If Peter Dutton’s nuclear energy policy has received a degree of scrutiny from political journalists, more recent developments on the Coalition’s climate policy seem to have gone through to the keeper as far as the press gallery is concerned.
The Coalition’s formal position now is to go to the next election with a worse climate policy than Tony Abbott. Peter Dutton — apparently unilaterally, and certainly without the agreement of the joint partyroom — has not merely walked away from Labor’s 43% emissions reduction target for 2030, but will have no target of any kind for 2030.
At the next election, 2030 will be just five years away, just beyond the forward estimates. Failing to offer a target for 2030 to voters at the 2025 election is an act of electoral mendacity. It also means withdrawing Australia from the Paris Agreement, regardless of what Dutton or his media unit at The Australian insists.
But more to the point — a point widely missed — in doing so, Dutton has also dumped the 2030 target that was in place under three Liberal Prime Ministers: the 26-28% target agreed upon by Tony Abbott for Australia to take to the Paris climate talks in 2015.
Abbott, out of power, later reversed himself completely and claimed he’d been lied to by bureaucrats over the target. But that target, hopelessly inadequate as it was, held under both Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison.
Dutton is copying Abbott in having a fake climate policy: Abbott had the risible “direct action”, which relied on carbon sequestration to pretend farmers were storing carbon in vegetation (Labor persists with programs based on discredited human-induced regeneration because big polluters need the resulting carbon credits). Dutton has nuclear power. Both are intended to maintain business-as-usual for fossil fuel companies. But Dutton won’t have even Abbott’s weak emissions reduction target.
That Dutton has an even worse climate policy than Abbott — the benchmark of Australian climate denialist politicians — should be attracting extensive scrutiny from the press gallery, and at least as much as his nuclear energy policy. That lack of scrutiny is at least bipartisan — Labor’s commitment to the fiction of carbon capture and storage, in order to accommodate the “gas-fired recovery”, has similarly been ignored by the corporate media’s representatives in Canberra.
There’s also been little effort to interrogate the costs of Dutton’s nuclear policy — journalists appear content to wait for the Coalition to produce its own costings for building an array of nuclear power stations and propping up unviable coal-fired power stations in the interim (especially as the Coalition has now confirmed it intends to “cap” funding of renewables).
As Crikey showed yesterday, it’s quite possible to undertake such an exercise based on available financials. Given the now-long history of major infrastructure projects in Australia blowing out both in timelines and costs, the Coalition’s commitment to six major energy infrastructure projects in an area with no expertise or industry knowledge, with a price tag in the tens of billions, should be a subject of concern, namely that the Commonwealth will repeat Victorian Labor’s disastrous Suburban Rail Loop project or the massively over-budget Sydney metro.
What’s also missing is any questioning of the fact that even under the most optimistic investment scenarios, the construction of a fleet of new nuclear power stations — backed by new coal or gas-fired power stations — will require a massive financial commitment by the Commonwealth, either by direct subsidies or through guarantees for the tens of billions required. The states are unlikely to take on the task of building nuclear power stations — NSW, South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria are all Labor for the foreseeable future, and Queensland’s LNP, which will be in power from October, isn’t interested in nuclear power.
As a result, the Commonwealth will, for the first time — if it can overcome state government hostility — be entering the power generation industry, and on a colossal scale. Dutton is proposing a radical enlargement of the role of the federal government in an industry in which it has zero expertise, corporate knowledge or history. You’d think that would be worth covering. Editors and journalists seem to disagree.
