Campbell: Reasons against nuclear power in Australia are legion

If we accept the next election is going to be all about the cost-of-living crisis, then nuclear power is too far off to be much of a help to the Coalition, writes James Campbell.

Whether it’s the current mania for all things Taylor Swift or the propensity of young men to get around in shoes without socks, I have of late had to accept the evidence is piling up that others see the world differently to me.

Which is why my first reaction when I picked up The Australian on Monday to read that Peter Dutton is going to the next federal election with plans to introduce nuclear power was not to assume – as it would have been until very recently – that he had gone stark raving mad, but to try to work out if I was missing something.

Maybe, I thought, all that is solid really has melted into air and that which I had thought was nothing more than simple commonsense – that nuclear power is political kryptonite – is no longer true.

Perhaps just as we are now accepting that for the purposes of sport, men can indeed be women, Australians will be taught to stop worrying and learn to love the nukes.

So I rang around among Liberal people whose political judgment I respect and found that I wasn’t the only one wondering if I was the only one missing something.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is going to the next federal election with plans to introduce nuclear power. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

While all of them prefaced their remarks by saying “I’m not opposed to nuclear” or “from a policy perspective, it makes sense”, most admitted they worried about the wisdom of pushing it from opposition.

To be fair, a few were prepared to back the policy, while acknowledging it was not without risks.

An Anti-AUKUS rally in Sydney drew a few hundred people to protest the nuclear submarine deal and to mark the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima in World War II. Would Australian’s now accept nuclear power? Picture: NCA NewsWire/David Swift

Still wondering “is it me?”, I finally struck an MP who couldn’t have expressed my views better when he said that what was being proposed was “madness on steroids”.

The reasons are legion.

Let’s start with the polls.

You’d have thought that a mob that so easily unpicked the lead of the Yes case at the Voice referendum would understand that support for anything radical in Australia shrinks the moment it hits any sort of concerted opposition.

And support for this is weak to start with – 35 per cent in favour versus 32 per cent opposed according to a recent RedBridge poll.

There’s the lead time involved.

The last time anyone tried to do anything really politically difficult – and to make it stick – was the Howard government when it introduced the GST in its second term.

But it had taken more than a decade from the 1985 tax summit until the 1998 election for the public to finally vote for a party that was prepared to introduce a consumption tax.

A screen grab taken from news footage shows the moment of a hydrogen explosion at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power station number three reactor in 2011.

And this was just a tax – it wasn’t something with the potential to remind people of Chernobyl or Fukushima.

To believe you can win an argument from opposition about something as big as this defies history.

If we accept the next election is going to be all about the current cost-of-living crisis then nuclear power isn’t going to be much of a help to the Coalition, given it is at least 10 to 15 years away.

Worse, not only will nuclear energy not be much help as a cost-of-living policy, its salience will make sure that no one gets to hear about whatever policies the Coalition does offer.

Coalition frontbenchers will struggle in vain to be heard on housing or immigration or whatever else it is they want to talk about.

Just as Labor found last year whenever it tried to talk about anything else, the conversation drifted back to the Voice.

Then there’s the unity problem. Do you really think Liberal candidates in “tealy” places are going to face the front on this?

I’m sure the loyal ones will try, but if they do say they support nuclear power, Labor will turn this into an ad saying the local Liberal wants a nuclear plant in (insert local beauty spot).

And that’s even before you get to the state Liberal leaders!

How many of them do you reckon are going to be lining up to sing this policy’s praises?

From some of the things I’ve read this week, it seems some Coalition supporters of this policy have got it into their heads that because Labor has backed AUKUS, this means they are somehow hampered in how they can run a scare campaign about nuclear reactors.

Personally, I think that is underestimating the flexibility of the brains in the Australian Labor Party, but let’s accept this is true.

The problem here is that Labor doesn’t need to run this scare campaign itself; it can rely on its faithful army of cut-outs and sock puppets to run it for it.

Moreover, to win the anti-nuke vote, Anthony Albanese doesn’t have to be perfect in the eyes of those scared of nuclear power, he just has to be better than Dutton.

Madness. It’s total madness.