UN move expands Australia's territory: minister
SYDNEY (AFP) — Australia's territory has expanded by an area five times the size of France after the UN agreed to its jurisdiction over a massive amount of seabed, Resources Minister Martin Ferguson said Monday.
The UN decision to extend the country's borders south, west and east to include a further 2.5 million square kilometres (965,255 square miles) could potentially provide a "bonanza" in underwater oil and gas reserves, he said.
"I am pleased to announce that Australia, the largest island in the world, has just been dramatically increased in size," Ferguson told reporters in Canberra.
"We have fully explored through the United Nations our entitlements to actually extend our continental shelf."
Ferguson said the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf in New York gave Australia control of large areas of seabed beyond the standard 200 nautical miles, including some bordering Australia's Antarctic Territory.
The decision gives Australia the rights to what exists on and under the seabed, including potentially lucrative oil and gas reserves and biological resources.
"That is an area five times the size of France, 10 times the size of New Zealand and 20 times the size of the United Kingdom," Ferguson said. "The truth of the matter is that they have been hardly explored. This is potentially a bonanza."
The minister said the decision would allow Australia, which has massive coal, uranium and other reserves but limited oil supplies, to carry out further exploration.
He said the decision was important for resource-hungry nations that are seeking security of energy supply.
"As you can appreciate, when you sit down and talk to countries such as Japan, Korea, India and China, the big issue they want from us is security of supply and that goes to the energy security debate," he said.
But Ferguson said there would be no exploration of the waters immediately around the Antarctic mainland.
He added that the government would move quickly to proclaim the outer limits of the Australian continental shelf into law on the basis of the UN recommendation.
Mark Allcock, leader for the law of the sea project at government agency Geoscience Australia, said the new areas were deep and "on the edges of current oil and gas exploration zones at present."
"The gas fields in the North West Shelf may extend up to the areas of extended continental shelf but generally in the north, the water depth is more than 1.5 kilometres.
"These are the more remote areas. Everybody likes to get to the easy stuff and it is the difficult stuff that you go to later. This is the more difficult stuff."
Allcock told the national AAP news agency that areas which could potentially be explored following the UN decision included Lord Howe Rise, to the east of Lord Howe Island in the Pacific Ocean.
"Also, perhaps the Great Australian Bight and some areas of the Exmouth Plateau are considered to have some petroleum prospectivity," he said.
The decision gives Australia the right to look for resources in the new areas but does not give it control over shipping or whaling, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
