"But then the Rudd proposal, inherited from Kim Beazley, to drop the present illogical policy will not have much practical effect, either. Queensland and Western Australia have substantial uranium deposits and premiers Peter Beattie and Alan Carpenter will be supporting the change in policy. Yet neither will be approving uranium mines in his state. The way they reconcile this contradiction seems to be that the states will retain their powers over mining, so it will be they who call the shots, whatever the federal policy says. The real reason they are voting for change is to put on a show of support for Rudd."
* But a fight at the party conference won't harm Kevin Rudd, as long as he wins the day * April 26, 2007
PASSION, principle and Labor tradition will be on display when the party's national conference debates uranium policy on Saturday. That won't hurt. Politics should not always be reduced to the utterly cynical. But there will be illogicality and hypocrisy as well.
Federal frontbencher Anthony Albanese, who will lead the anti-uranium forces at the conference, is a former staffer and protege of Tom Uren, a prominent anti-nuclear campaigner in the 1970s and '80s. Albanese will argue that nuclear proliferation problems have grown worse, not better, despite decades of preaching about tighter nuclear safeguards.
Even though the Cold War has ended, he has a point. International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei spoke last year of "the new realities". Terrorists were trying to acquire nuclear weapons and in the past decade his organisation had recorded more than 650 cases of attempted smuggling of nuclear material. The IAEA's task, he added, was to oversee 900 facilities in 71 countries, but with the budget of only a local police department.
Albanese argues that the proposal by the Bush administration for countries to receive guaranteed access to nuclear fuel in return for giving up the right to enrich and reprocess uranium - and therefore the means to produce nuclear weapons - concedes that answers to proliferation and waste disposal have yet to be found. He will try to convince the conference not to drop the existing policy of opposition to new uranium mines until such solutions do exist.
Albanese's stance is the same as that of the anti-nuclear forces for the past 30 years: the phasing out of uranium mining in Australia. But a great deal else has changed. When the 1982 national conference adopted the no new mines policy, two were operating, Nabarlek and Ranger, both in the Northern Territory. But it also agreed to consider the export of uranium "mined incidentally to the mining of other minerals. on a case-by-case basis". This was the South Australian let-out clause: a mineral find at Olympic Dam in 1975 contained copper, gold and uranium.
Since then, the same policy has enabled the scaling up of production of the incidental uranium deposit to 4000 tonnes a year. It also has allowed the tripling of total Australian uranium exports to more than 10,000 tonnes a year, making Australia the world's second-largest uranium producer. Plans for the expansion of Olympic Dam would increase its production to 15,000 tonnes a year, greater, says Labor's resources spokesman Chris Evans, than total production in 2005 by Canada, now the world's largest uranium producer. On the basis of its present reserves, that could see Olympic Dam staying in production for 30 years or more.
So the two mines policy adopted by Labor in 1982 became a three mines policy with Olympic Dam, a four mines policy with the Beverley mine in South Australia, which started in 2001, and a five-mine policy with approval of the Honeymoon mine in the same state, although by then Nabarlek had ceased production.
The policy that is supposed to be about phasing out uranium mining and that Albanese is fighting to retain has presented no obstacle at all to Australia's moving steadily towards becoming the world's largest uranium producer, despite it being Labor governments that have made all the critical decisions. As Evans put it in a recent speech: "The hypocrisy of maintaining a policy so at odds with the actions of Labor governments is transparent."
It is the same policy that the anti-uranium forces originally opposed in favour of a tougher anti-uranium position. Now they prefer it over Kevin Rudd's attempt to drop the limit on new mines. Even if it did eventually lead to a phasing out of Australian production, it would not stop countries obtaining uranium from elsewhere. Even if, as some anti-nuclear campaigners claim, world uranium supplies last for only 25 years, that would only encourage countries to reprocess existing stocks, increasing the stock of weapons-grade material.
But then the Rudd proposal, inherited from Kim Beazley, to drop the present illogical policy will not have much practical effect, either. Queensland and Western Australia have substantial uranium deposits and premiers Peter Beattie and Alan Carpenter will be supporting the change in policy. Yet neither will be approving uranium mines in his state. The way they reconcile this contradiction seems to be that the states will retain their powers over mining, so it will be they who call the shots, whatever the federal policy says. The real reason they are voting for change is to put on a show of support for Rudd.
A change of policy could have an effect in the other parts of Australia where uranium has been discovered, South Australia and the Northern Territory. But the Rann Government in South Australia already has approved a new mine, Honeymoon, due to begin production next year. NT Chief Minister Clare Martin said yesterday she, too, would support dropping the no new mines policy at the national conference. But it is the commonwealth that has the power to approve new mines in the territory, leaving this option available for a Rudd government, though the Coalition Government has not taken it up.
Rann says in a letter to national conference delegates that opponents of uranium mining need to come up with answers to global warming. Yet Rann and every other Labor leader in Australia rejects domestic nuclear power, even though it produces no greenhouse gases. Rann was the first premier to push legislation through his parliament to prevent even low-level nuclear waste from being buried in his state. But he doesn't mind exporting the problem.
Rudd's motion to drop the limit on the number of mines will come with proposals to strengthen nuclear safeguards. The biggest contribution Australia can make on that score is to take back the waste from the uranium it exports to ensure it does not find its way into nuclear weapons. That will be missing from Rudd's proposal.
A stoush on Saturday over uranium need not do Labor any political harm, provided, of course, that Rudd wins the day.
But it will be a victory more of perception than reality.
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