Antinuclear

Inside the room that loves Nuclear Ted

The Opposition’s fission frontman Ted O’Brien was in his element at Australia’s premier pro-nuclear conference last week, feeling the love from a hot-to-trot audience swallowing every word from a smooth-talking messiah . Freelance Journalist Murray Hogarth was there and imbibed the vibe — but not the glow-in-the-dark Kool-Aid.

by MURRAY HOGARTH., https://thepolitics.com.au/inside-the-rooms-that-love-nuclear-ted/?fbclid=IwY2xjawF8E1hleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHeNqjz022ugJko-9VboOWN2DC-94pA7Y5ifdvNwZFTZ_YaikPJPpvYhkNw_aem_dxORDyGfCPnc4VD223hWhA 16 Oct 24

Ted O’Brien MP was confecting political outrage, playing to Australia’s ultimate pro-nuclear audience in Sydney last Friday. The day before, the Albanese Labor government had sprung a pre-election surprise on the Liberal-National coalition, and O’Brien as its nuclear torchbearer, when it forced through a tactical parliamentary inquiry into nuclear energy.

“It was hard not to be a little bit suspicious, not just because there’d been zero engagement on this,” he confided, eager to share his take on the backstory to how the Coalition had been politically blindsided and outmuscled.

O’Brien was in high dudgeon about the inquiry’s terms of reference, but mainly about its committee having four Labor government members versus two from the Coalition, a two-to-one ratio, plus one from the crossbench, a teal. That’s a clear government majority, so official committee reports will say what it wants, which is realpolitik at work. But to O’Brien it was a desperate government “very clearly trying to weaponise the parliamentary system to kill the idea that Australia should include nuclear energy as part of its mix”. 

Of course, hypocrisy is quite the thing in politics. It turns out the last parliamentary inquiry into nuclear energy in 2019, which was chaired by O’Brien, and which supported partial lifting of Australia’s long-standing nuclear energy ban, was even more dominated by the then Coalition government — 5-2 also plus a single teal.

The Coalition under PM Scott Morrison then squibbed it on running a go-nuclear policy at the 2022 elections, which it lost to Labor. Yet, as the opposition, it now expects a Labor government to overturn the nuclear ban that the Coalition introduced in 1998, under the conservative leadership of PM John Howard.

Nothing for O’Brien to melt down over here. But don’t let facts get in the way of a convenient story.

Smug, glib, righteous and on the Right

O’Brien approaches a speaking platform with a radioactive level of smugness and glibness that makes me feel queasy to the core. Perhaps that’s because I’ve been overexposed to him in the past six months as I’ve tracked the emerging nuclear story: three live speeches and seemingly endless videos and television interviews. His own productions. 7.30. Insiders. Four Corners. Sky News on loop. 

A committed spruiker, in an Americanised preachy showman kind of way, the ambitious O’Brien is both righteous and on the Right. To paraphrase him: nuclear is vital to our future energy mix and to achieving net zero. Labor’s 100% renewables can’t do it. Blah blah blah. Oh, and we’ll make public the costs and other key details “in due course”.

Last Friday, in contrast to my gut feeling, there was love vibing in the room when O’Brien returned to his people at Australia’s premier pro-nuclear event, the annual conference of the Australian Nuclear Association (ANA). Among this fraternity, he’s Nuclear Ted, the reactor-evangelising federal Liberal from Queensland who’s putting the fission back into the politics of energy in Australia, with a touch of frisson too for this audience.

It’s a pro-nuke constituency that has been in the Australian political wilderness seems like forever, but at least since the 1960s. Now a smooth-talking messiah has emerged, vowing to lead it to its promised land: a nuclear Australia. 

If you’ve been thinking it’s mainly renewables-hating, climate-denying National Party political malcontents who are behind the Coalition’s plans — which include prolonging coal and expanding gas generation — think again.

Friends in high places 

ANA conferences are where corporate big nuke and its international and local lobbyists meet Australia’s nuclear true believers. Weirdly, however, this gathering of 200 or so delegates has the Australian government as its long-standing principal sponsor. That’s right. The Albanese Labor government is sponsoring a platform for O’Brien, its would-be nuclear energy policy nemesis, to attack the government. And unsurprisingly he keeps coming back to do just that. It’s almost like the government wants O’Brien out there, talking his talk.

The government’s sponsorship comes via its main nuclear advisory agency, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), which operates the nation’s only reactor, a research and medical isotopes facility at Lucas Heights in Sydney. The other event sponsors include the Canadian nuclear engineering powerhouse AtkinsRéalis, and the Australian lobbying outfit SMR Nuclear Technologies.

ANSTO definitely isn’t meant to play politics, challenge policies of the government of the day, or otherwise advocate for nuclear energy. So it’s worth pointing out that the ANA’s president, and the conference’s main host, Dr Mark Ho, is a senior ANSTO scientist in his day job, and the event’s key organiser, Dr John Harries, is former ANSTO, as are many in the ANA orbit.

Beyond the conference, the ANA is increasingly involved in promoting nuclear energy. It and Ho helped organise the Navigating Nuclear forum in May, where O’Brien was a surprise guest speaker after it had been promoted as being “free of politics”. 

The Nuclear for Australia campaign thanked Ho for joining its first public event in Lithgow — one of the Coalition’s targeted communities for nuclear reactors — several weeks ago, and Ho was billed as a speaker at an ultra-conservative, anti-renewables, pro-nuclear forum in western Sydney in September where Barnaby Joyce was a pop-up speaker, as previously reported in The Politics, before Harries stepped in to replace him.

I missed Lithgow, but I was at the Navigating Nuclear and western Sydney events. Hence my delicate stomach.

The Coalition is all over this

O’Brien gave a keynote at the ANA’s conference last year too, lambasting the Albanese Labor government then as well. His National Party colleague Dr David Gillespie MP, who spoke at the end of last Friday’s event, has been a regular at these conferences since 2018. Gillespie used the 2022 conference as a springboard for pro-nuclear lobbying through his chairmanship of the Coalition-dominated Parliamentary Friends of Nuclear Industries. 

With O’Brien, they played a key role in shaping Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s headland nuclear energy policy announcements in mid-2023. Indeed, O’Brien passed on Dutton’s greetings to last Friday’s conference, and indicated Dutton’s wish to attend a future event “in due course”. 

The irony of this phrase choice may have escaped O’Brien in the moment. But he and Dutton are constantly promising the media and the Australian public that they will announce the Coalition’s nuclear energy policy costs and other details “in due course”. Thus far there is no sign of them.

As the day-long conference played out last Friday, it became more and more clear this wasn’t just a political speaker and an audience with a common interest. It’s more like they are collaborators, private sector interests included, working not just for a nuclear Australia but for a global nuclear renaissance. 

One of the main industry sponsor presenters, for example, mentioned a recent economic assessment it had undertaken looking at nuclear generation for the NSW Hunter region that “isn’t public”, saying that “hopefully David and Ted can use that going forward”. Very cosy. It’s all very reciprocal and transactional. The kind of thing which Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed master of the deal turned political leader, might applaud.

It’s a fair bet that if Trump returns to the US presidency after next month’s election the Americans will be all over Australia to buy its nuclear energy technologies and services — a number of which were showcased at the 2023 ANA conference, especially Brookfield-owned Westinghouse, already on Dutton’s reactor design shopping list, and Bill Gates’s TerraPower.

The dream merchant

O’Brien, meanwhile, hung around the conference for an extra Q&A session, and actively canvassed for political support via the ANA community, inviting delegates to mobilise their networks ahead of the federal election, and make wide-ranging submissions to the Labor-dominated parliamentary inquiry into nuclear energy now underway, without feeling constrained by “Labor’s terms of reference”.

In return, O’Brien is promising the realisation of their nuclear dream. If only the Coalition can return to political power, they’ll get nuclear power, or at least that’s the bait, whatever happens down the years ahead. At one stage in the Q&A he even indicated that a future Coalition government could help promote nuclear energy development ambitions with other nations across the Asia-Pacific. 

Standing in the way, however, as O’Brien the reactor evangelist tells it, is a Labor government at odds with the nation’s patriotic spirit, and “Team Australia” to revive a favoured Tony Abbott line:

“This is about Australia  … But it is people in this room and beyond, who’ve been doing the heavy lifting for years. It is the intellectual capacity of people in this room and the willingness to be patriots, to put Australia first … It is very much a Team Australia effort of patriots who are prepared to engage and assist along the way.”

Oh dear, I’m feeling queasy all over again.

FOOTNOTE: A key conclusion from delving into O’Brien’s nuclear journey, and that of the Dutton Opposition over the past couple of years, is that they haven’t gone to energy experts to work out if and how nuclear fits into Australia’s energy future. Rather, they’ve gone to nuclear vested interests and true believers, and surprise! surprise! they are all for it! As are fossil-fuel diehards, who know a strategic distraction when they see one.

October 17, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics