Chris Bowen could singlehandedly doom Labor to one term in government | David Penberthy

Anthony Albanese’s government is becoming an international embarrassment holding back the state Labor leaders who know a good idea when they see it, writes David Penberthy.

Federal Labor is looking increasingly like a shag on a rock when it comes to its obstinate hostility on the nuclear question.

It was hard to imagine there could be a dumber policy that the “three mines” position Labor crafted during the Hawke era at a time of great concern over nuclear proliferation, Cold War tensions and the threat posed to the ALP by Peter Garrett’s Nuclear Disarmament Party.

This unparalleled piece of half-pregnant silliness held that Australia was implacably opposed to the mining of uranium – other than at three designated locations.

It was the equivalent of joining Alcoholics Anonymous but still giving yourself a leave pass to attend a few pub crawls and really tie one on.

Under the leadership of Anthony Albanese and his genuinely hopeless Energy Minister Chris Bowen Australia has gone one better in the stupidity stakes in a public policy sense.

In AUKUS we are signatories to a major security pact which requires that we do two things – build nuclear-powered submarines and house the high-level nuclear waste produced in operating these submarines.

Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

And in the same breath, we are opposed to a domestic nuclear industry.

Huh? It makes three mines look almost sensible.

Federal Labor’s excruciating inconsistency was paraded on the global stage this week when we told our two closest partners the United Kingdom and the United States that, sorry, we would not be signing an agreement to speed up the rollout of civilian nuclear energy.

Some flunky in Chris Bowen’s office issued this pat declaration as a statement on behalf of the Minister, and since then the unenviable job has fallen to Bowen and others including Defence Minister Richard Marles to explain why their position isn’t the purest form of nonsense.

It surprised the UK, it surprised the US, and it puts Australia in a kind of energy dunce’s corner away from so many liberal democracies which have realised and are showing that nuclear is a valuable and affordable part of the energy mix in achieving a decarbonised future.

What it means in effect is that Australia has pulled out of the Generation IV International Forum, which is the scientifically-focused nuclear energy body set up in 2001 to let like-minded countries share insights into best practice in the nuclear space.

It involves billions of dollars for research and development. It involves countries which are the exact same type of nations we want to collaborate and trade with – Argentina, Australia, ­Brazil, Canada, China, France, Japan, Korea, Russia, South ­Africa, Switzerland, the UK and US, and the 27 European Union members of the European Atomic Energy Community.

So here’s a question – what does Energy Minister Chris Bowen know that all these nations don’t?

Does he have a hitherto unseen PhD in nuclear physics or something which proves that all these nations are taking terrible risks and wasting vast amounts of money going down the nuclear path?

Or a tougher question – has he got evidence that renewables are going so well in Australia that we are all paying so little for our electricity by world standards that nothing needs to change.

The answer of course to all these questions is: total bollocks on every score.

Much has been written and said about the PM’s performance and his electoral chances.

My view is that Bowen alone is potentially his one-man political wrecking ball, whose smug righteousness about the energy path we are on is a world away from the realities facing families and businesses.

Bowen’s policy position is so bad that he alone can make this a one-term government.

It is worth contrasting Federal Labor’s juvenile and dated antinuclear stance with the commendable open-mindedness and thoughtfulness shown by both ideological arms of the South Australian ALP on this question.

Former South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill. Picture: Tait Schmaal

In Jay Weatherill we had a Left Faction Premier who had the sense to realise nuclear waste storage could provide an economically and globally beneficial opportunity for SA.

We could make heaps of money housing the world’s waste in a geographically and politically stable location.

It produced an impressive body of work led by former SA Governor Rear Admiral Kevin Scarce which also invited discussion around the correlated possibility of nuclear energy production.

In the end Weatherill was forced to scuttle the project purely because the Liberals withdrew bipartisan support.

We now have a Right Faction Premier in Peter Malinauskas who is not so much open-minded as enthusiastic about nuclear with just one reservation, its cost.

I suspect that the Premier is deliberately labouring his cost fears to give Albo some much-needed political cover on the question.

Given our advanced work as a state thinking about the issue, and the SA public’s higher level of acceptance for the use of nuclear, it is no exaggeration to say the Federal Government is inflicting economic damage on our state through its illogical obstinance.

We are staring at a potential new car industry for South Australia, yet Federal Labor is too stuck on its ways to see it.

They are embarrassing themselves and they are damaging our state.

There was a bit of talk here recently for one very obvious reason about whether we should introduce drug testing for politicians.

My instinctive reaction was to regard this as gimmicky nonsense and find something more sensible to talk about.

Hearing Chris Bowen talk at the COP this week I’m not so sure.

Bowen actually said the government’s approach to climate change “makes economic sense at every level from the household budget to the nation’s economy”.

He must be on something to make such a claim. Either that or he has never paid a power bill in his life, and has certainly not seen one over the past two years, when we were all conned into thinking they’d be $275 cheaper.

You could only defend the status quo on energy in Australia if you are completely inured to cost of living concerns.

The biggest joke is that even with the renewables push, subsided to a degree that vastly dwarfs any public cost of nuclear, we still generate one-third of our power through coal anyway.

Originally published as Chris Bowen could singlehandedly doom Labor to one term in government | David Penberthy