've never voted for it, and I'm not going to vote for it today”.
In an emotional plea, former anti-nuclear campaigner and rock singer Garrett said, “Labor has a great disarmament tradition, that's why I'm here. Where is our commitment to a nuclear-free future?"
Minister for Transport and Infrastructure Anthony Albanese said, “The disaster at Fukushima has resulted in Germany, Switzerland and Italy winding back their commitment to the nuclear fuel cycle - under those circumstances it is absurd we are expanding ours”.
“I say that until we have resolved the issues of nuclear proliferation and we have resolved the issue of nuclear waste we should not change our platform to further expand our commitment to the nuclear fuel cycle”, he added.
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd didn’t speak on the issue, but he has earlier warned that a policy change won't automatically translate into a beginning of sales. Mr Rudd had reversed former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard's decision to export uranium to India to meet its civilian energy needs, when he succeeded Mr Howard as prime minister in November 2007.
As Tim Wright, Australian director of International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) told Business Standard, “Australia cannot lawfully sell uranium to India unless India agrees to open up all of its nuclear facilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency. India is highly unlikely to agree to that, meaning that trade cannot go ahead”.