Energy policy is becoming Australia’s own Brexit, and proving just as intractable

Some big election wins elicit more joy than others. Watching the UK election count last week, my thoughts turned to 1997, the previous time the Labour Party had come in from the cold to take power after a long stint in opposition.

I covered that 1997 election for this masthead, and what I saw then was sheer jubilation in large parts of the community. Labour’s first win under Tony Blair, replacing a Tory government that had stayed in office for one term too long, carried with it an enormous sense of promise for Britain.

Illustration: Dionne GainCredit:

The reaction among most people then wasn’t just relief at turfing out a clapped-out government, it was excitement about what would be possible to modernise and reinvigorate the country.

Compare that with the more perfunctory response to Labour’s victory under Sir Keir Starmer. The turnout of voters in the UK’s voluntary voting system this time was 60 per cent, the lowest number for a change of government election in the modern era. The turnout to elect Margaret Thatcher was 76 per cent; for Blair 71 per cent; for David Cameron 65 per cent.

I was in the UK a few months ago, and the attitude to politics and its ability to find solutions to the country’s problems was a mixture of weariness and wariness. The biggest issue in Britain over the past 50 years has been its relationship with Europe after the UK joined the “common market” in 1973. Eventually, in 2016, a referendum on whether to leave or remain in the European Union saw Britain choosing to leave.

It is a perfect example of an intractable issue, something that just won’t go away. No matter how much it’s argued out and even legislated, it can’t be settled. You might have expected that the actual formal enactment and implementation of Brexit in 2021 would have drawn a line under it all. But no, it’s just mutated a bit and lives on. Indeed, depending on how the Starmer government fares, it might even come back bigger and stronger than before.

The greatest promoter of Brexit, Nigel Farage, is now a member of parliament as the leader of the Reform Party, which attracted more than four million votes or 14.3 per cent of the total. Reform is all about standing up for British culture, identity and values, freezing immigration and stopping the boats, according to its campaign material.

Voting for Brexit didn’t resolve anything, because for many of its adherents, it was less about Europe than it was about resisting change and outsiders.

Here in Australia, as the Coalition has revealed bits and pieces of its signature nuclear policy, it’s hard to resist the conclusion that energy policy – which is really shorthand for climate change – is our Brexit, our intractable issue that dwarfs so much else. In our polity and quite likely in our community, how we should deal with climate change – or even if we believe it exists – is something we just can’t settle.

Nuclear energy is merely the latest play in a much longer game going right back to the Howard years, when – incredibly – the Liberals paid lip service to backing an emissions trading scheme. If the Coalition isn’t making up the policy as it’s going along, then it’s doing a Vegas-level impression of a political outfit that is. In any event, that doesn’t matter so much because just like Brexit, the proposed solution, which for the moment is nuclear, counts for less than the underlying message behind it. That message is “you are right not to want to accept change, especially if it might involve any cost or sacrifice”.

That message has political resonance. It’s all too easily forgotten that during Kevin Rudd’s first stint as prime minister, public support for climate change action started to fall away in 2009-10 once Australians started to realise that it might involve some sort of financial cost.

Of course, under Peter Dutton’s still-developing energy policy, the public will have to pay for the nuclear reactors, but those charges presumably won’t be included in household energy bills. And while we’re waiting for the reactors to be built, we’ll be able to emit carbon to our heart’s content, just like the old days, because nuclear will eventually deliver us to net zero just ahead of 2050.

The truth is that the entire nuclear energy policy laid out so far is contingent on the Coalition winning the next election. Its timelines are already tight and if the LNP has to wait until 2028 to take office, the first nuclear energy plant would be unlikely to be up and running before 2040, rendering the 2050 net-zero target all but impossible to achieve. The odds that the Coalition’s energy policy mutates into yet something else should the Albanese government somehow secure a second term look pretty good.

And anyway, our own Brexit-style intractable policy might be rendered a bit of entertainment if, as seems increasingly likely, Donald Trump moves back into the White House in January. He has no intention of cutting carbon emissions, and without the US putting its shoulder to the wheel on climate change, we’ll all be cooked, in the literal sense.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor.

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