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The typical rule in Australian politics is that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. The most successful oppositions tend to employ a small target strategy - not putting out any big promises or agendas for the government to attack, and simply taking pot shots at the government for anything that goes wrong. The current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was an exemplar of this sort of strategy and he succeeded in dethroning a three-term Liberal government with it.
The current Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, has decided to hell with that. Very unusually, he has proposed a big change in policy direction that is going to be one of the main issues that defines next year's election. He wants to go nuclear.
Australia does not have a nuclear industry (despite having more than a quarter of the world's uranium). In fact, nuclear power is explicitly illegal, at both the federal level and in multiple states. Victoria and Queensland (both ruled by Labor governments) have already ruled out any change in their laws or allowing nuclear plants to be built in their jurisdictions. Dutton is undeterred. He argues they will change their tune if he wins a mandate from the electorate for his policy.
The Albanese government meanwhile has made a big deal of the transition to renewable energy and acting on climate change. It has challenged Dutton to name the locations of his proposed nuclear plants (which he has now done) with the obvious intention of trying to stir up local resistance. It's running the argument that nuclear won't be built quickly enough to meet our climate commitments under the Paris Agreement, and that nuclear will be more expensive than renewables. Most of the media has joined in the chorus of insisting that nuclear just doesn't make sense and that relying on wind and solar is much more sensible.
Much remains to be seen about how this debate develops. But Dutton in my estimation is an very pragmatic politician with a good sense of the public mood. He's certainly a conservative, but not someone who's about to let ideology get in the way of political advantage. It seems that he's judged that this is a good fight to have, and I suspect he's right.
I don't know what the politics of nuclear were like back in the 70s but today most people simply don't have a strong opinion on it. What they do have a strong opinion about is energy prices, and those have been going up and up. And while there's an endless stream of commenters ready and willing to assert that the path to cheaper prices is more renewables, I think Dutton is correct that he can win this argument.
Firstly, the actual experience of Australians has been that prices have gotten more and more expensive as more and more wind and solar has been deployed. It's easy to write a headline saying "Power prices went negative today" during a sunny period, but most people are very aware that they are paying more overall.
Secondly, the uptake of rooftop solar has been very high. Something like a third of houses have solar panels already, and this has led to widespread understanding of the intermittency of renewable energy. People understand that it's great when it works... but when it doesn't and they have to buy power from the grid, it's extremely expensive.
And there's a third underrated and underreported aspect to this debate. Dutton's plan is for these nuclear power stations to be government built and owned, while the Albanese government is relying on private investment for its renewable energy buildout. This is kind of an inversion of the traditional stance of the two parties involved, with the Liberals having led the charge in privatising our existing energy system. But I've encountered a not-insubstantial number of people who think that privatisation was a big mistake and really wish we had a nationalised energy system again. I've even heard doctrinaire libertarians say it.
I think Dutton expertly read the public mood on the Voice referendum, correctly judging where people would end up as the issue became more salient. And my feeling is he's done the same here, and is guiding the debate in a direction that will be rewarding for him. It's rare for first term governments to lose, we'll see if this play is able to create an exception.
Do they believe this? What’s going through their heads? Is it just vibes?
There are two(2) ways to run a power grid without particularly fortuitous geography a la Iceland, Switzerland, Norway. Nuclear and fossil fuels. That’s it. Renewables just aren’t reliable enough.
No, the third (3rd) way is degrowth. Affordable and reliable energy is not a human right, it is a construct of white supremacism and colonialism which doesn't take into consideration climate justice and accountability to the stakeholders.
That's not an option.
It's something that a handful of radicals talk about on the internet, mostly alongside extreme ignorance of the effects of any of the policies they symbolically recommend, but it has no purchase with the actual electorate.
As Ashlael notes, Australians care about energy prices. Energy prices win (or lose) elections, and if the Australian public feels the pinch of energy costs, or worse, starts feeling a measurable decrease in standard of living, they will turf out any government that seems responsible for it.
Climate change activists have been complaining about this for a long time, actually - the moment it hits the hip pocket, the public always pick side "lower prices, worry about climate change later". We're willing to vote for lower emissions and growth, but we absolutely will not vote for lower emissions at the cost of growth.
Degrowth is dead in the starting gates. It's not happening.
Ironically, I think the combination of left-wing policies actually makes it less likely, not more - the white-supremacism-and-colonialism argument only has appeal to liberal middle-class white people who feel a sense of collective guilt. However, as Australia becomes more ethnically and culturally diverse, that means that guilty white people will only come to make up less and less of the overall population, and have less power as a voting bloc. Chinese or Indian migrants largely do not respond to arguments about white supremacism or colonialism or historical injustices, for hopefully obvious reasons.
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This is of course retarded and will lead to populists who end emissions regulations getting elected.
Like seriously, concern about climate change will not survive the first wave of blackouts.
Not if they ensure all such populists are excluded from the ballot.
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This has, in fact, already happened.
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When the blackouts start, they'll blame wreckers who refuse to conserve.
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Longer term yes. But true believers can cause enormous damage now while we await the populists.
Especially not if the true believers harden the country's institutions against democracy. As some people are doing in preparation for the return of Trump.
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