Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard has been visiting India and was on All India Radio with Prime Minister Singh. The interview was short and focused on Australian uranium.
JOURNALIST:
Sir, I am from All India Radio. I have a question for both the Prime Ministers. What are both of your expectations from this visit?PRIME MINSTER SINGH:
India and Australia are members of the Commonwealth. We are two English-speaking countries. We have a large Indian community in Australia. We have nearly 30,000 students studying there. Our trade is expanding very rapidly. This is a unique opportunity for me and the Prime Minister to review the progress we have made in working together and explore new options so that our two countries can cooperate more intensively and diversely.PRIME MINISTER HOWARD:
This is a wonderful moment in the history of the relationship between the two countries to consolidate what we have achieved in the past and have in common but also to explore a lot of new fields. India’s economic growth, her influence, is very significant. India is now the fourth-largest economy in the world and in a short distance of time may in fact become the third. Its growth rate is very significant. We have a lot in common. We have the shared history and the shared love of certain sports that you’re very familiar with. All of those things bind us together and both the Prime Minister and I believe very strongly that now is the right time to achieve what you might call a quantum leap in the relationship.JOURNALIST:
Dr Singh, are you hoping to buy Australian uranium?PRIME MINISTER SINGH:
We would like to trade with Australia in all areas and we are short of uranium. We would very much like Australia to sell uranium to India.JOURNALIST:
Would you like a deal on uranium done while Prime Minister Howard is here?PRIME MINISTER SINGH:
Well I will discuss all relevant issues.JOURNALIST:
Are you hopeful of Mr Howard acceding to your request for Australian uranium?PRIME MINISTER SINGH:
We will discuss all these issues.PRIME MINISTER HOWARD:
I think we will talk about them and we’ll talk about them against the background of the policies and the needs of the two countries. Thank you.
In a speech to a business luncheon in New Delhi, the Australian Prime Minister said:
“Energy of course plays a critical role in our economic relationship and I know in your minds will be the agreement signed between the United States and India only three days ago regarding the nuclear industry. This will be an issue to be discussed between myself and the Indian Prime Minister later today and I will be interested to hear more about that arrangement and I will be interested to hear the views that the Prime Minister may wish to put to me in relation to it.
Australia supplies 25 per cent of India’s gold market, and Australian coal is used in more than 50 per cent of the steel that is produced in India. And with the large global increase in demand for energy, the international market for some resources – such as LNG – is extremely tight and I am encouraged that people from both India and Australia are working on these issues and I note that the leader of the Australian delegation Mr Charles Goode of Woodside is with us today and his knowledge of those matters is very, very impressive indeed.
The establishment of the Australia-India Joint Working Group on Energy and Minerals will be an important vehicle to address these issues. I am very pleased that this afternoon I will witness, with the Prime Minister, the signing of an Australia-India Trade and Economic Framework Agreement and this will provide an important basis for the facilitation and the future development of the trade and economic relationship and it will encourage closer strategic cooperation in many of the key economic sectors.”
While India would like to buy Australian uranium, Australia currently won’t sell to countries that are not signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and that includes India and Israel.
But I get the impression something is going to change?
Interestingly the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty recognises ‘the right’ of the US, Britain, France, China and Russia – all permanent members of the UN Security Council – to have nuclear weapons but stops other countries from having nuclear weapons.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
China is powering ahead with nuclear power stations and given its long history of democratic government it would be unreasonable to deny India the same opportunity.
Re: the last sentence, what would Dr Strangelove say? Doomsday machine allies?
India funds half it’s energy growth from Australian uranium? Now that certainly kicks the crap out of the IPCC’s bullshit CO2 scenarios, don’t you think?
Damn, there goes the ocean acidity beat up too.
And of course, right out there on the cutting edge of history, where is the ALP? They’re still dining out on a bit of roadkill called a three mines policy. Be sure to pick the fur out, fellas, it’ll get caught in your teeth.
Ian Mott – I think the main problem is that neither India or Pakistan has seen fit to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and have developed nuclear weapons. By contrast the new world pariah, Iran, has signed the treaty.
And Ender, the USA, Britain, France and Russia all waited until they had their own bomb before deciding that others should not have one. China and India have a greater right to this than France or Britain by weight of their population and pending economic weight. And lets not put too much store in any UN treaty because these two tin pot nations have a veto in the UN Security Council over the will of the General Assembly that is only legitimised by their possession of nuclear weapons.
The idea that a nuclear armed Iran would be less of a threat than India because it signed a non-proliferation treaty is ludicrous. The public pronouncements of the Iranian president should make that quite clear.
And I’m quite glad that Britain and France still have their historical veto powers. The standard of governance of many nations in the general assembly leans toward the tyrannical dictator model.
I say, Motty you bounder, are you calling Britain a tin-pot nation? We did win at Agincourt y’know, although that was mainly due to the skills of the Welsh archers, plus a bit of extra rain and mud, possibly due to medieval global warming.
Ian Mott: “India funds half it’s (sic) energy growth from Australian uranium?” => CO2 & ocean acidity?
= Huh????
Ian – so basically it is OK for any nation to develop nuclear weapons as long as they really want them.
No Ender, I wouldn’t say that. But both India and China have only been outside the major powers for a comparatively short time, and then only as a result of colonial skulduggery.
And if nuclear weapons do play a part in ensuring the territorial integrity of nations then it is better that this protection be accorded to the largest economies.
Either way, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty is a value judgement exercised in most part by those who already have them. The US exercised its veto to prevent sanctions against Israel for its blatant thumbing of nose to the will of the General Assembly who regarded that country as a rogue state.
It would seem that the Iranian position on Israel’s right to exist is identical to Israel’s earlier position on Palestine’s right to exist.
So value judgements are obviously being made on both the “merit” of a countries justification of nuclear weapons and on the existing nuclear countries powers of co-ersion over the nuclear aspirant. If the OECD nations can look the other way as Israel developed nuclear weapons then the claims of India, Pakistan and China are at least as valid.
I’ll spell it out for you Thinksy. The IPCC scenarios that projected major increases in CO2 levels over the next 50 years included a range of assumptions on the pace of economic growth in less developed countries. Most scenarios assumed there would be a catch up in living standards and this was topped off with the further assumption that this increase in economic growth would mean a substantial increase in coal and petroleum based CO2 emissions.
China and India account for a big slice of the total potential for economic expansion in lesser developed countries. So if both opt to source about half their energy needs from uranium then the IPCC scenarios get their flabby butts blown off. End of global warming crisis.
And don’t think for a moment that we won’t sell uranium to India. They have been watching all the AWB contortions of late and just happened to discover a shortfall in their wheat supplies to the tune of 2 million tonnes. They discovered that it was cheaper to import wheat from Australia than transport wheat from their strategic reserves overland from the north of the country to the south.