Moreover, the deal is seen as foreshadowing a major expansion in Australian uranium mining, capped since the Labor government in 1984 instituted it's (only) three mines policy.

After years of doldrums nuclear power is moving back to centre stage. These changes promise big profits for some Australian resource corporations and a major prop to the Australian dollar, continually threatened by the country's ever increasing current account deficit. (1)

Three factors come together here to make this change possible.

First there is the increasing demand by China for more and more energy. The country remains highly reliant on coal, supplying around 62% of power output, but is also diversifying its sources, including into nuclear energy. China has brought six new reactors online since January 2002, at a time when few other countries are building any.

Nuclear power lobbyists in the United States have been pushing the importance of this power station market but political considerations mean that the Canadian and French power builders have beaten them to the punch. In addition the Chinese have developed their own reactors, and are claiming they are both safer and more flexible in size than those of Western technology.

Second there is the policy approach of the Australian government. While the governing party is Liberal in name and mostly conservative or neo-liberal in pronouncement, it not much of either in practice.

John Howard's government is a pragmatic and reactive government in economic policy, making it largely a creature of responses to existing vested interests, with a strong centralising and illiberal streak that has seen it systematically undermine those levers of the state that might hold it accountable. Pronouncements of good faith combined with plausible deniability when found out have been its continual theme.

The overall pattern is one of short term decision making for immediate political advantage, or for returns to existing economic players. Creation or strengthening of market competition and opportunity, let alone social vision, run a very long second place in government policy.

The uranium deal follows this same pattern, China has signed protocols stating it will abide by safeguards, and the government announces itself satisfied. The appearance of probity is reached and this is enough. Real world questions have not even had time to arise in the whirlwind of spin and decision making. Consider:

China is a nuclear armed authoritarian dictatorship with outstanding issues with the only Chinese democracy, Taiwan, and thus America, yet this does not come up. Though the way for this was partially prepared by the Australian Foreign Minister's suggestion last year that the ANZUS treaty does not cover Taiwan. Though presumably Australia still expects US help should trouble arise with Indonesia. Perhaps Australian involvement in Iraq is seen as payment enough on ANZUS for now.

China is a corrupted polity and economy with an appalling record in industrial safety and pollution. Despite it being plausible that China is, for reasons of simple survival, attempting to improve its record in this area the safeguard regime in China can hardly be taken as prima facie a reliable institution.

Human rights might also be expected to get some scrutiny when one is talking about trade with China, especially in something as volatile as uranium. Australian protesters, including Chinese dissidents, did make this point. However they likely only show up on the government's radar as a negative to be neutralised.

This government has a worse record on human rights since 1945 than any other Australian government. Apart from running concentration camps to dissuade refugees from arriving the rhetoric of the government is usually derogatory and suspicious of human rights organisations.

Even in the case of Iraq the Australian Prime Minister, unlike his counterparts in the US and Britain, shied away from condemning Saddam on abuses of human rights, preferring to use the threat to world peace posed by WMDs as an argument for the war.

Finally there is the nuclear waste issue. This is the elephant on the wardrobe that everyone is avoiding seeing. China has no plans in place for dealing with its projected 3,900 tonnes of nuclear waste by 2010. There have been no answers given as to whether the price of storing spent fuel for thousands of years is factored into the economics of its nuclear power program.

Whether Australia has any responsibility for the waste from its uranium has not been raised at all. However, it is worth noting that proposals are periodically put forward by business that Australia has ideal geologic conditions for waste storage and that this could be highly profitable. This idea resurfaced as recently as 2005 but at the moment we are not hearing a peep about it.

Thus the Australian government's approach is closer to that of the amoral businessman (one can't help but think of Lenin's dictum that the last capitalist would sell the communists the rope to hang the second last).

Australia has around 30% of the world's uranium and meets 22% of the worlds needs, exporting to eleven countries. That market is about to get a lot bigger because of China and India. Australia's immediate economic interest is perceived as to both supply and grow those markets. As they grow their very existence will call forth demand for further expansion of uranium mining.

As the wealth of the miners grows so will their, already substantial, ability to lobby government to open more mines. Thus Australia is in the process of moving from a country with a very ambivalent and mostly suspicious attitude to uranium, one with roots in the vision of being a responsible global citizen, to one that sees itself as just another rational self maximiser in the homo economus mould.

The third factor worth noting is the novel use of climate change by the corporate resources sector and governments. Concerns about climate change are being mustered ideologically as new argument for uranium mining and nuclear power. Nuclear power is being pushed as a first resort solution to the problem of fossil fuel and global warming.

The "we demand our constantly improving standard of living" brigade, and those who make money supplying them, took a long time to even admit global warming from greenhouse emissions was a possibility.

They are still in denial that it should cause more than minor inconvenience. Inasmuch as they do admit any problem they are inclined to quickly displace it elsewhere than their own backyards, and flavour of the month have been India and China.

Now the world clearly can't ecologically afford a future where India and China, using current technology, supply Western styles of living to their populations. Thus, even while the real climate problem is still far more to do with contemporary Western consumption, India and China are continually trotted out as bogeymen of the earth's future. India and China are frequently cited as reasons for Australia and the US to stay out of the Kyoto protocol for example.

In the same vein the supply of Australian uranium to China is being promoted as a "greenhouse solution". That it is not going to be a substitute for coal power, that it produces a destructive poison of devastating potential, these are issues swept aside. At best 5% of Chinese power will come from nuclear plants in 2020, as opposed to 1% at present.

With breathtaking hypocrisy a limited, expensive and highly polluting energy source is being pushed as a "green" solution. The more climate change rushes upon us the more we can expect this solution to be pushed as the "only" one.

Yet an examination of the Australian context makes it plain that this is the "only" solution because it is the only one with powerful and currently existing profitable corporations behind it. To switch from fossil fuels to nuclear in order to "save the planet" is a clear case of market failure and the power of spin.

That government would assist that failure, rather than override it, is a clear suggestion that market and government have their hands too firmly in each others pockets. A rational and moral position would see nuclear power as a last, not first, resort.

Anthony Phillips teaches and researches in public policy and political theory and is based at the Contemporary Europe Research Centre at the University of Melbourne.

(1) Australia's current account averages 4.5% of GDP and the ratio of net foreign liabilities has reached over 60% of GDP compared to around 24% in 1980. ("Perspectives on Australia's current account deficit" Keynote Address to the Australian Business Economists Forecasting Conference by David Gruen, Chief Adviser (Domestic), Macroeconomic Group, Australian Treasury on 13 December 2005. http://www.treasury.gov.au/documents/1087/RTF/02_ABE_Keynote.rtf) Moreover this latter figure is distorted by non productive high home prices that are underwritten by existing easy flows of foreign money.

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