"Certainly our policy to date has been to prohibit sale to countries which are not signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty," Australian Prime Minister John Howard said adding, "...and that's why at the moment we couldn't, without changing policy, sell to India, but we can to China.
"But as time goes by, if India were to meet safeguard obligations, some Australians would see it as anomalous that we would sell uranium to China, but not India," he was quoted by the media as saying on Monday.
Howard said India had first requested in March that it be permitted to import Australian uranium, and the request was still being considered by the government.
"I don't think there's anything that has happened to justify the re-emphasis on the issue, except that India has repeated the interest in buying Australian uranium," he said.
"There is nothing that has happened since March 2006 that has altered the issues that were on the table then," he said.
The Indian government has restated its desire to purchase Australian uranium, but Howard said a policy change was still under consideration.
Earlier, Australian Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile said, "Our policy remains the same as it has been in the way we addressed this issue with China."
"We maintained we could not do business with China until we had the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty signed and in place and that is the policy we would apply today to India," he said in a local radio interview.
According to media reports, National Security Advisor M K Narayanan and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's spokesperson Sanjay Baru told the Fairfax newspapers they want Australia to reconsider the decision on sale of uranium, but said refusal would not hurt the relationship between the two countries.
The US Senate is expected to decide this week to dump such a policy and pursue a new nuclear cooperation deal with India.
Two senior Indian government officials have made it plain that Australia should also change its policy, the reports said.
Meanwhile, opposition Labour Party leaders in Australia said changing policy for India would damage the nuclear non-proliferation cause.
"Uranium cannot be sold to India because India is not a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty," Opposition foreign affairs and trade spokesman Kevin Rudd said in Melbourne, a media report said.
"That is a first and fundamental position to us when it comes to our ability to sell uranium to other countries," he said. Rudd said Australia should be leading the international effort to rebuild support for the non-proliferation treaty, at a time when Iran's nuclear ambitions were causing concern.
"If we fail to do so and the (non-proliferation) regime collapses, we then end up with nuclear arms races right across our own part of the world," he said.
