Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon says Australia can keep one type of cluster munition, despite a draft ban treaty agreed on in Ireland overnight.

Delegates from more than 100 countries meeting in Dublin, agreed the text of a landmark international convention to ban cluster bombs, after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the UK would scrap all such weapons in its arsenal.

A delegation of senior Australian Defence Department and Foreign Affairs officials are involved in the Dublin talks.

Cluster munitions open in mid-air and scatter as many as several hundred 'bomblets' over a wide area.

They often fail to explode, creating virtual minefields that can kill or injure anyone who finds them later - often curious children.

Mr Fitzgibbon said the treaty was a great step forward in humanitarian terms but said Australia would not be scrapping the plans to buy cluster-munition artillery shells known as 'SMArt 155'.

The 155mm shells burst in mid-air and expel two smaller bombs which descend on parachutes and use sensors to scan the ground below them for possible targets before detonating.

"We are of course procuring the SMArt 155 and I think it's a fair proposition that it does not of course fit into the category of these indiscriminate munitions that people are rightly and genuinely so concerned about," Mr Fitzgibbon said.