Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants in Australia has attracted plenty of critical attention. But there’s a striking feature which has received relatively little discussion or criticism: the nuclear plants would be publicly owned and operated, similar to the National Broadband Network (NBN).
On the contrary, it received enthusiastic endorsement from free-market advocates such as The Australian’s Judith Sloan, who observed: “It’s how the French nuclear plants were first constructed.” It is also the way Australia built its biggest single piece of energy infrastructure, the Snowy Mountains Scheme.
