Why the Labour party must back U3O8Why the ALP must back uranium project
The Labor hard Left's recalcitrance could keep hurting the party
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05 April 2006
WILL the Labor Party tear itself apart over uranium exports? The shilly-shallying of its leader, Kim Beazley, is certainly not helping it towards a resolution.
But it is clear that the feeling in the party has changed dramatically since the debates just before its election victory of 1983. In 1982, it was Bill Hayden who courageously insisted on a half-rational policy towards uranium mining and export, not long before he was deposed by the conspirators who forced him out, not because of policy but in a desperate and successful gamble on Bob Hawke.
But that is where Labor policy was doomed to remain for 20 years. Existing mines would continue, but no new mines would be allowed. At that time the decision was not a huge problem because the phenomenal growth of China and India had hardly begun. The advocates of uranium mining had few friends because few people saw any great economic or environmental benefit in insisting on expansion.
But the emotion and heat generated by the debate was considerable, and it was in those days that opposition to such mining became a fundamental article of faith among the Labor Left and the Greens, inside and outside Labor. Their obsession proved to be a boon to the Hawke government, which was able to get on with genuine economic reform while the Left was concerned mainly with symbols, as it still is.
But now the climate has changed in more than one sense, and at last the uranium issue is at the centre of the central rift of the Labor Party, the class struggle that has long since replaced the old employers v workers conflict.
The new class struggle is between the ideologically obsessed upper middle-class Left and the pragmatic lower middle classes and the remains of the old working class. It has a geographic orientation, too; the bourgeois Left is to be found mainly in the inner urban electorates, and in the leafy suburbs such as those north of the harbour in Sydney (the doctors' wives, etc), while the socially conservative proletarian Labor supporters are in the outer suburban and regional electorates, and they are being increasingly recruited into the ranks of the Howard battlers.
The classic demonstration of this conflict was in the 2004 federal election campaign. In Tasmania, then Labor leader Mark Latham made the fatal mistake of allying himself with the Greens/Left so clearly that the timberworkers threw their support behind John Howard. Nothing could have more clearly shown the tectonic changes in support for the Labor and Liberal parties. The same division is now appearing in the uranium issue.
The saner Labor premiers, such as Peter Beattie in Queensland and Mike Rann in South Australia, are realising this. The rise in world prices and the huge potential demand from China, India, Taiwan and probably Japan and other countries which need greater supplies of non-greenhouse gas generating energy sources, has made the issue one of urgency.
The more flexible of the environmentalists have also begun to concede that this is the way to go. Even the guru of the deep green environmentalists, James Lovelock, the author of the Gaia hypothesis (that the earth is a giant self-regulating organism), has conceded that the nuclear energy option must be taken seriously. But there is no group more conservative than the old Left of the Labor Party, which cannot give up its old shibboleths and will not reconsider, in the light of the history of nuclear energy since Chernobyl in 1986, that safe nuclear power generation and the safe disposal of wastes is now far from an insoluble problem. It is locked into a symbolic obsession with the dangers of nuclear power. It cannot concede the contradiction between its horror of global warming and its rejection of the valuable role that nuclear power can play in averting it.
But there are genuine economic as well as strategic benefits to accrue from the export of uranium in the form of yellow cake (despite superstition, this is far from unsafe). Even NSW and Victoria should be able to perceive this, as the Grants Commission formula, currently much abused by the large states, will turn to their benefit as the uranium-rich states begin to compensate them for their losses of GST revenue over the past year or two.
There are also huge indirect employment benefits from the expansion of mineral revenue. These are of direct interest to the pragmatic, ordinary people of Australia, no matter how much it horrifies the prosperous population of the inner urban regions with their detestation of the rednecks and the rest of unworthy humanity. If the latter really believed their own rhetoric, of course, they would be interested in the nuclear option, but they are far more interested in symbols and slogans.
Clearly, the potential of clean nuclear energy must be considered if we are to take even a precautionary view of the possibility of global warming due to human generation of greenhouse gases. Because Australia, as a coal-rich country, will want to continue to use coal for many years, it should be able and willing to offer the rest of the world a cost-effective substitute and offset.
The gauleiter of the Labor hard Left in NSW and spokesman for the environment, Anthony Albanese, cannot and will not conceive of any change of attitude. But one of the leaders of the moderate Left, Martin Ferguson, spokesman on mineral resources, has clearly learned that Labor, in the interests of its own core constituency, has to embrace uranium mining and export.
Of course, no one is arguing that proper supervision and controls should not remain in place. This is where the emphasis of the debate should shift. We are entitled to ask for guarantees from China, India and the others. It is nevertheless clear that the old nuclear non-proliferation treaty restrictions may need revision. The future of the world in the next 50 years has to be orientated towards nuclear energy, and it would be wise for Australia to consider its own future in this technology.
For a start, the old project of a uranium enrichment plant at Jervis Bay should be revived (prepare for the screams of the Canberra bureaucrats who have built their beach houses along the road surfaced as the first stage of that project). At the very least, pilot nuclear generation plants for water desalination should be built.
P.P. McGuinness is the editor of Quadrant magazine.