I managed to miss the crucial moment, but Labor’s National Conference has just voted to scrap the three mines policy, which was adopted at the last Labor conference I attended (in 1982, IIRC). I can’t say I have any regrets about this. The policy was a grubby compromise when it was adopted, and it didn’t improve with age. The idea that restricting Australian exports of uranium could constrain nuclear proliferation might have made some sense back in the 1970s when nuclear power was expanding rapidly, but it has long since ceased to be relevant.

That said, the news on nuclear proliferation has nearly all been bad lately, after a period in the 1980s and 1990s when a number of countries (including Brazil and South Africa) turned away from seeking nuclear weapons. The insistence of declining powers like Britain and France on maintaining their nuclear power status, and the success of India and Pakistan in gaining acceptance of their nuclear weapons has set the scene for a disastrous expansion in the set of nuclear-armed states, which will, surely lead to nuclear weapons being used, either by a government or a terrorist group, sooner or later. The only hopeful sign is the possibility that North Korea will disarm, though the recent agreement gives the rest of the world nothing better than the position that had been reached back in 2001.

The related ‘news’ is Howard’s announcement of plans for an Australian nuclear power industry. It’s hard to see this as much more than a stunt, since it’s most unlikely that any plants will be operational before about 2030. Even that possibility is conditional on a whole range of necessary conditions, including a return to nuclear power in the US and Europe, the successful completion of research on a new generation of plants (Howard’s announcement includes a contribution to this project) and, most importantly, some permanent resolution of the debate over what to do with nuclear waste.

Given the absolute need to respond to the global warming problem, we shouldn’t rule out the nuclear option. But neither should we engage in the kind of winner-picking implicit in the statements we’ve heard lately from Howard and others.

I’ve been attending Labor’s National Conference (more on this later), as an observer, mainly because I spoke at a “Fringe Conference” event on the topic of federalism. Amazingly, around 40 people turned out at breakfast time to hear me and Bob McMullen on this exciting topic.

A more substantive cause for surprise is that this is an issue (the only one I can think of – maybe others will suggest examples) where the major parties have swapped positions in the last 30 years. When the Whitlam government was elected in 1972, the view that the states were obsolete anachronisms and the Senate a collection of “unrepresentative swill” was pretty much unchallenged among Labor supporters, and this was even more true after 1975. Yet now it’s the Howard government that wants to bring the states entirely under the heel of the Commonwealth and to render the Senate a rubber-stamp.

In part, this is the effect of elections that have produced long-lived Labor State governments and an even longer-lived Liberal Federal government. If the position were reversed, I imagine old views would reassert themselves. But, on the Labor side at least, the change goes much deeper than election outcomes. As Labor has been forced to defend the achievements of the past against neoliberal attacks, the benefits of the checks and balances provided by democratically elected upper houses and a federal system have been more deeply appreciated. And the fact that the states (and also local government) are the natural providers of the services central to a social democracy has become more and more evident.

If Labor wins (and it’s notable that no-one I’ve met here is counting their chickens on this – even the formulaic references to a Rudd Labor government are matched with negative references to what a re-elected Howard would do), there’s a real chance to fix at least some of the overlap and duplication that plague our system at present, and to make talk about co-operative federalism correspond more closely to reality.