6m have solar and will vote

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s announcement on nuclear energy last week contained a welcome development. For the first time since about 1989, the Coalition has acknowledged that only governments can do some of the really big-ticket items.

Since about 1990, the Coalition has said, Private Sector Good, Public Sector Bad. But with the program to build seven nuclear power stations, the Coalition acknowledges that only the public sector can do it.

The publication of Fightback! by then Opposition Leader John Hewson in 1992 was the touchstone of conservative policy: the private sector was more efficient and could do things quicker and better than the great big bloated public sector full of lazy, box-ticking public servants. Taxpayers and consumers would be much better off, they argued.

If you can find it in the Yellow Pages, they said, buy it there. Or these days, Google it. Don’t let the Government do it, they said. The Government is not the solution to the problem. The Government is the problem, as Ronald Reagan said. Get government out of the way, and the private sector will provide the solution.

So, what has happened now? The signature Coalition policy for the 2025 election will be a huge government-owned energy monolith.

Gulp.

That will require the unlearning of three decades of conservative policy.

As it happens, though, much of that policy was a cruel hoax. Far from being cheaper and more efficient, the neo-liberal conservatives did not – to use market parlance – factor in two critical elements of private-sector contracting: fraud and profit gouging.

Since about 1990 in Australia we have seen, through privatisation, a major shift of wealth and income up to the top two percentiles at the cost of people on middle income. From employees and small business to the managers and shareholders of big business.

In the 1990s, the neo-liberals (read, the Coalition) harped on about reducing the role of government, particularly government spending. It did not happen. Government spending remained at 38 percent throughout the 1990s’ privatisations and downsizing. All that happened was that the spending went from public health, education, and welfare into subsidies and tax breaks for the fossil-fuel industry, other big corporates, and private health, education and other providers.

Public spending remained stubbornly the same.

It will be the same with the nuclear reactors. The overall costs will be borne by taxpayers because the publicly owned reactors will bear them. But the overall profits will be made by the private sector which will queue up for the construction contracts and whose profits will balloon as the costs of construction inevitably and uncontrollably blow out.

Importantly, even though the Coalition is going for a massive program of government spending and ownership for its nuclear reactors, it has relied on a private firm of economists to do the costings. Surely, if such a massive spend and risk is to be undertaken by the public sector, you would want the public sector to do the costings.

As it happens, we have that. The CSIRO has costed and re-costed nuclear energy and come up with the same result: higher electricity bills and greater dangerous carbon emissions.

The private-sector costings, on the other hand, look like an exercise in: “These are the conclusions upon which we have based our facts.”

This is because the real aim of the exercise is not to produce the cleanest energy at the lowest cost, but to keep the profits of the fossil industry flowing for as long as possible.

However, it is an electorally risky exercise. Not because a generally financially illiterate electorate will see nuclear as a white elephant, but rather because an ever-growing portion of the electorate has rooftop solar and know it pays off.

Further, in the unlikely event that nuclear goes ahead there will be times when the grid has too much power and domestic solar generators will be blocked from exporting their product to the grid because nuclear power stations cannot be turned on and off without enormous cost and difficulty.

That is going to annoy the owners of four million rooftop solar systems. It would be about as popular as taking away Medicare.

The electoral dynamics for nuclear are made worse for the Coalition because more than three million of those solar systems are on the roofs of stand-alone houses – in the very suburbs and regions which the Coalition hopes to take from Labor. That is about six million voters in an electorate of 18 million.

Moreover, those six million voters are proselytising about the value of solar, and lots of tenants and unit holders – hitherto shut out of solar – want to get a slice of the action sooner rather than later.

The big trouble with nuclear is spending vast amounts of public money with no electricity generation for at least a decade, more likely a lot more. Whereas every bit of renewable infrastructure generates from Day 1 and every battery stores from Day 1. Voters prefer the here-and-now to spending on something they might never see.

Nuclear is a matured industry. It not going to get much more efficient, if at all. Whereas the efficiency of solar, wind, and batteries continues on an upward trajectory well beyond previous expectations.

When you add electric vehicles, the renewables pay for themselves very quickly.

The task for Australia now is to reduce our reliance on our $30 billion a year of imported oil. And to reduce our reliance on $30 billion a year of thermal coal exports before the world does it for us. These are energy and national-security issues.

The Coalition’s decades-long nuclear program and Labor’s continued approval of coal mines fail to meet the urgency and magnitude of the national-security risks arising from climate change and fossil-fuel reliance.

A government’s first priority should be national security: not just from the threat of arms but the threats of disasters and supply-chain disruption.

We need politicians who think about the long-term security of their people not the short-term profits of big corporations and the donations which come from them.

Crispin Hull

This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 17 December 2024.