Greens MPs

So that was estimates.

One of the few advantages of being new to this job is appreciating it's strangeness with fresh eyes. Three times a year, while the Senate is in recess, an intriguing and largely overlooked ritual takes place in the airy committee rooms of Parliament House in Canberra. Senior public servants, heads of departments and a highly qualified army of advisers and minders converge for five days of cross-examination in front of the Senate's eight standing committees.

I was privileged to camp with Aboriginal elders and environment groups recently at the ‘Australian Nuclear Free Alliance' meeting, which took place at Mary River, about 100 km south east of Darwin.

This was a remarkable gathering of Traditional Owners and campaigners impacted by uranium mining, weapons testing and radioactive waste dumping, supported by environment groups from around the country. It got started in 1997 as the ‘Alliance Against Uranium' when the campaign to stop a uranium mine in Kakadu at Jabiluka that combining the strengths of Green and Black organising.

Thirty years after his first anti-uranium benefit gig at Sydney Town Hall, Environment Minister Peter Garret approved the expansion of the Beverley Uranium mine in South Australia.

The Beverley uranium mine is 520km north of Adelaide, deep in the heart of the South Australian desert. This is an area of low rainfall with sparse vegetation, reliant on underground water for development. Discovered in 1969, the ore body of approximately 21,000 tonnes of uranium oxide has an average grade of 0.18% and stretches four kilometres by 500 metres.

I have to confess myself baffled.

Over the last couple of days, we've seen a seismic shift in Australia's stated foreign policy - a shift with massive global implications that are already starting to reverberate around the region - and the mainstream media has given it no more than a cursory glance.

We've known it was coming. But, until yesterday, Australia still officially subscribed to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). We still respected the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. We still, officially, believed that Australia should not sell uranium to countries which illegally acquired nuclear weapons.