Australia’s uranium policy undercuts its energy diplomacy
Australia’s uranium policy undercuts its energy diplomacy
Treasurer Jim Chalmers told the Australia–Japan Joint Business Conference this month that ‘Japan has no energy provider more loyal than Australia’. He promised to keep working with Tokyo as Australia’s Domestic Gas Reservation Scheme took effect. Western Australia Energy Minister Amber-Jade Sanderson also travelled to Japan this month on a reassurance mission, as Japanese companies increased their stakes in two gas projects. The message, federal and state, was the same: Australia’s gas will keep flowing.
That sits awkwardly beside a second message Australian governments have sent for the better part of a decade: that this country cannot be relied upon to have coherent policies for uranium supply. Uranium has a far smaller carbon footprint than gas – the ‘transition fuel’ – and several of the same customers now want more of it. In Western Australia, Premier Roger Cook argues that the state’s exports of liquefied natural gas help importing countries cut emissions, but he applies no such logic to uranium. The ban on new uranium mines in Western Australia, introduced in 2017, has left only one project with a clear path to development; approvals of two others have lapsed. If Western Australia’s energy diplomacy in Tokyo rests on being a dependable supplier of the fuels the world wants, uranium is a strange, parochial exclusion.
Australia asks its energy customers to treat it as a dependable, long-term supplier. Over the past year it has built institutional architecture with three partners, including consultation clauses, disruption-notification mechanisms and safeguards agreements, to make that credible. But state-by-state uranium policies are inconsistent. The issue isn’t that Australia is unreliably withholding uranium; it’s that Australia’s policy process is harder to read than its pitch admits.
Australia holds more than a quarter of the world’s known recoverable uranium resources but ranks only fourth in production, driven by policy. That policy is balkanised: a patchwork of inconsistent rules between the states and between the states and Canberra. South Australia and the Northern Territory allow mining of uranium but Queensland only exploration for it. Western Australia permits neither. In New South Wales, a bill to repeal the state’s ban on uranium mining and exploration passed the upper house in May 2026 but has stalled in the lower house ahead of a procedural deadline in late November.
Canberra’s signalling compounds this problem. Australia’s Critical Minerals List, last updated in February 2024, excludes uranium, even as the United States and Japan have both added it to their lists and as China treats it as a strategic mineral. Officials have argued privately that uranium doesn’t meet Geoscience Australia’s criticality test: essential to modern technology, with supply chains vulnerable to disruption. That test is harder to sustain by the day, with demand rising from construction of nuclear power plants from France to India and restarts of plants in Japan. The US’s own 2024 ban on Russian uranium imports is being widely ignored, as Russia still supplied 26 percent of US reactor operators’ enrichment purchases in 2025.
Canada has listed uranium as a critical mineral since 2021, despite holding barely a 10th of the world’s recoverable resources against Australia’s quarter. And it mines that smaller endowment hard: 14,309 tonnes in 2024, which makes up 24 percent of world output, against Australia’s 4,598 tonnes – only 8 percent. Australia sits on the world’s largest uranium endowment and extracts little from it. That doesn’t make Australian supply unreliable, but it reflects a policy process fragmented across nine governments.
Trade needn’t be reciprocally in kind, but Australia’s 2026 energy agreements with Japan, Korea and India don’t treat energy as ordinary commerce. Each is framed as a reciprocal energy-security relationship with its own procedures for consultation or notification when circumstances change.
In energy diplomacy Australia casts itself as a reliable supplier and other countries as anxious customers. But in refined fuels, it’s the anxious customer, importing 84 percent of what it needs.
Western Australia’s government has, in effect, already conceded that point. Since April 2026, it has run a formal fuel state of emergency, requiring weekly supplier reporting. On 16 September, the state extended those powers to March 2027 alongside a 20 million litre diesel stockpile and a $100 one-off payment to every driver to help with fuel costs. A government confident enough to assure Tokyo on gas reliability is simultaneously applying emergency powers to its own fuel security and banning production of uranium that partners increasingly need.
None of this means that Australia should stop reassuring Japan. That reassurance rests on sound logic. What it does mean is that Australia cannot keep asking to be judged on its sales pitch while leaving its own policy processes so hard to read.
Two changes would close much of the gap. First, add uranium to the Critical Minerals List at the next review, rather than waiting for a supply shock to force the issue – as China’s export curbs did for gallium and antimony. And second, stop pretending reciprocity is something that only other countries owe. Reassurance tours to Tokyo will keep being necessary. They would be more convincing if Australia’s own house were in better order first.
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