I understand patience is a virtue, but it’s not an inexhaustible commodity – particularly when a party of government continues to have a lend of the Australian public in such extravagant fashion over such a long period of time.
Peter Dutton has made his captain’s call to oppose Labor’s 43% emissions reduction target for two reasons: to force Anthony Albanese to do a parliamentary deal with the Greens, a situation he senses is risky for Labor politically; and to reserve the right to engage in more weaponised bollocks by blaming rising consumer prices on Labor’s new 2030 target.
Dutton’s big partisan play was formalised on Monday night by the shadow cabinet with only a minimum of pushback. Then it was rubber stamped by the Coalition party room on Tuesday morning with only the minimum of pushback.
What’s happening now is dead simple: later this week in the House of Representatives, the Liberal and National parties will once again vote against any form of serious emissions reduction.
That’s the truth. Voting against action to combat the climate crisis. This behaviour needs to be called for what it is.
But Dutton obviously needed something to say on Tuesday apart from, I am an absolute shocker who is leading a political party that can’t seem to face up to the responsibility of leadership grounded in evidence, reason, and prudent risk management, so he sailed forth with news.
There would be a review into nuclear energy.
If you haven’t been at this deranged rodeo for as long as I have, you may not know nuclear power has practical utility for the Liberal party.
Colleagues invoked the prospect of nuclear back in 2006 as a means of leading John Howard to accept the inevitability of carbon pricing. Nuclear energy would need a carbon price in order to be viable, so that technology was a pathway to lead a conservative like Howard to accept emissions trading – a position the Liberals then held until Tony Abbott thought it was politically convenient to weaponise emissions trading as a “carbon tax” and use that to blast the Coalition back into government.
Now nuclear is being invoked to leash the Nationals and give the After Dark roster on Sky News something to have #BigFeelings™ about while Liberals work out how on earth to regroup on climate policy over the next three years.
Dutton said on Tuesday his new nuclear review would be led by Ted O’Brien.
Who, you ask? O’Brien is the new shadow minister for climate change and energy.
Dutton then declared it was “high time that Australia had an honest and informed debate on the benefits and costs of nuclear energy”.
High time is possibly a little insulting to O’Brien.
Back in 2019, when O’Brien was chair of federal parliament’s standing committee on environment and energy, he authored a report intended – as O’Brien put it at the time – to provide “a way forward for nuclear technology in Australia”.
Sadly, O’Brien’s path forward proved to be very short.
Emerging nuclear technologies only rated a cursory mention in the Morrison government’s subsequent technology roadmap. These technologies had “potential but require R&D and identified deployment pathways”. Here was the sound of an issue being kicked forcefully into the long grass.
The Coalition has just been in power for nine years. It had the power to progress a domestic nuclear industry. It didn’t. Now, in opposition, we’ll have O’Brien (2022) agreeing with O’Brien (ignored in 2019), or possibly we’ll have duelling O’Briens. Who says politics is too cruel a profession for closure?
I mean no disrespect to O’Brien, who has a couple of masters degrees and proficiency in Chinese. In my book, that makes a person very bright. But what gamechanging insight can he possibly bring to an issue that’s been studied as frequently as nuclear?
Only two weeks ago the CSIRO found that wind and solar remains the cheapest source of electricity generation and storage in Australia, even when considering additional integration costs arising due to the variable output of renewables, such as energy storage and transmission.
In terms of the viability of small modular reactors, the CSIRO said the “status” of that technology had not changed.
It said there were no prospects of any domestic projects “this decade, given the technology’s commercial immaturity and high cost”. That was two weeks ago.
Back in 2006, the Switkowski review commissioned by Howard found that nuclear power was likely to be between 20% and 50% more costly to produce than power from a new coal-fired plant at current fossil fuel prices in Australia.
It said nuclear would only become competitive in Australia in a system where the costs of greenhouse gas emissions were explicitly recognised, and even then, reactors would require government subsidies.
Ziggy Switkowski appeared before O’Brien’s inquiry in 2019 and said there was no coherent business case to finance an Australian nuclear industry before adding: “I have emphasised that one of the things that has changed over the last decade or so is that nuclear power has got more expensive rather than less expensive”.
The South Australian government, through a royal commission, also examined the viability of nuclear in 2016 and found it wasn’t a goer.
I’m technology agnostic. Climate science tells us the urgent imperative is emissions reduction, so in that context, all technology should be considered.
But it is beyond ludicrous for the Coalition to decline to support Labor’s new emissions reduction target on the basis that it might drive up energy prices (which is one of the current excuses) and in the same breath, hail the breakthrough prospects of nuclear energy.
If the Coalition seriously wants to advance nuclear energy, then the questions it must answer are simple:
1. What carbon price are you willing to support to make this happen;
2. What level of taxpayer subsidies are you willing to allocate to create a domestic industry; and
3. Why on earth would you subsidise the most expensive form of power when the cheapest form of power generation already exists and has none of the downsides of nuclear?
Anything else is just total bullshit.
