Mining company remains silent in senate uranium inquiry
Updated
It is still unclear how much uranium Australia’s uranium industry lost over the past decades.
The Government’s investigation into the massive, politically fraught, botched uranium deal will probably yield no definitive figures, but the Opposition is pushing to put pressure on the Government to make a public accounting of how much uranium was exported, if at all, and to offer a comprehensive understanding of what caused uranium prices to crash in the 1990s.
The Senate has previously approved a bill, calling for an audit of the decision to give China the right to buy about 20 per cent of Australia’s uranium ore and have the government set out its legal position.
If approved, it would also allow the Government to appoint independent experts to assess whether the current uranium price problem can be fixed.
But with the Liberal Government now pushing the uranium deal through, the committee could turn its attention back to China, to see if Beijing can offer an accounting as part of its request.
The Federal Government has said this is nece라이브 카지노ssary because if an export licence were granted, then, in effect, the Chinese state or industry would own 80 per cent of the mining companies producing uranium.
The Government’s own estimates show there was a 2블랙 잭0 per cent loss in uranium imports from China, while international trade sources like Japan accounted for around $1 billion of the fall in the price of uranium over several years.
Labor has pledged not to fund an audit unless there is a full explanation of how the Government allowed the price of Australian uranium to increase.
Its deputy leader Penny Wong said성남출장마사지 the Government needed to reveal, in writing, how much of a loss the current uranium export licence made to China, and whether it was still profitable to be importing that uranium.
Labor’s spokesman on the committee Tim Watts said the Government should offer an estimate of the price of the uranium it imported from China.
The Opposition’s uranium export licensing bills, Bill Shorten said, needed to be introduced next week, with an accounting from the Government and its Australian mines and resources minister, Paul Fletcher, to be done within weeks.
“We’ve had all of this time since 2003, because a decision was made, it’s now been approved and it’s time for it to be fully investigated in detail to find out exactly how much of an export subsidy got made to China for selling the product in that way,” he said.
“We’ve had a long debate now about why the Government chose to approve a massive export licence fo
