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While Coalition insiders say Peter Dutton has rallied the party room around his nuclear policy, some fear that unity has been achieved at the expense of key seats.
By Karen Barlow.‘Just a bloody mess’: The Coalition confronts the energy market
Bringing energy bills down – and getting credit for it – will be the holy grail for Labor in this election campaign. For the opposition, it will be securing support for a nuclear solution, starting from within its own ranks.
The pain of a rising cost of living has galvanised voters almost to the exclusion of all other political debates.
“With the cost of electricity, with a very active movement against large-scale renewables, I think it’s improving the perception around nuclear as much as anything,” says one Nationals MP.
“There’s no silver bullet here. Excuse my French, but I think it’s all a giant fucking disaster, the national energy market. It’s all just a bloody mess.”
As Peter Dutton hones the sell on his still-uncosted, yet-to-be-detailed nuclear energy push, The Saturday Paper spoke to Coalition insiders and found a degree of acceptance, alongside some frustration, in the party room.
There was concern about how the big reveal on cost might be received.
“How much is the capital expenditure going to be? How’s the government going to fund it? How long is it going to sit on the government balance sheet? Or is it going to be owned in perpetuity by the government?” one backbencher asks.
“Obviously, we prefer the private sector to be doing this sort of stuff and creating the enabling environment to allow that to happen.”
Another expressed regret over the time lost to climate wars.
“I was just horrified for the last 10 years, because it was really the Nationals and Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin, and people like that, that really held us back, and it has meant that the country is in a terrible position now in terms of energy,” one Liberal backbencher says.
“The writing was on the wall for a long, long time that the coal-fired plants were coming to the end of their life, but instead it became twisted into a debate about climate change.”
“We spent 10 years arguing about it instead of saying, ‘What are we actually going to do?’ ”
That’s not to say there’s any sign of support for what Coalition MPs have branded Labor’s “ideological renewables-only” energy policy, and what Energy Minister Chris Bowen calls Labor’s “sensible” approach to get to 82 per cent renewables in the national grid, firmed by gas power.
Renewables already supply 40 per cent of Australia’s power. But Dutton argues, without providing a timeline for implementation, that nuclear has a role to play in reaching net zero by 2050. In the meantime, to fill the large gap in power needs, he says gas would be “a huge feature” of the Coalition’s transition plans – a strategy that has been criticised as simply a ploy to prolong the fossil fuel industry’s dominance.
Nuclear is likely the most expensive option for renewable energy, though exactly how expensive is unclear without costings. Dutton conceded on Monday the upfront costs of starting to build the Coalition’s planned seven nuclear power plants from 2035-37 would be “significant”. He insisted, however, in a speech described by Bowen as a “nothingburger” filled with “anti-renewables prejudice”, that his plan would ultimately prove cheaper than Labor’s planned transition to renewables.
“I am not going into figures now. We’ll release all of that. But the fact is that you end up with a much cheaper unit cost under nuclear over time,” Dutton told a press conference in Sydney.
He said he was “fully supportive” of renewable energy but quickly pivoted to the “environmental impact” of such projects and the “evaporating” social licence in some communities.
Liberal MPs have moved on from their surprised response in June to the captain’s call in which Dutton rejected a 2030 emissions reduction target. This stance may have proved the unity ticket the Coalition needed with climate deniers still holding sway among the Nationals.
Opposition MPs are largely falling behind the Nationals-led agenda on climate and the transition, with one Liberal backbencher pointing to published polling that the prospect of going nuclear “does not seem to be doing us any harm anywhere”.
“I think the party room’s pretty comfortable with it for now,” the backbencher tells The Saturday Paper.
This MP was among those reporting positive feedback from their constituents.
“It’s being sold well. I think Labor’s struggling to find a way to respond to it because they’ve got their own vulnerabilities within their own energy transition and power bills, and I think people are interested in the proposition.
“Not entirely convinced, but their minds are open to it, and I guess it’s a good thing for us to have.”
One Liberal MP expressed surprise at the reception to nuclear. “If you told me that we would be in the position we are two years after losing after nine years in government, that we would have announced the nuclear energy policy and we’ve got ourselves in a position where we are, I would have thought, Aw, that’s going to be hard.
“The great irony is, I think in a lot of the teal seats, it’s actually probably worked a lot better than I think any of us probably thought it would.”
That’s not a view universally shared, however. Another Liberal MP can’t see nuclear working as a vote-winner in inner-city seats, despite polling suggesting the teal seats of Curtin and Goldstein may return to the party.
“We’ve got to do a lot of work still there in the teal seats. It is not popular at all. And mathematically, we can’t get into majority government without those teal seats,” they said.
“They’re also our traditional heartland. They’re also where, traditionally, where we could do a lot more fundraising, and that matters, because you need money to win and to run a campaign.”
The same MP described nuclear as the Coalition’s only policy option with coal-fired power “essentially coming to an end”.
“Look, at least this way it was one way the Nationals were at least brought on board to stop saying ‘net zero is a nonsense’ and ‘it’s a hoax and we don’t need to do this’,” the MP said. “This has at least got them now talking about it in a different light.
“There’s still a couple in the Nats – you know, [Matt] Canavan, particularly [Alex] Antic – that will say, ‘Oh, this is just all nonsense climate change.’ But Canavan, at least, does give his support to nuclear but he doesn’t do it on the basis that it’s a way of getting to net zero. He does it on the basis that that would be good for regional areas.”
There’s general acceptance that the giant leap has already been taken.
“The big moment was when we committed to it, named the sites and just sort of said, ‘Look, this is the path we think we need to go down,’ ” another Liberal MP says.
“It sort of might be counterintuitive, but the biggest issue is how you can deal with power and energy prices in the immediate future, in the next five years, because people are hurting, business is hurting.”
As for offering policies to immediately bring down power bills, while National Party leader David Littleproud backs household solar and batteries for the cities, there’s no sign of a push within the party to help with household electrification backed by solar.
“Our policy will revolve around extending the life of those coal assets, and making sure that we’ve got reliable, consistent energy will play into that, and also get rid of a lot of the costs of the transmission that’s required for the wind and solar proposal,” one Nationals MP says.
“So, I think that’ll be part of the argument that’ll have an effect on cost, both a proven technology that we’ve relied on in the past, and we’ll sort of focus on that until 2050.”
The nuclear proposal is not yet harming the Coalition, according to former Liberal strategist and RedBridge Group pollster Tony Barry, but he says a number of factors are at play.
He regards Labor’s scare tactics, including the three-eyed fish imagery, as falling flat, and says people are not seeing evidence that renewable energy is bringing down energy prices.
Barry says there is public anger over falling feed-in tariffs and substantial outlay costs for solar power. The government and renewable energy groups have “manifestly failed” to sell clean energy, in his view, and public support has softened.
“It’s playing beautifully for Dutton,” he says.
“Voters just look at their bills, which are going up, and they’ve made the assessment that perhaps renewable energy isn’t cheaper.
“The salience of cost of living and housing is so high at the moment in all our research that every other issue is failing to punch through,” Barry says.
“We’re seeing around 75 per cent of voters nominate those two issues as the most important ones to them. That is unprecedented in my 25 years as a consumer and supplier of research.”
The Labor policy most cited as helpful for Australians was the amended stage three tax cuts and the energy rebates, but they were the options from just 24 per cent of respondents in a RedBridge poll who could name a standout Albanese government policy.
RedBridge research also suggests Dutton is getting “some reward for a bold idea on nuclear”, Barry says.
“That’s not to say they think it’s the best plan or they supported it, but they identified it as the biggest, most memorable, boldest plan in this parliamentary term.
“When you focus people on a conversation about nuclear there are certainly hesitations and concerns and knowledge gaps … The trick for Labor is not to be seen as being too focused on nuclear energy at the expense of not being focused on cost of living.”
To put that “boldness” another way, however, the nuclear power proposition also makes the opposition a target. MPs who spoke to The Saturday Paper don’t express too much concern.
“We’re not saying it’s sort of a cost-of-living measure or anything else like that. We’re saying it’s a long-term energy market reform,” one parliamentarian says.
“It’s a good point of differentiation. I think it’s an important policy. But I don’t think we will win an election off the back of that, and I don’t think we’re going to lose one either.”
In the meantime, Dutton is seen by the Nationals as a “steady navigator”.
“I think we’ve got the advantage. We’ve had the situation where he’s been so far ahead of anyone else in the Liberal Party that there’s really not been any leadership rumblings or undermining,” one Nationals MP says.
“The dynamic between David [Littleproud] and Peter is good. It’s not stealing the limelight off Peter in a presidential-style environment that we exist in these days.
“I think Albanese is one of our key strike weapons. He’s certainly doing some things that are pissing people off.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 28, 2024 as "‘Just a bloody mess’: The Coalition confronts the energy market".
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