One workaround to this is described here : http://stackoverflow.com/a/4999510/168874

It involves prefixing all of the elements with the namespace like this :

    from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
    
    # build a tree structure
    root = ET.Element("{http://www.company.com}STUFF")
    body = ET.SubElement(root, "{http://www.company.com}MORE_STUFF")
    body.text = "STUFF EVERYWHERE!"
    
    # wrap it in an ElementTree instance, and save as XML
    tree = ET.ElementTree(root)
    
    tree.write("page.xml",
               xml_declaration=True,encoding='utf-8',
               method="xml",default_namespace='http://www.company.com')