Peter Dutton’s steady progress away from the traditions of his own party continued in Friday’s nuclear policy costings, one of the more disingenuous documents foisted on Australians by either party for quite some time.
While experts rapidly spotted the deep flaws, bizarre assumptions and inconsistencies in the freebie modelling performed by the Coalition’s longtime advisers at Frontier Economics — and the implications for Australia’s millions of solar rooftop owners — the problems were so apparent that mainstream media commentators spotted them. Even right-wing economists tore the numbers apart.
Given that the job of the Coalition and Frontier Economics was to invent a set of numbers to claim that a build-from-scratch nuclear power industry would be cheaper than renewables with storage — when the objective truth is the latter is far cheaper — it’s unsurprising the modelling was so shambolic.
But one of the key ways in which it’s shambolic is very, very telling. As most impartial observers have noted, the “nuclear is cheaper” modelling relies — as the single biggest factor in distorting the comparison — on comparing like with unlike: specifically, the fanciful $600+ billion cost attributed to Labor’s plan is for an economy using 40% more power. Most of the purported cost differential vanishes if like is compared with like.
Compared to the inaptly named “progressive” scenario used as the basis for the Coalition’s nuclear costings, the “step change” scenario used for the claimed cost of Labor’s policies reflects a significantly larger economy with greater power consumption.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has put a dollar value on the difference between the modelled economies — $294 billion — but you don’t have to take such a figure as gospel to understand the sleight-of-hand at work. In an effort to shoehorn a vastly higher cost into a vastly smaller budget, Dutton and his modeller effectively propose to power a smaller economy, spending $300-plus billion along the way to fund it.
This is a fascinating contrast with how the Howard government used modelling in its climate denialism. As was notorious in the 2000s, the Howard government — relying on climate denialist economists at its resources lobby group-cum-modellers ABARE — made its central pitch against climate action that any efforts to reduce carbon emission would inflict costs on the economy.
These costs were modelled into an annual figure by ABARE’s denialists, then aggregated into a cost out to 2050 (or some other arbitrarily chosen year) to produce a colossal number. It was preferably then converted into a per-capita number so that Howard and his ministers could warn that any climate action would cost each man, woman and child tens of thousands of dollars.
This was a version of the basic lie devised by the fossil fuel industry and other heavy polluters in the 1970s: that we could have economic growth or environmental action, but not both. Now, of course, we’re stuck with the rapidly growing economic costs of failing to take action, while the cost of taking action is now significantly higher than if the Howard government had put in place simple measures like a modest carbon price.
Dutton radically departs from the Howard approach. The very point of his nuclear policy — which is to halt climate action and sweat decaying coal-fired power stations and build more gas power while we wait for nuclear reactors — is a smaller economy. Where Howard once warned of lower economic growth from climate action, Dutton promises lower growth from inaction.
It’s a remarkable three-way loss being offered to Australians: get a smaller economy while spending hundreds of billions to keep pumping out carbon emissions.
On its own, you might think that merely reflected Dutton’s desire to pretend his plan was cheaper than Labor’s. But it’s not the only area where Dutton prefers a smaller Australia. His other signature policy is a much smaller migration program, even though he can’t actually explain how he’ll achieve it. With less migration, there’ll be less pressure on housing and infrastructure and services, lower energy consumption — and lower economic growth, lower government revenue, and bigger workforce shortages.
It’s in every way the opposite of the Australia that John Howard pursued. But as we’ve noted repeatedly, Peter Dutton isn’t just another Sydney Liberal leader. He’s a Queensland LNP leader, and that’s something very, very different.
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