For well over two years, Peter Dutton has been talking about nuclear power. He formally embraced it 18 months ago. At any point since mid-2023, he could have unveiled a detailed, costed policy. All we’ve had in that time is repeated promises, usually delivered by Dutton’s News Corp stenographers, that the details were about to be released.
It’s taken so long that the CSIRO has had time to conduct not one but two of its annual “GenCost” reports demonstrating what even the layperson can work out from the overseas experience of nuclear power: it’s massively more expensive than renewables, particularly the mythical “small modular reactors” that Dutton claims will be up and running by the mid-2030s.
Now here we are, a few days out from Christmas, with Dutton revealing his costings at 11am on a Friday.
Except, of course, Dutton has already released the key message he wants out there: that at $331 billion, the cost will be hundreds of billions of dollars less than Labor’s renewables-and-storage policy. That was carefully leaked to selected journalists yesterday — without the modelling to explain the figure. One senior journalist reporting the figures said the modelling “has been described to” them.
Rigorous stuff.
The source of the costings is Frontier Economics, a Canberra consulting firm that has long helped the Coalition on energy policy and its attempts to delay climate action. Frontier’s most recent effort was an apparently voluntary costing of its version of Labor’s policies because the head of the firm was “irritated” about them. Entirely coincidentally, that costing is now the basis for Dutton’s claim that building an entirely new nuclear power industry from scratch is radically cheaper.
Dutton’s preferred line was thus reported across the commercial outlets and the ABC, with no opportunity for scrutiny of its basis.
Dutton’s technique — and it is clearly a successful one — is a version of Steve Bannon’s tactic of “flooding the zone with shit”: pumping so much material (accurate, or biased, or utterly absurd) into the media ecosystem that not merely do journalists fail to do their jobs, but also media consumers struggle to separate fact from fiction. Do it when your average punter is too busy buying gifts and working out what to do for Christmas lunch and voilà! Dutton can declare he’s been fully transparent about his policy without anyone in the mainstream media applying a proper blowtorch to his claims.
The single greatest absurdity of all this is the bizarre doublethink in the media about building infrastructure in Australia. The Panglossian assumption behind Dutton’s nuclear policy is that the whole thing can be stood up in a couple of decades, with the first reactor kicking off in less than a decade — and journalists take that seriously. But read media coverage of virtually any major infrastructure project in the country and you’ll find headlines about delays running into years, workforce shortages and massive cost blowouts.
Do the journalists covering Dutton’s nuclear policy ever read anything about the myriad of troubled infrastructure projects reported by their colleagues? Do they have no understanding that infrastructure in Australia is marked by hopelessly politicised project selection, poor business case development, wildly optimistic costing forecasts and the grim reality that the bigger the project, the greater the proportional blowout in its costs? Do they not remember how the NBN — initial estimate for the Coalition version, $29.5 billion; final cost, $54.5 billion — blew out?
They think it’s credible that the federal government — which decades ago outsourced or sold any infrastructure construction capacity — can rapidly build an entirely new industry, at a time when we can’t even build roads on time or within budget. If only we could power the energy grid with this nonsense.
