Tuesday, 27 February, 2007

The Australian

LABOR's two most senior figures will vote for the party's national ban on new uranium mining to be lifted in April, but have baulked at pushing the Labor states to develop new mines.

ALP deputy leader Julia Gillard has joined Kevin Rudd in calling for the scrapping of Labor's no new mines policy at the party's coming national conference, leaving leading opponents of a bigger nuclear industry, such as Peter Garrett and Anthony Albanese, increasingly isolated.

But Ns Gillard has refused to push antimining states such as Western Australia, Victoria and NSW to lift their bans.

On Sunday, she announced she would vote for the lifting of the national ban, saying: "I'm for jobs, jobs and jobs, and I understand that the expansion of the uranium mining industry in this country will mean jobs." However, she said yesterday she would not push the states to lift their own bans on new uranium mining, saying: "It's up to individual state governments to determine if uranium mining will occur in their home state." A spokesman for Mr Rudd agreed.

Western Australia's Treasurer, Eric Ripper, told The Australian the state had no intention of relaxing its ban on uranium mining, no matter what position the party took federally or at the national conference.

"We have a policy of no uranium mining.

That's the policy we went to the election with, and we intend to keep that commitment," Mr Ripper said.

He said his understanding was that if the national conference voted to remove the ban from the party platform, it would permit state Labor governments to approve new mines but would not compel them to.

"If South Australia wanted to approve an expansion, it could, but we could maintain our policy," he said.

NSW and Victoria both prohibit uranium mining and exploration.

Last year's prime ministerial taskforce examining the potential for Australia to expand its nuclear industry headed by former Telstra chief Ziggy Switkowski concluded that the nation could double its uranium exports by 2015.

With uranium prices spiking and the massive growth in interest in nuclear power as a partial solution to the fossil-fuel driven greenhouse problem, this presents Australia with major opportunities to sell new resources to markets such as China.

But if the no new mines policy is not dropped by Labor at its April national conference, the $1 billion industry presaged by Mr Switkowski will go backwards shortly after 2020, shrinking by about a quarter within a couple of years.

In 2005, record production of 12,360 tonnes of uranium oxide earned Australia $573 million in exports, and the Switkowski report predicts the existing mines Olympic Dam, Beverley and Ranger could lift that to 21,000 tonnes by 2015.