James Campbell: Libs finally take a great big leap of atomic faith

Not since 1991 when John Hewson rolled the dice with Fightback! has an opposition leader had the cojones to offer a vision as bold as Dutton’s plan to introduce nuclear power, writes James Campbell.

It’s the boldest move by an opposition leader in more than three decades.

Not since 1991 when John Hewson rolled the dice with Fightback! has a leader had the cojones to offer a vision as bold as Peter Dutton is doing with his plan to introduce nuclear power.

There’s a reason for that of course – at more than 600 pages, Fightback! still holds the record for the longest suicide note in Australian political history.

But although it has become Australian political shorthand for what-not-to-do and explains why every winning opposition since John Howard in 1996 has run a small-target strategy, it needs to be remembered that Hewson almost pulled it off. It took Paul Keating at the height of his powers more than 18 months to wear Hewson down.

Luckily for Dutton, if we’ve learned anything in the past two years, it’s that Anthony Albanese is no Paul Keating.

Peter Dutton has taken a huge kangaroo-sized leap of faith by backing nuclear power. Picture: ChatGPT

Coalition supporters of Dutton’s move are not deluding themselves that this policy is risk free.

But if you press them closely on why they are giving their opponents the chance to raise Chernobyl and Fukushima, they say they don’t really think they have a choice.

Essentially the Coalition had three policy options to choose from in deciding what energy policy it should offer at the next election.

The first would be to “me too” Labor’s all-in on renewables position; ie, to downplay their differences and find something else to talk about.

This was never going to happen, not only because the National Party wouldn’t have stomached it but because they sincerely believe the government’s policy is a dud that is costing us a fortune and making the power grid less robust.

The second option would have been to say to the public net zero is not only not going to be achieved, Labor is sending the country broke trying. But even though global emissions are rising and will keep rising whatever we do, we should still do our bit, so while we wait for something to turn up – like green hydrogen – let’s build gas-fired power stations which are cleaner than coal.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton is finalising the Coalition’s nuclear energy policy. Picture: NewsWire

As sensible as this sounds (it’s the option I’d have gone for) it was not exactly risk-free either.

If you thought there’s been a chorus of squawking from leftoids across the spectrum about Dutton’s threat to walk away from the “legally binding” 2030 targets, imagine the noise if he’d said he was walking away from net zero by 2050.

In other words not only would this policy have meant there was net zero chance of winning back Teal-land, it probably would have been sayonara to the last of the Liberals’ seats in Melbourne and probably one or two in Sydney.

That left nuclear – the only policy which not only keeps the Coalition together, but by sticking to net zero by 2050 gives it something to sell in their lost ancestral homelands of Double Bay and Toorak.

Coalition hard heads had also convinced themselves that while a small-target strategy might have worked from opposition for John Howard, Anthony Albanese and Tony Abbott, it simply wasn’t going to work against a first-term government.

So if political necessity dictated they needed to be bold, for the reasons I have explained, circumstances also dictated that it would be nuclear on which Dutton ended up rolling the dice.

If Albo was travelling well, the logic of what Dutton is doing would be impeccable.

But he isn’t. Poll after poll shows the public is souring on him.

The background is the big fall in Australians’ standards of living in the past two years.

People might not hate him, but on the No.1 issue they care about it’s obvious more and more people have quietly decided he’s useless and are tuning him out.

A concept design of a zero emissions small modular reactor the Coalition proposed on Wednesday.

His embarrassing performance this week – getting the Chinese Premier’s name wrong then later pretending no one had told him goons from its embassy had stood over Sky News journalist Cheng Lei – will only stoke growing fears he isn’t up to the other bits of his job as well.

In other words, while a small-target strategy mightn’t have worked when Dutton set sail on his nuclear adventure, it’s far from clear that this is the case today.

By telling us where his reactors will be, Dutton will be hoping to limit Labor’s scare campaign in those places where they won’t.

But until he tells us how much they are going to cost, the scare campaign will roll on.