Liberals Against Nuclear director Paul Luthje advocates for tax on gas and coal, wants to see ‘polluters pay’

Peter Dutton is nuclear’s biggest fan. Unfortunately, the director of Liberals Against Nuclear wants to derail his big plans for Australia’s energy sector.

The director of a fledgling political group claiming to be disaffected antinuclear Liberal supporters is a Queensland retiree who has never been a member of the party.

Paul Luthje, director of Liberals Against Nuclear, is also supportive of the Albanese government’s intervention in the energy sector, big spending childcare subsidies, and the end of stage three tax cuts.

The fledgling antinuclear group has been spending big on campaign advertising, including spots on free-to-air television, online and on billboards — though where this funding war chest has come from has not yet been disclosed.

Three ads by Liberals Against Nuclear — each authorised by Mr Luthje — have been viewed 540,000 times on YouTube in the past fortnight alone.

On Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram Liberals Against Nuclear has spent $85,600 on advertising in just a month.

The website says Liberals Against Nuclear’s mission is “to highlight that the current nuclear power policy attacks our core values and also hurts us politically in key seats which we need to win to form a majority government.

“We are calling on Peter Dutton and the Liberal leadership to drop this anti-Liberal policy that contradicts our core values of fiscal responsibility, free markets and limited government,” the site says.

Paul Luthje, who is the director of Liberals Against Nuclear. Picture: Paul Luthje's Facebook page

The group has also had enough cash to commission pollster uComms to undertake research in key seats the Coalition need to win to take government, including Brisbane.

A deep dive into Mr Luthje shows he is a self-funded retiree who was a builder for 32 years, and a director and shareholder of Liberals Against Nuclear Pty Ltd — an entity that’s only a month old.

It has been confirmed by party sources Mr Luthje, who moved to Queensland in 1985, is not and has never been a member of the LNP or the stand-alone Liberal Party before the 2008 merger.

It’s understood he is also not a member of Queensland Labor.

Numerous letters to the editor penned under Mr Luthje’s name between September 2024 and February also revealed his ardent support for the Albanese government on issues like cheaper childcare, tax cuts, and climate change action.

In a letter to the editor published in the Courier-Mail last September, Mr Luthje wrote that the Albanese government “has runs on the board in key areas including cheaper childcare, tax cuts for all, and climate-change action, unlike the Morrison government.”

The criticism of the Morrison government is noteworthy, given it did not propose nuclear reactors.

In a letter to the Courier-Mail published in February this year, Mr Luthje endorsed a Commonwealth Treasury recommendation to “develop options for a levy on coal and gas extraction companies, based on the annual energy content they have extracted, from which the funds raised would be invested in disaster mitigation and resilience measures, and the cost of rising insurance.

“In this way, the polluters pay,” Mr Luthje wrote.

In another letter, published in the Gold Coast Bulletin in January, Mr Luthje accuses former Liberal leader Alexander Downer of misleading Australians about electricity prices. Mr Luthje went on to assert that wholesale electricity prices which “spiked” in 2022 had now “returned to normal levels”.

But data from the Australian Energy Market Operators shows that so far in 2025, the average wholesale price of electricity in South Australia and Tasmania is double what it was in 2021. Prices are more than 70 per cent higher in Queensland and 80 per cent higher in NSW than what they were four years ago; in Victoria, costs are still more than 50 per cent above the 2021 average.

Ted O’Brien and Peter Dutton say nuclear is cheaper than renewables-only. Picture: NewsWire’s John Gass

When contacted by this masthead, Mr Luthje was not keen to comment.

“I’m in the middle of the mowing job at the moment so I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to add other than I am who I am.”

Liberals Against Nuclear spokesman Andrew Gregson – formerly the party’s Tasmanian director and the one-time operator of Hobart’s now-defunct Spectacle Restaurant and Comedy Club – said polling it had conducted showed the Coalition was “taking a policy to the election that will see them lose.”

In the critical seat of Brisbane, which the Greens won from the Liberals in 2022, about one in four Coalition voters are prepared to take their support elsewhere because of the plan for up to seven reactors, Mr Gregson said.

The policy is also a turn-off for 40 per cent of undecided voters in the seat, he added.

The group has taken heart from Mr Dutton’s backflip on working from home.

“We now urge him to apply that same political flexibility to the $600 billion nuclear power plan,” Mr Gregson said.

Coalition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien said Labor and “fringe groups” were feeding Australians a “steady diet of lies” while the rest of the world “is surging ahead with nuclear”.

“Australians now pay among the highest electricity prices in the world, far higher than nations which have nuclear in the mix,” he said.

There are rumours in Canberra that private-jet-owning climate activist and tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes has provided financial support to Liberals Against Nuclear.

When asked about this speculation, Mr Gregson did not respond and Mr Cannon-Brookes’ media relations team made no comment.