Antinuclear

‘The most beige person’: The man behind the Coalition’s nuclear plans

The Coalition’s spokesman for climate change and energy, Ted O’Brien.

Mike Seccombe is The Saturday Paper’s national correspondent. March 16, 2024Just two months after the 2019 election, Barnaby Joyce was making trouble for the new Morrison government. The dumped Nationals leader was part of a group of maverick MPs pushing for nuclear power. He reckoned he knew a way to make such a policy saleable.

The Joyce plan, as articulated in The Sydney Morning Herald on July 21, was this: “If you can see the reactor [from your house], your power is for free. If you are within 50 kilometres of a reactor, you get power for half price.”

People living or working up to 75 kilometres away would get a 25 per cent reduction on their electricity bills, he told the paper. By his reckoning, communities across the country would be lining up to get reactors.

Scott Morrison didn’t want a bar of the idea, or of nuclear power. Inquiring media were assured the position taken by the Coalition to the election still held: there were no plans to build nuclear power plants and there would be none unless and until there was evidence they could stack up economically.

Still, the problem persisted. The split on energy policy was boiling over between moderates and right-wingers in the [Coalition] government’s ranks – the latter mostly from Queensland, mostly climate change sceptics and proponents of more coal-fired power as well as nuclear.

A number of the pro-nuclear members, prominently including Keith Pitt and James McGrath, had long been calling for a parliamentary inquiry into the prospect of taking Australia nuclear.

A few weeks later, Morrison gave them one, although technically the August referral to the Standing Committee on the Environment and Energy was from the then minister for energy and emissions reduction, Angus Taylor.

The chair of the committee was Ted O’Brien, the Liberal member for Fairfax on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, a relative neophyte elected to the parliament only three years prior, on the slogan “Time for Ted”.

To him fell the difficult task of steering through a report that would pacify the pro-nuclear zealots without undermining the Coalition leadership’s “no nukes” policy.

In some respects, O’Brien is typical of Queensland’s conservative party, a unique amalgam of the Liberals and Nationals.

Like many in the Liberal National Party, he is the scion of a family business with agricultural links, Defiance Mills. He began his working life as a trainee baker, before moving into management.

In other ways, though, he differs from the norm. ——— (subscribers only) https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/environment/2024/03/16/the-most-beige-person-the-man-behind-the-coalitions-nuclear-plans#mtr

March 16, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics