It’s Liberal Ingrates time again in the lead-up to the federal election. On this occasion, Matt Kean stars.
The high-profile Kean is a former treasurer and energy and environment minister in the NSW Liberal-Nationals Coalition government.
Kean was the member for the relatively safe NSW seat of Hornsby from 2011 to 2024.
The words of Kean can be heard in a YouTube video put out by a group calling themselves Liberals Against Nuclear. Needless to say, this organisation has no formal or informal connection with the Liberal Party of Australia. It has a website but no office address.
Kean is quoted on YouTube by an anonymous woman as saying that nuclear power is a distraction that doesn’t stack up at the moment on practical or economic grounds. It is reasonable to assume he has no objection to being quoted in this advertisement, which is hostile to the Liberal Party under the leadership of Peter Dutton.
No surprise, really, since Kean was appointed by the Albanese Labor government as chairman of the Climate Change Authority in August 2024 shortly after he resigned from the NSW parliament.
There is nothing the left in Australia likes more than high-profile Liberals who turn on the institution that made them politically famous.
Before he entered politics Kean was working in one of the big four accountancy firms, having studied business. Now he is a national figure with international contacts. He became well known initially for being a one-time Liberal minister who had public rows with former prime minister Scott Morrison and for opposing Dutton’s energy policies.
There was a profile in The Australian Financial Review by Paul Karp on March 21. Karp quoted from Kean’s supporters and critics but did not critique his record as NSW treasurer and energy minister. This was followed by a soft feature story in Good Weekend magazine on March 22 by Anne Hyland titled “Force of Nature”. Kean was photographed for the story staring into the distance, waist-deep in ferns. Really.
At least Hyland reported that Kean texted a journalist suggesting hostile questions that she could direct to Morrison during the 2022 election campaign.
However, the gist of the profile can be gauged by the penultimate sentence, which refers to the park’s towering trees. Namely: “As we admire them (the towering trees) in silence they stand tall like Kean, the chair of the Climate Change Authority.” By the way, Kean’s main job is at Wollemi Capital, which presents itself as “a specialist climate investor”.
Kean firmly and truly believes that renewables are the cheapest form of energy – solar, wind and hydro supported by batteries as back-up. He is completely dismissive of nuclear in the Australian energy market.
Appearing on the ABC TV Q+A program on March 10, Kean declared: “People talking about building nuclear today are the same people that are, sort of, arguing that we should be building a Blockbuster Video complex when Netflix is already here.” A smart line. But no more than that.
Blockbuster Video was a movie rental chain that went bankrupt in 2010. Whereas France has long relied on nuclear energy as its primary source of power and is planning new reactors. China has more than 20 reactors under construction. In the US, Silicon Valley tech companies are planning to build nuclear reactors to feed their power-hungry AI projects.
It would seem that Kean recycles a style of ridicule. Until recently, he compared any proposal to establish new coal-fired power plants with companies that were into Kodak cameras when iPhones had arrived. However, China has hit a 10-year high for the construction of new coal-fired power plants. It would seem that the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party did not get the joke.
What Kean and his supporters seldom discuss is his own record as a senior minister in NSW.
In February 2022, it was announced that the Eraring coal-fired power station in NSW would close in August 2025. Kean publicly backed the decision.
At the time Angus Taylor, the minister for industry and energy in the Morrison government, said he was “bitterly disappointed” with the decision, fearing that this would lead to energy shortages in NSW.
Taylor was correct, Kean was wrong.
In May 2024, the Minns Labor government in NSW did a deal with Origin Energy to keep Eraring open for an additional two years beyond August 2025.
This decision was made after new modelling showed NSW could face energy shortages if Eraring closed in 2025.
Recently it was announced that Origin Energy has opted out of a profit and loss sharing arrangement with the NSW government for the financial year 2025-26. This indicates that Origin Energy believes that Eraring will turn a profit for that year. Eraring is no Kodak – for which the people of NSW have much reason to be thankful.
Meanwhile, this year energy customers in NSW are destined to have higher energy price rises than in most other states. Asked on Sky News’ Credlin program on March 13 as to what was causing the price hike, Aidan Morrison, energy research director at the Centre for Independent Studies, blamed Kean. Morrison said NSW energy consumers were now seeing “the actual costs flow through from the renewables energy program … the big NSW electricity road map that Kean produced … when he was energy minister”.
Don’t expect Kean to acknowledge the failures of his own energy policies. He’s busy talking about himself to journalists and being photographed for magazines.
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