PERTH, Australia: Australia is looking positively at a US-Indian civilian nuclear energy deal despite its policy of refusing to export uranium to India, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said on Thursday.

Smith told reporters travelling with him to Perth from Singapore that Australia would now have to make a decision on whether to support it, possibly by mid-August, now that the deal has survived in the Indian parliament.

“Our consideration of the India-US civil arrangement certainly won’t lead to a change of policy so far as Australia’s exports of uranium are concerned,” Smith said aboard US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s plane.

“Australia’s position has been consistent throughout,” he told the US-based reporters as he prepared to show Rice his hometown during an informal visit to Western Australia.

“We only export uranium to those nation states who are parties to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. India of course is not a party,” Smith said. But the deal to provide India with US nuclear technology is “separate from that,” he added.

“And we don’t regard our policy position on the export of uranium as preventing us from joining a consensus in the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) from supporting the arrangement,” he said. India needs to present the deal to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and to win the approval of the 45-nation NSG, of which Australia is a key member.

“What we’ve always said is that if and when the arrangement proceeded through the Indian parliament we would then give consideration to it at the appropriate time before the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the IAEA,” he said. Australia, the world’s top uranium producer, is a strong advocate of non-proliferation.

“We’ve made the point to India and also to the United States that we will give very careful consideration to the strategic importance of the agreement both to India and to the United States,” Smith said.

“And we’re also looking at the arrangement with a positive and constructive frame of mind,” he said. “We of course want to look very carefully at the detail and consider that very carefully in the NSG but we don’t regard in any way our longstanding party policy position on non-exportation of uranium as in any way standing between us and joining a consensus to support the arrangement,” he said.

The agreement, unveiled in 2005, will allow the United States to sell nuclear plants and related technology to India once it has separated its civil and military programmes and accepted a certain level of UN inspections.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Thursday that a proposed US-India nuclear energy deal is good for both countries and for global efforts to reduce the spread of atomic technology and greenhouse gas emissions.

In her first public comments on the agreement since India’s government won a confidence vote that paves its way forward, Rice said the administration of President George W Bush would press US lawmakers to approve the agreement in the coming months. “I think we can make a very good case that this is not just a landmark deal but a positive landmark deal,” she told reporters aboard her plane as she flew from an Asian security conference in Singapore to Australia. “It’s certainly our hope that we can get through all the processes and get this done in the Congress, and we are going to work very expeditiously toward that goal,” Rice said.

The pact would end more than three decades of nuclear isolation for India by opening its civilian reactors to international inspections in exchange for the nuclear fuel and technology.

Previously, India has been denied such outside help because of its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and its testing of atomic weapons.

But Rice said India has a good record of not spreading its nuclear technology and that safeguards are built into the deal. She added that its approval would help India meet its huge demand for energy without using oil, coal and other petroleum products.

“India is a country that has tremendously growing demand for energy,” she said. “It is a country that, if it tries to meet that demand through carbon-based sources for energy, is going to contribute dramatically to the continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions.”

India imports about 75 per cent of its oil, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has argued the country needs the nuclear deal to power its financial growth and lift hundreds of millions of its 1.1 billion citizens out of poverty.