Australia said on Tuesday that the civil nuclear agreement allowing it to supply uranium to India and the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) would be in place by the target deadline of December.
Speaking to reporters, visiting Trade and Investment Minister Andrew Robb said the Australian Parliament was expected to ratify the Nuclear Cooperation Agreement that the two countries had signed in September 2014. Australia has about a third of world’s recoverable uranium resources and exports nearly 7,000 tonnes of it a year.
“The CECA will principally focus on services and investments and will also have a respectable goods package and it will, as any such deal must, respect the fact that still 600 million Indians live on less than $2 a day… those sensitivities will be in it,” Mr. Robb said. In the last 12 months, this is Mr. Robb’s fifth visit to India — during which he met among other Ministers Commerce and Industry Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
He said that though outstanding issues remained on the CECA, his team of negotiators was confident of concluding it by December.
Senior officials said meetings between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull were expected on the sidelines of the upcoming G20 Summit next month in Turkey and that they might make an announcement there.
Investor sentimentSpeaking about the global investor sentiment, the Minister said all eyes were on India, which in the last 12 months had been the greatest recipient of foreign direct investment and was growing faster than China. “I travel the world and I find it is awash with cheap money and with nervous investors, investments into bonds have given negative returns to a lot of whom …. and where nervous investors are putting their money is symptomatic of the political, economic environment driving growth ... if you look at the numbers, the investment community has a lot of confidence in India.”
Freedom of expressionResponding to a question on the possible impact on investments of the concerns currently being raised in certain quarters about “threats to freedom of expression,” the Minister said that in a democracy different views keep a government honest. “When change is occurring it is not surprising that people are not comfortable and find all sorts of ways to express themselves … It requires governments to make every effort to answer their concerns, maintain its support of them and their mandate,” he said.
