World Mining Exploration News

Australia conservatives buoyed by state election

Australia looked set to expand uranium mining on Sunday with conservatives poised to win elections in resource powerhouse Western Australia state and demolish the coast-to-coast grip of the centre-left.

State Labor Premier Alan Carpenter was bravely tipping a hung parliament with four of the 59 seats still in doubt, but election analysts said the two conservative opposition parties would likely form a coalition government in coming days.

“It has not been the sort of night and the sort of day that we had hoped,” said Carpenter, who called the election five months early to capitalise on disarray caused by a conservative leader caught sniffing the chair of a female staffer.

A day before Carpenter called the poll, the pro-uranium Liberal Party dumped its troubled leader Troy Buswell, who was dogged by lurid reports of his chair-sniffing behaviour, and replaced him with veteran Colin Barnett.

“I believe that the people of Western Australia have expressed their trust in myself and my colleagues. They have given us an opportunity and if that comes to pass we will accept that opportunity,” said Barnett.

Labor was tipped to win 27 of the 59 seats in the state’s Legislative Assembly, while the conservative Liberal Party was tipped to take 25. The conservative Nationals, representing mostly farmers, were likely to win four seats and others three.

Western Australia is at the centre of Australia’s resource boom with vast iron ore and offshore oil and gas projects, but the state’s centre-left Labor government opposes uranium mining, meaning eight major deposits remain unexploited.

The state accounts for a third of the A$1 trillion (458.5 billion pound) national economy on the back of the international resource boom, and a third of global iron ore exports, but has only a tenth of Australia’s 21 million population.

If Labor loses WA, it will be the first time the party has lost a state-level election in a decade.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has painted Labor’s dominance at state and national level as a chance to erase a century of constitutional and fiscal overlaps in health and education.

A Labor loss in WA places at risk Rudd’s reform dream, which was central to his sweeping national election win last year.

Conservative politicians in the national parliament said the “massive” 6 percent swing in WA, when tied to a recent vote in the outback Northern Territory, showed voters nationally were becoming jaded with Rudd and Labor after only a year.

“The economy has deteriorated over the last 6-12 months and what you’ve seen is that people are worse off since the election of Kevin Rudd,” senior conservative lawmaker Joe Hockey told Australian television.

But two national by-elections on Saturday in strong conservative seats also showed anti-conservative swings, with one MP scraping home and another losing decisively to an independent.

With voters belligerent over a slowing economy and high official interest rates against a backdrop of international economic uncertainty, it was not a good time for governments of any colour, media commentators said.

The WA conservatives went into the election supporting uranium mining and said they wanted to see a project up and running within five years, raising industry hopes that new mines could help meet booming worldwide demand for nuclear energy.

Australia has 40 percent of the world’s known uranium reserves, but only three operating mines, Ranger, owned by Rio Tinto Ltd unit Energy Resources Australia, Olympic Dam, owned by BHP Billiton, and Beverly, owned by a local unit of General Atomics of the United States.

Australia is the world’s second largest uranium supplier behind Canada, but has more than twice Canada’s reserves.

Rudd’s national government supports uranium mining, but it is up to each of the six states and two territories to approve new mines. Only South Australia and the Northern Territory currently allow uranium mining. ($1=A$1.22)