The Labor Party needs to modernise its policy and allow uranium to be exported to India, federal Resources Minister Martin Ferguson says.

Mr Ferguson said Labor's current uranium sales policy needed to allow ''flexibility and discretion'' when it came to India.

Mr Ferguson said he was not proposing Labor dump its blanket ban on uranium exports to countries outside the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but he urged the party to recognise India's ''very, very good history of nuclear non-proliferation''.

''No one can suggest India is a rogue state,'' Mr Ferguson said. ''I think this is something the Labor Party has to think about: there should be some flexibility or discretion built into the national policy that enables Australia to handle the delicate situation of India while at the same time forcing full accountability in the use of uranium in civilian power plants.

''I accept [that our refusal to export uranium] is a major concern in an otherwise close strategic relationship between Australia and India.''

Any future uranium sales to India would be accompanied by a bilateral safeguards agreement such as the one Australia negotiated with China in 2007.

Mr Ferguson’s comments come a week after WikiLeaks supplied details of a secret diplomatic cable revealing he had told US embassy officials that despite the current ban, a nuclear fuel deal with India could be sealed in the next three to five years.

His decision to publicly endorse a policy shift comes on the eve of an expected move today by the influential right-wing Australian Workers' Union to pass a resolution supporting an expansion of uranium mining and endorsing a debate about nuclear power.

AWU national secretary Paul Howes has publicly supported nuclear energy. Former New South Wales Labor premier Bob Carr also believes the party needs to debate the issue.