alp welcome shift on uranium mining policy kim bea
Welcome shift on uranium
Kim Beazley
The Minerals Council of Australia has welcomed Opposition Leader, Kim Beazley’s announcement that he is committed to a change in the ALP’s policy on uranium.
MCA Chief Executive, Mitchell H Hooke, said yesterday: “This is the change in the ALP’s approach to uranium policy the industry is looking for, a shift from a policy justified in political ideology, to a policy emphasising the integrity of Australia’s strict regulatory controls governing the exploration, mining, milling, storage, transportation and export of uranium.
“In this, we support the Leader of the Opposition’s rationale for advocating a change in the ALP’s position to a new approach based on the strength of safeguards, not on the number of mines,” he said.
“The Opposition Leader is entirely justified in seeking to reassure the Australian community that the movement of uranium through its value chain, and the potential risks to occupational and community health and the environment, are both understood and adequately controlled through effective regulation.”
In particular, the industry shares the Opposition Leader’s commitment to Australia’s stringent national and international nuclear safeguards, which give objective assurance that Australia’s uranium is only used for peaceful, non-military purposes such as electricity generation and nuclear medicine.
Even though Australia currently holds nearly 40 percent of the globe’s known uranium reserves, we only represent 23 percent of world production and trail Canada in global exports, which has less than half our known resources.
With global demand rising, supply tightening, and uranium spot prices soaring, the Opposition Leader is rightly weighing the opportunity costs to all Australian’s and particularly to remote and Indigenous communities, of persisting with an artificial constraint on uranium mining.
According to the Minerals Council, the ALP and the Australian community should be confident in the minerals industry’s commitment to ensuring that the economic development of the country’s considerable natural endowment will not be at the expense of our environmental and our social stewardship responsibilities.
The Minerals Council will need to work closely with the ALP and respective governments to ensure that proposed new measures are efficient and effective without lowering Australia’s regulatory standards.
- 26 Jul 2006
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