Australia uranium sales to India 'will improve ties'

Australia's strategic ties with India are set to benefit from the ruling Labor Party's decision to lift a ban on exporting uranium to the growing Asian power, Defence Minister Stephen Smith said Monday. Prime Minister Julia Gillard had pushed for the scrapping of the ban on exports to the nuclear power, which is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to help meet its energy needs. "This will be a deeply significant decision so far as our strategic relationship with India is concerned," Smith told Sky News. Smith said he had no qualms about the prospect of exporting uranium to the South Asian nation, which has fought three wars with neighbour Pakistan since independence from Britain in 1947. "This will advance Australia's interests," he told ABC television. Fast-growing India is a key trade partner for Australia and the two countries agreed in 2009 to upgrade their relationship to a "strategic partnership" involving greater security co-operation. Australia's governing Labor party voted Sunday to lift a long-standing ban on exporting uranium to India after a passionate debate about nuclear weapons and reactor safety following Japan's atomic crisis. Gillard said it was not rational to sell uranium to powers such as China but not India, "the world's largest democracy". New Delhi welcomed the development Monday. "Bilateral cooperation in the energy sector is one of the important facets of our multifaceted ties with Australia. We welcome this initiative," External Affairs Minister S. M. Krishna told reporters. Canberra ships nuclear fuel to China, Japan, Taiwan and the United States but had refused to sell it to India because it is not a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty. But Smith said while India had made it clear it would not sign the treaty, it had entered into a civil nuclear agreement with the United States in 2005, which was approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency. "That effectively put India under the international nuclear regulators for the first occasion and India gave a series of undertakings including a moratorium on future nuclear testing," Smith said. "That effectively gives you the same protections that you get if a country signs the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which, of course, has been the stumbling block for many years as far as India is concerned." Sales to India will be regulated by strict safeguards, which Canberra and New Delhi are expected to start discussing in 2012, Trade Minister Craig Emerson said. "There's no doubt that India wants to use uranium for peaceful purposes," Emerson told ABC Radio. "It's entered into agreements with other countries that confirm this." Although Australia does not use nuclear power itself, it is the world's third-ranking uranium producer behind Kazakhstan and Canada and holds an estimated 23 percent of the world's reserves.