Senior Western Australia Liberal calls for Australia to become nuclear weapons power
Brisbane Times, Hamish Hastie, March 11, 2024
A two-time WA Liberal candidate and party office bearer says Australia should have nuclear weapons.
Jim Seth made the argument at a Liberal Party state council meeting this month, saying nuclear weapons had made North Korea untouchable and suggested Australia should follow suit.
At the party’s March 2 meeting, details of which were leaked to WAtoday, Seth asked the question-and-answer panel:
“North Korea, a small country, has got nuclear fire, right? Nobody can do a mimicry [sic] on them, no neighbour can touch them, why we as first world country not nuclear react?”
Seth, who was a WA Liberals candidate for Bassendean in 2017 and for Morley in 2021 and is now the marketing committee chair and state executive member, furthered his point in a follow-up question about the Australian Navy’s capabilities to counter drone attacks…………………..
Seth claimed $90 million was being paid every day to Canberra public servants to create federal policies and suggested this money could be better spent on making Australia a nuclear power.
“We could have spent that money into making Australia a nuclear power, so nobody can come and do mimicry [sic] on us,” he said………………………….
WAtoday contacted Seth to clarify whether he was talking about nuclear energy or weapons, and he said “as a patriotic Australian” he believed Australia should have nuclear weapons.
He did not respond to follow-up requests for comment.
Australia has since 1970 been a signatory to the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which binds the country to an agreement not to acquire nuclear weapons.
According to the Department of Foreign Trade and Affairs Australia has been one of the treaty’s strongest supporters and was a key player in ensuring the treaty was extended indefinitely in 1995.
Seth’s comments alarmed Nuclear Free WA co-convener Mia Pepper who said nuclear weapons would make Australia a target, not safer.
“Nuclear weapons have no strategic utility and would not enhance Australia’s defence or security,” she said.
“In a time of growing conflict and uncertainty, Australia should be proliferating peace and diplomacy, not fuelling nuclear tensions and threat.”………………… https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/western-australia/senior-wa-liberal-calls-for-australia-to-become-nuclear-weapons-power-20240308-p5fazr.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed
Liberal Coalition twisting itself into knots over nuclear policy
Liberal MP warns Dutton on nuclear energy as Labor steps up attacks
By Paul Sakkal, March 28, 2024 , https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/liberal-mp-warns-dutton-on-nuclear-energy-as-labor-steps-up-attacks-20240326-p5ff92.html
Liberal MP Bridget Archer has issued her colleagues a caution on the political risk of the party’s nuclear energy plans, which the backbencher claims have been catapulted into political debate partly to keep climate change doubters on board with the Coalition’s net zero emissions policy.
While there is widespread support within Peter Dutton’s opposition for a conversation on nuclear energy, several Coalition MPs speaking confidentially to detail private concerns said they were worried the opposition was moving too quickly and creating an easy target for Labor attacks.
As the first Liberal to ask questions about the Coalition’s approach, Archer argued fiscally conservative opposition MPs, including herself, would be uneasy with the massive government investment required to build multibillion-dollar plants.
Nuclear energy, which Archer — a leading moderate voice within the party — says she is open to, should be pursued only if coupled with a rapid surge in renewables, she said, a contrast with Dutton and other Coalition MPs, who suggest extending the life of coal until nuclear availability in 10 or 20 years.
Dutton and the shadow cabinet MP leading the nuclear push, Ted O’Brien, are expected to detail their energy plans, including about six plant sites, by the budget in May, but Archer said the initial policy should be limited to lifting Australia’s nuclear moratorium.
“I’m very agnostic about it and I don’t think we should be afraid to just have conversations. But there are a lot of things that need to line up,” she said, noting technological and economic factors that might inhibit private investment even if the decades-old moratorium was overturned.
The opposition has spoken in favour of nuclear energy since losing government in 2022, and escalated its commitment this year as it declared support for large-scale nuclear on top of new-age small modular reactors.
Its backing of the new energy source has guaranteed that climate change and energy will be a key election issue. Voters will be presented with a choice between Labor’s renewables-heavy path to a zero emissions future and one complemented by nuclear energy, amid doubts over Labor’s emissions-reduction targets and expensive energy bills.
Signalling Labor’s future election attacks, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese compared Dutton to the contentious energy source in parliament on Wednesday, saying: “One is risky, expensive, divisive and toxic; the other is a nuclear reactor. The bad news for the Liberal Party is that you can put both on a corflute, and we certainly intend to do so.”
Dutton has been open about the potential need for government investment in nuclear plants, which Labor says have cost tens of billions overseas.
Archer, a member of an influential parliamentary inquiry into nuclear energy last term, said she would be uncomfortable with a “big government” approach to energy investment, which she said might irk Liberals with a fiscally conservative bent.
O’Brien has emphasised nuclear as a zero-emissions option to smooth Australia’s bumpy transition to net zero. However, some of the strongest voices for nuclear energy are MPs such as Barnaby Joyce, who oppose renewables and have questioned scientific orthodoxy on climate change.
Earlier this month O’Brien said, “we should not be closing our coal-fired power stations prematurely” because under Labor’s plans 90 per cent of baseload energy would exit the grid by 2034.
Archer, who Dutton this week congratulated for winning the McKinnon Prize for political leadership, said nuclear energy should not be used as an excuse to prolong fossil fuel reliance.
“There is no point even having a nuclear discussion if you don’t accept a need to decarbonise, to transition away from coal and gas,” she said. “There only is a case for nuclear if there is a fairly rapid transition to large-scale renewables, otherwise why are you doing it?”
“I think part of the reason for having the discussion is to keep people in the tent on net zero.”
Allegra Spender, a teal MP who some Liberals believe should be recruited to the party in future, said nuclear “may have a role in the distant future”.
But it is too slow, too expensive and the UK Hinkley [nuclear power station] experience shows the costs are too uncertain for it to be relevant to our current energy plans,” she said.
“AGL Energy, Alinta, EnergyAustralia and Origin Energy have all dismissed nuclear.
“The community does not trust the Coalition’s commitment to climate action, and their current stance reinforces it.”
‘They don’t have a plan’: Chris Bowen slams Opposition push for nuclear
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has slammed the Opposition over its push for nuclear because they “don’t have a plan”.
“Rolling out renewables and storage over this decade is critical not just for reducing emissions … but because it’s the cheapest form of energy available,” Mr Bowen said during Question Time on Wednesday.
“It is important for jobs and job creation, and also it’s very important for reliability.
“The alternative approach that’s been proposed by those opposite is nuclear.
“Any sort of nuclear plan is irresponsible and incorrect.
“Maybe they got it right because they’ve got a thought bubble, but they certainly don’t have a plan.”
On nuclear, Coalition prefers the optimism of misleading, decade-old, unverified claims
The Coalition is a fan of quoting the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation’s optimism on nuclear timelines compared to the CSIRO. But do the numbers add up?
JOHN QUIGGIN, MAR 22, 2024, https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/on-nuclear-coalition-prefers-the?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=806934&post_id=142847313&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
To the extent that most Australians have heard of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), we know it as a supplier of radio-isotopes for use in medicine and as the operator of a small research reactor at Lucas Heights in the suburbs of Sydney.
So, it may have come as a surprise to hear shadow energy minister Ted O’Brien cite ANSTO as the source for an estimate that a small modular reactor (SMR) could be constructed in three to five years, and a large reactor in eight to 12 years.
Appearing on the ABC’s 7:30 report in mid-March, O’Brien stated “that is the advice from ANSTO. That is the advice of the Albanese government’s nuclear agency”. In view of the fact that widely publicised advice from an extensive study undertaken by CSIRO yields much less optimistic conclusions, that seems like a surprising claim.
But O’Brien is correct. ANSTO is indeed the government agency officially advising on nuclear technology, including nuclear power.
Section 5 of the ANSTO Act mandates the organisation provide advice on aspects of and the application and use of nuclear science and nuclear technology. ANSTO provides such advice to government, parliaments, ministers, departments and agencies, inquiries and investigations, members of the public, and international, multilateral and bilateral partners — in pursuit of the national interest.
In a submission to the Senate standing committee on environment and the communications inquiry into the environment and other legislation amendment (Removing Nuclear Energy Prohibitions) Bill 2022, ANSTO stated that SMRs “have the potential to reduce build costs using a variety of strategies, including reducing plant build times from six to eight years for large reactors to two and a half to four years for SMRs via the use of series-production methods“.
These numbers are even more optimistic than those cited by Ted O’Brien. But terms like “potential” can do a lot of work in claims of this kind. Nuclear fusion, for example, has the potential to meet all the energy needs of the planet, but it won’t do so any time soon.
A natural response from an interested member of the public would be to visit the ANSTO website to get more detailed information on the assessment of nuclear technology. This leads us to a webpage titled “What are small modular reactors and what makes them different?”, which leads with the claim “the USA is expected to have its first SMR operating by 2026” and includes the timeframe of three to five years for construction.
A note hastily added in the last week states: “Please note that this content was current at the time of publishing (July 2020), and the projected construction time of SMRs (three to five years) is referenced from a University of Leeds research paper. In November 2023, NuScale [the subject of the 2026 claim] announced it was discontinuing its SMR project in Idaho.”
Even in 2020, this research was out of date. The NuScale project, originally projected to be delivering power in 2023, had already pushed its target past 2026 by then. But given that the project has been abandoned, there’s no need to look too closely at this.
The University of Leeds paper is more interesting. It turns out to be a literature survey covering the period 2004-19. The three- to five-year estimate for the construction time for SMRs is taken from a non-peer-reviewed 2016 report by consulting firm Ernst and Young (which worked with one of the authors on the University of Leeds study). The information used to compile the report is even older, going back to 2014 or earlier. To put it bluntly, this is worthless.
Rather than complying with its legal obligation to keep abreast of nuclear power technology and inform the public of its findings, ANSTO has relied on decade-old, unverified claims, made by a consulting company. This sloppy treatment of an issue that should be a central focus of ANSTO analysis contrasts sharply with the careful assessment undertaken by CSIRO.
I went to ANSTO for a response but didn’t hear back.
Ted O’Brien can scarcely be blamed for taking ANSTO’s word on these matters, particularly when its claims are so convenient to his case. But ANSTO needs to retract its misleading claims as soon as possible. That would give the LNP an opportunity, if it wants it, to drop its nuclear policy and put the blame on an Albanese government agency for misleading it.
One final irony. The ban on nuclear power, which is now the subject of so much controversy, was introduced by the Howard government to secure the passage of legislation that allowed ANSTO to build a new research reactor at Lucas Heights. In light of this history, maybe ANSTO’s remit should be revised to steer the organisation clear of nuclear power once and for all.
Peter Dutton in standoff with state Liberal leaders over federal Coalition’s nuclear plan
The federal opposition leader’s calls to include nuclear power in Australia’s energy mix has so far failed to win support from his state colleagues
Guardian, Tamsin Rose, Catie McLeod and Tory Shepherd, Sun 24 Mar 2024
The federal Coalition faces a battle with the states on its proposal for nuclear power stations at the sites of decommissioned coal power plants, with state premiers and opposition leaders alike largely against Peter Dutton’s proposal.
Labor governments and Coalition oppositions in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia are either outright opposed to the plan or have failed to endorse it.
Most of those states have their own bans on nuclear that would need to be lifted in addition to the federal ban if Dutton’s plan were to progress.
Despite this, the federal opposition leader has repeatedly called for nuclear to be considered as part of the future energy mix for Australia.
Here’s how the debate is playing out around Australia.
Queensland
It is illegal to run any forms of nuclear facilities in Queensland, including power stations and radioactive waste dumps. Any change to this would need to be passed by parliament.
David Crisafulli, the Liberal National party leader, is the bluntest in his opposition to Dutton’s plan.
When asked if he supported the federal Liberal leader and fellow Queenslander’s energy campaign earlier in the week, the opposition leader said: “No, we don’t.”
“Until both sides of Canberra agree, that will never happen because there won’t be investment,” Crisafulli said.
The state’s deputy opposition leader, Jarrod Bleijie, said debate was “many years” away and the party was focused on the cost of living in the immediate future.
“People are hurting, they need to see their electricity bills reduced now and that has to be our priority,” he told Sky News.
New South Wales
Similarly, in NSW there is a ban on uranium mining and nuclear power for electricity generation.
The state’s shadow energy minister, James Griffin, said he supported a “rational discussion about nuclear energy” but stopped short of endorsing the federal Coalition’s proposal……………………………….
The premier, Chris Minns, has dismissed any nuclear energy strategy that uses modular reactors for NSW………………………………………
Victoria
A number of nuclear-related activities, including exploration for uranium and construction or operation of a nuclear reactor, are banned in Victoria.
Like its northern counterparts, the Victorian opposition has failed to endorse the federal Coalition’s nuclear plans.
The shadow energy minister, David Davis, said “the Victorian Liberals and Nationals support a commonsense transition to renewables that ensures affordability and security of supply”.
South Australia
There are no state-level bans on nuclear power in place in South Australia and the premier, Peter Malinauskas, has repeatedly said he is open to or neutral towards the idea of nuclear power, but that the economics do not stack up.
SA is something of a nuclear state thanks to uranium mining and the prospect of building nuclear submarines, but Malinauskas does not think nuclear should be part of the power mix, not least because he has pledged that SA’s power will be fully sourced from renewables by 2027.
The energy minister, Tom Koutsantonis, said: “While we have nothing in principle against nuclear power, this current debate is nothing but a distraction because it is not economically feasible or viable for Australia.”
The opposition leader, David Speirs, said “all options should be on the table in the pursuit of an affordable, reliable and clean energy future”.
“That includes looking at new generation nuclear energy as a possible addition to our energy mix,” he said.
Coalition yet to produce costed nuclear energy policy
Last week, Dutton claimed the annual report from science agency CSIRO that had included estimates of costs for small modular reactors – which are not yet available commercially – was “discredited” because it “doesn’t take into account some of the transmission costs, the costs around subsidies for the renewables”.
CSIRO rejected Dutton’s claim that its estimates were unreliable, with its chief executive, Douglas Hilton, warning that maintaining trust “requires our political leaders to resist the temptation to disparage science”.
The most recent GenCost report estimates a theoretical small modular reactor built in 2030 would cost $382 to $636 per MWh. It says this is much more expensive than solar and wind, which it puts at between $91 and $130 per MWh even once integration costs are included.
The federal Coalition is yet to produce a costed energy policy, despite arguing for a lift to Australia’s ban on nuclear energy and suggesting it will nominate six potential sites for nuclear reactors around Australia – likely to be close to current or retiring coal-fired power stations.
With additional reporting by Benita Kolovos, Paul Karp, Graham Readfearn and Andrew Messenger https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/24/peter-dutton-liberal-leaders-nuclear-power-ban
Here’s why there is no nuclear option for Australia to reach net zero
Dr Alan Finkel, Guardian, 22 Mar 24
Any call to go directly from coal to nuclear is effectively a call to delay decarbonisation of our electricity system by 20 years.
The battle lines have been drawn over Australia’s energy future.
With the nation signed up to net zero emissions by 2050, the Albanese Labor government is committed to renewables. The Coalition wants nuclear.
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has a vision for meeting Australia’s energy needs that would include large-scale nuclear power plants and small modular reactors, a technology that is not yet proven, but which the shadow minister for energy, Ted O’Brien, says could be “up and running within a 10-year period.”
While nuclear power might experience a resurgence globally and eventually have a role in Australia, right now, no matter how much intent there might be to activate a nuclear power industry, it is difficult to envision before 2040.
The reality is there is no substitute for solar and wind power this decade and next, supported by batteries, transmission lines and peaking gas generation.
Any call to go directly from coal to nuclear is effectively a call to delay decarbonisation of our electricity system by 20 years……………………………………………………………………….
The cons
There are challenges for nuclear power in Australia, most notably timetable and cost.
Legislation. Commonwealth legislation passed by the Howard government in 1998 prohibits nuclear power. Australia is the only country in the G20 to have a legislated ban on nuclear power. This would need to be lifted before anything else could happen.
Public support. An August 2023 poll by the Resolve Political Monitor found 40% of people backed nuclear power, 33% were undecided and 27% were opposed. It is likely that no matter how small the opposition, it will be vocal.
Ramp rate. Large nuclear power generators cannot ramp up and down rapidly like batteries or peaking gas generators. This reduces their compatibility with a predominantly solar and wind powered electricity grid. It is expected, though, that small modular reactors (SMRs) will be better in this respect than large, conventional reactors.
Falling investment. The various operational, political and cost challenges faced by the nuclear industry have led to nuclear’s share of global electricity generation falling from more than 17% in 1996 to 9% in 2022.
Starting from scratch. It is unlikely that Australia would switch from being a laggard to a leader. That is, we would not proceed before we saw a licensed SMR (not a prototype) operating in the US, Canada, UK or another OECD country.
After that, we would need to beef up the regulatory system, find the first site, find and license the first operator, approve and issue construction contracts, establish a waste-management system, establish the decommissioning rules and decommissioning fund, run the environmental and safety regulatory gamut, train a workforce, respond to the inevitable protests and respond to the inevitable legal opposition all the way to the high court.
Only then could construction begin. It is difficult to imagine all this could be accomplished and provide an operational nuclear reactor in Australia before the mid 2040s.
The cost of wind versus nuclear
Coal-fired generators and nuclear power generators can dispatch electricity at full power more than 90% of the year. In practice, because demand fluctuates, the typical dispatch level from the Australian coal-fired fleet is about 60%.
For comparison, what would be the capital cost of a wind farm to dispatch 60% of the year? A simplified approach would be to ignore market economics and the variability of solar electricity in the system, and assume a 30% capacity factor for the wind energy. With these assumptions, for a windfarm to dispatch 60% of the year, we would need to install 2GW of wind turbines. The first 1GW of turbines would dispatch when the wind is blowing. The second 1GW of turbines would be used to charge a 7GW-hour (GWh) battery, to be discharged into the grid on demand.
Using figures from the CSIRO’s GenCost draft 2023-2024 report, the cost in this simplified model would be around $7bn per GW. Other, less costly, integration configurations are available. In comparison, based on the latest cost estimates for the Hinkley Point C plant under construction in the UK, the cost for nuclear power would be $27bn per GW.
The big opportunity in thinking small
In Australia, we would be looking to use SMRs because of the enormous cost and construction delays of large-scale nuclear plants. But we will want the reassurance of first seeing SMRs work safely and well in the UK, Europe, Canada, the US or another OECD country.
The trouble is, there are no SMRs operating in the UK, Europe, Canada, the US or any other OECD country. Nor are any SMRs under construction or approved in an OECD country.
There is no data to support any claims about how much SMRs will cost when deployed as operating power stations………………………………………https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/22/heres-why-there-is-no-nuclear-option-for-australia-to-reach-net-zero
Shadow energy minister Ted O’Brien’s nuclear energy misstep
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8560035/shadow-minister-ted-obriens-nuclear-energy-misstep/ By John Hanscombe, March 20 2024
A couple of weeks ago, during a run of sunny, breezy weather, the price of electricity actually went into negative territory in NSW as wind and solar kicked in.
I discovered this on a fascinating website, OpenNEM, which tracks national energy market data, including where the power comes from – solar, wind, hydro, coal and gas – the emissions it produces, and its value at any given point. It’s become a bit addictive, regularly checking to see where most of the power has come from.
It was heartening seeing renewables – especially rooftop solar – generating so much power during the day when conditions were favourable.
Solar’s peak was especially high last Tuesday, the same day shadow energy minister Ted O’Brien appeared on the ABC’s 7.30 to spruik the Coalition’s push for nuclear energy. O’Brien made the mistake of trying to mansplain to Sarah Ferguson (is there a more patronising expression than “Let me unpack this”?) why his party thought nuclear was the way to go. It was painful to watch.
He fumbled through awkward questions about cost. Questions about the fact it takes the US, with its established nuclear energy industry, 19 years to build a reactor. Questions about the Coalition’s intentions to keep coal in the energy mix. Every attempt by Ted to “unpack it” ended up in a ditch.
This question from Ferguson on Bill Gates’s enthusiasm for nuclear, cited repeatedly by the Coalition, was when things really went bad for poor old Ted: “I asked Bill Gates, on this program, whether Australia should be involved in nuclear energy, and this was his answer: ‘Australia doesn’t need to get engaged on this. Australia should aggressively take advantage of Australia’s natural endowment to do solar and wind. That’s clear-cut and beneficial to Australia.'”
By the end of the interview, the shadow minister was a shadow of his former self.
“He ended up looking like he’d been through a woodchipper,” said a mate watching from Hobart.
News from the Australian Energy Market that electricity prices were not going to be hiked next year, and would even start to come down, will make the Coalition’s nuclear pitch even harder to sell.
Most energy experts agree the cost of setting up nuclear power in Australia will be borne by consumers, that it would likely be the mid-2040s when a reactor would finally come on line.
Peter Dutton keeps calling for a mature discussion on nuclear energy.
There’s nothing mature about dismissing the work of the CSIRO, our peak scientific body, just because its research shows renewables are cheaper than coal and nuclear.
There’s nothing mature about Ted O’Brien ignoring the advice of one of the world’s most successful business operators and nuclear energy champions, Bill Gates, who says Australia doesn’t need to go down that expensive path.
And skipping from hailing theoretical small modular reactors one week to large-scale reactors the next is all over the shop.
The whole push seems to be a Quixotic attempt at relevance, a guileless opposition tilting at windmills.
Dutton’s bid for nuclear power: hoax or reckless endangerment?
“In the last few months, we’ve seen a bill introduced into the Parliament by the Labor Government that legalises the acceptance of nuclear waste from the UK and US and provides the Government with the power to nominate any place in Australia as a nuclear waste site, with no requirement to consult with local communities or other interested groups.”
In the bigger picture, AUKUS depends upon a gamble that nuclear power will be the naval fuel of the future. And the even bigger gamble that submarines are not yet obsolete.
But beyond the tactics of Labor-baiting and the politics of diversion ……. lurks the original – and only – economic rationale of nuclear power – as an adjunct to a nuclear arms industry.
March 18, 2024, by: David Tyler https://theaimn.com/duttons-nuclear-dream-is-a-dead-cat-on-the-table-to-distract-us-from-his-dunkley-debacle/
It’s incredible. Such is our love-in with Peter “Junkyard” Dutton, our former Border Overlord, who used to play the bad cop dispensing rough justice–doing whatever it took to keep us safe-that today, he’s being cheered by most of the press gallery for reckless endangerment in his punt on nuclear energy.
Is it just to please his sponsor, Gina Rinehart and other richly attractive mining oligarchs who will make a few extra billion out of delaying the end of coal-fired power generation? Even if they do hasten the end of the world, they do get to star in their own perverted, planet-destroying mother of all snuff movies?
Or… brace yourself- does “Dutts” blunt truth and other fiction’s pin up boy-harbour
And what a boon for democracy. Voters choose between the pro-mining, colliery-opening, Labor Party and the pro-mining right-wing rump of a moribund Liberal Party, only in the race because of its secret agreement with the National Party, a mob of pro-mining, faux populists who pose as saviours of The Bush and its battlers, such as Riverview Old Boy, Barnaby Thomas Gerald Joyce’s Weatherboard Nine.
Or Bob Katter’s family which includes the incredibly successful arms manufacturer, son-in-law Rob Nioa.
ulterior motives?
Of course. A whiff of Emu Field, Montebello and Maralinga on the campaign trail helps with Coalition branding and product differentiation. “I’m with nuclear, stupid” would be a killer of an election slogan. Albo and Dutts could get together to whip up a referendum for the next federal democracy sausage BBQ. Besides, no-one in the nuclear power side hustle isn’t also itching to develop his or her own nuclear weapon cycle. Nuclear energy only makes sense if you are a nuclear arms manufacturer.
Nuclear is also a feint in the climate wars. Let’s talk tactics. Team Dutton can say that Labor is on the right track but has “no credible pathway” unless you have nuclear energy in the brew, firming up your mix. The Liberal Party plays the front end of the Coalition panto horse; the Nationals bring up the rear.
And just as he did after defeat in Aston, Dutton dashes into nuclear after his Dunkley debacle. Note he’s now a big reactor man, having got the email that small modular reactors are scarce as rocking-horse manure. It’s a revolutionary turn. A year or so ago, Dutts opposed, “the establishment of big nuclear facilities”. But being a conservative in Australian politics means, you don’t have to explain or apologise.
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Nor do you have to heed our scientists. “… the CSIRO has made clear, large reactors are too large for our small grids, and small reactors are still unproven commercially.”
Smear them. Say it’s a discredited study.
Sean Kelly sees Dutton’s pro-nuclear vision as a way of buying unity. Nobody on Dutton’s team thinks it’s a real policy, he claims, and it’s a long-term fantasy, so they won’t buck Dutton’s wilful stupidity. He’s sniping at CSIRO, too, which always wins friends amongst a growing anti-science brigade, a resource tapped into shamelessly by such figures as, “planter saint”, Barnaby Joyce; off his nut about the “green peril”. The former deputy PM also calls windmills, “filth” whilst renewable energy is a “swindle”.
The Coalition attack on CSIRO parallels its harassment of a now cowed ABC, on which it inflicted a barrage of criticism, funding cuts and Morrison’s captain’s pick of Ita Buttrose as chair. Cutbacks in the CSIRO have also taken their toll but their CEO, Professor Doug Hilton publicly rebukes Dutton.
“For science to be useful and for challenges to be overcome it requires the trust of the community. Maintaining trust requires scientists to act with integrity. Maintaining trust also requires our political leaders to resist the temptation to disparage science.”
Kelly might add that the Coalition is riven by at least ten factions, post-Morrison, and has rivals hatching plots of helping their leader by taking his job away from him. One of these, with some experience of edged weapons, is former SAS Patrol Commander, Captain Andrew Hastie who must have been cheered when in 2017 the AFP cleared of war crimes, an SAS soldier who cut the hands off two suspected Taliban fighters. Handy Andy was in command of some other soldiers at the scene. Hastie’s mentor is none other than party kingmaker, Big Mining Shill and fellow happy clapper, the Nationals’ John Anderson.
A spill now could avoid some bloodletting in the next federal election, a surgical strike, perhaps.
Rex Patrick sees Peter Dutton’s move as a “nasty” political wedge given that the federal Labor government has already signed us on to Morrison’s AUKUS which guarantees a small modular nuclear reactor inside a submarine moored near you if you happen to live close to HMAS Stirling Naval Base in Perth, the Osborne Naval Shipyards in Adelaide, SA or the yet to be opened mystery envelope containing only three options, Sydney Harbour, Wollongong/ Port Kembla or Newcastle.
Hint. The Royal Australian Navy berths in Sydney Harbour.
Moreover, the disposing of nuclear waste is also well in hand, notes Patrick.
“In the last few months, we’ve seen a bill introduced into the Parliament by the Labor Government that legalises the acceptance of nuclear waste from the UK and US and provides the Government with the power to nominate any place in Australia as a nuclear waste site, with no requirement to consult with local communities or other interested groups.”
In the bigger picture, AUKUS depends upon a gamble that nuclear power will be the naval fuel of the future. And the even bigger gamble that submarines are not yet obsolete.
Yet even today it’s uneconomic and fraught with a perplex of disposal and safety issues. Dutts the Kiwi Bikie Gangster Deporter, Dual Citizenship-Stripper, Dole-bludger-buster, or the African Gang vigilante; dog-whistling racism, fear and division, demonising the other, is as complex as the next bloke. But he is not a big ideas man. Fizza Turnbull has never heard Peter propose a single constructive idea.
Dutton’s mentor, John Howard was rarely troubled by big ideas either. But now, Dutton is calling for “a mature debate™” on a nuclear energy, we don’t need, can’t afford, could never rely on and can’t fuel. We’d be importing expensive fuel rods we can’t make at home for reactors which would never be built in time (without a slave labour workforce like the UAE) to replace our rapidly clapped-out coal-fired plant
Continue readingNuclear energy debate ‘many years’ away: Qld Deputy Opposition leader
Queensland Deputy Opposition leader Jarrod Bleijie claims the nuclear energy debate is “many years” away as he focuses on lowering power prices in the immediate future.
Mr Bleijie said he is focusing on making sure energy is affordable and reliable as the Opposition pushes to bring its coal power stations back online.
“There is a lot of water to go under that bridge before that is the case and I suspect we will be at an election before our federal counterparts,” Mr Bleijie told Sky News Australia.
“I stood at the booths in Ipswich West and Inala and every second person was talking about the cost of living crisis in Queensland now.
“People are hurting, they need to see their electricity bills reduced now and that has to be our priority.”
Peter Dutton refuses to say where his nuclear reactors will go
Peter Dutton, Bill Shorten clash on nuclear on Today show
After Australia’s peak science body called out the Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton has failed to answer one question on nuclear.
Ellen Ransley news.com.au 17 Mar 24
Peter Dutton has failed to answer a key question in a fiery clash with Bill Shorten over nuclear energy.
The Opposition Leader has this week been spruiking his plans for moving nuclear, but when asked by the NDIS Minister where the reactors would go, Mr Dutton didn’t answer.
“Are you willing to host one of your nuclear power plants in your electorate or anywhere in Queensland? Where are you going to put your reactors?” Mr Shorten posited to Mr Dutton on Nine’s Today Show on Friday morning.
Bill Shorten and Peter Dutton clashed on nuclear during a TV segment on Friday morning.
Mr Dutton did not answer the question, instead pointing Mr Shorten towards a “huge argument in the United Kingdom at the moment, where adults are able to have a conversation”.
“The Labour Party there is arguing for the Tories to have more baseload nuclear power because they know it’s zero emissions,” Mr Dutton replied.
“This government, your government, has no chance whatsoever of meeting the net zero by 2050 target. That’s the reality of it. What we’ve said is that where you’ve got a retiring asset … you can replace that coal with a zero emissions technology, the latest technology, the same technology you’ve signed up to for then nuclear submarines.”
During the segment, Mr Dutton was questioned on his stance on Australia’s national science agency CSIRO over comments he made earlier this week.
On Tuesday, Mr Dutton said it had been “well documented” that CSIRO “can’t be relied up” during a press conference where he discussed nuclear energy and a report by the agency that found nuclear energy was more expensive.
Mr Dutton said the report was “discredited”.
It prompted the agency to make a rare statement, with a letter from chief executive Doug Hilton published online on Friday morning, saying that for science to be useful, it requires the “trust” of the community.
“Maintaining trust also requires our political leaders to resist the temptation to disparage science,” he said.
“The GenCost report is updated each year … (It) is carefully produced … and updated regularly as new data comes to hand.
“The GenCost report can be trusted by all our elected representatives, irrespective of whether they are advocating for electricity generation by renewables, coal, gas, or nuclear energy.”………… https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/peter-dutton-bill-shorten-clash-on-nuclear-on-today-show/news-story/2a872c38238b358c5b3043158498775a
NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS ARE NOT APPROPRIATE FOR AUSTRALIA – AND NEVER WILL BE
Climate Council, 15 Mar 24
The prospect of nuclear power in Australia has been a topic of public debate since the 1950s. While Australia has never had a nuclear power station, we do have 33% of the world’s uranium deposits and we are the world’s third largest producer of it. Periodically, as with the changing of the seasons, various individuals appear in the media singing the virtues of nuclear energy – claiming it is the only option for clean and reliable electricity in Australia.
In fact, over one third of Australia’s electricity is already powered by renewables, and new initiatives like the Capacity Investment Scheme are set to push us towards 82% renewable energy by the end of this decade. While the move to clean energy is still not happening fast enough, it is underway and starting to speed up. We do not need distractions like nuclear to derail our progress now, so let’s set the record straight.
Why doesn’t nuclear power make sense for Australia?
1. Nuclear power stations can’t be built anywhere in Australia.
They are banned in every state, and in every territory. Such bans were introduced because of community concerns about the health and environmental risks. Many parliamentary inquiries at a federal and state level – see this Victorian Inquiry, this Federal Inquiry, and this South Australian Inquiry for instance – have been held into nuclear energy, and all have concluded that it makes no sense in Australia.
2. Nuclear power stations are expensive and take too long to build.
Australia’s independent science information agency, CSIRO, has found that solar and wind are by far the cheapest ways of producing electricity(even when factoring in storage). In contrast, the cost of building and operating nuclear in Australia remains prohibitively high.
Analysis conducted by the nuclear industry itself shows nuclear power stations take an average of 9.4 years to build – compared to 1–3 years for a major wind or solar project. Australia needs to replace its ageing coal-fired power stations as quickly as possible to rapidly reduce emissions this decade. As shown in the Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan, by far the cheapest and quickest way to do this is to ramp up renewable energy paired with storage like pumped hydro, and batteries.
3. Nuclear power poses significant community, environmental, health and economic risks.
Radiation from major nuclear disasters, such as Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, have impacted hundreds of thousands of people and contaminated vast areas that take decades to clean up. Even when a nuclear power station operates as intended, it creates a long-term and prohibitively expensive legacy of site remediation, fuel processing and radioactive waste storage.
4. Nuclear power is not renewable, and it is not safe.
Uranium is a finite resource just like coal, oil and gas. It needs to be mined and, just like mining coal, oil and gas, this carries serious safety concerns, including contaminating the environment with radioactive dust, radon gas, water-borne toxins, and increased levels of background radiation. On the other hand, energy generated from the sun and wind releases no pollutants into the air and is overwhelmingly considered to be safe.
There you have it: nuclear power is expensive, illegal, dangerous and decades away from powering our homes and businesses. It makes no sense. On the other hand, energy from the sun and wind is cheap, abundant, safe and available now. So, let’s get on with building more renewable energy!
What is a nuclear power station?…………………………………………………
Unlike coal and gas, no greenhouse gas pollution is created in the operation of the nuclear reactor. However, all other steps involved in producing nuclear power – from mining, to construction, decommissioning and waste management – result in greenhouse gas pollution.………………………….
Case Study 1: Hinkley Nuclear Power Station, United Kingdom………………………
Case Study 2: NuScale Power, United States of America……………………………..
Meeting the climate challenge means taking bold and decisive action this decade with the technologies that are ready to go in Australia today. The significant limitations nuclear energy faces means that there is no real prospect of it playing a role in reducing Australia’s emissions.
The Government will dictate where the high level nuclear dump will be.
@MrRexPatrick, ·Mar 13
The Govt has refused to provide #FOI access to its high level radioactive waste site selection process. But it turns out we don’t need to know because, as uncovered by @DavidShoebridge examining #AUKUS legislation today, the Govt will just tell us where the site will be
Nuclear power in Australia — a silver bullet or white elephant?
ABC News, By political reporters Tom Crowley and Tom Lowrey 16 Mar 24
“It’s time to talk nuclear,” Ted O’Brien declared in a video message filmed on an isolated beach last February.
Appointed shadow energy spokesperson a few months earlier, Mr O’Brien’s enthusiasm for nuclear power was already well known, but not yet fully formed as Coalition policy. By many in Canberra, it had been regarded with idle curiosity.
But it was the choice of beach that raised eyebrows on this occasion: Mr O’Brien was in Fukushima.
The small Japanese city was the site of an infamous nuclear accident in 2011, when the Daiichi power plant was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami.
Mr O’Brien had travelled to visit the plant at his own expense as a myth-busting exercise.
“I’ve heard many stories about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, including some unfounded horror stories and wildly untrue claims. I therefore decided to travel to Fukushima to find out for myself,” he said.
“I discovered a beautiful place and wonderful people, and I returned home with enormous optimism for their future.”
A year on, nuclear energy for Australia has firmed as Coalition policy, and Mr O’Brien’s “enormous optimism” has earned derision from Energy Minister Chris Bowen.
“Tell him he’s dreaming,” Mr Bowen said last Sunday when asked about the Coalition’s plans. His concern was not safety, where there have been significant improvements since Fukushima, but cost and practicality.
“I don’t know what expert he’s talking to … The average build time of a nuclear power plant in the United States has been 19 years. Ted O’Brien thinks he can do it in Australia from 10 [years] with a standing start,” he said……………………………………………………………………………………….
Nice work if nuke can get it
………………………..setting up in the Australian context would be a different proposition, and would present several hurdles.
First, large-scale nuclear power plants are expensive. The cheap power produced by plants in Europe comes only after decades of operation, enough time for the operators to have recouped their significant upfront capital costs.
It would take a long time – the Coalition hopes for a decade, but Labor says it would be at least twice that – to get them up and running, and an even longer time to bring costs down.
Second, the CSIRO and the AEMO doubt that large-scale nuclear plants are the right fit for Australia’s energy needs.
The east coast electricity market is relatively small by global standards, owing to Australia’s small population.
A single large plant of the sort used in Europe, according to CSIRO and AEMO, would account for such a huge chunk of our power needs that it would be inadvisable, since the whole grid would falter if the plant went offline for maintenance, or due to some fault.
Instead, the agencies say we would need more than one plant working together, like the coal plants currently do. But that would be even more expensive.
Some have called instead for “small modular reactors” (SMRs) – mini nuclear plants, assembled in a factory, which can be set up quickly. Unlike large plants, they can also be switched on and off quickly, which means they could “pinch hit” to provide power alongside renewables or other power sources.
If this sounds appealing, cool your jets – the technology to do this on any notable scale doesn’t exist. Attempts to build them elsewhere, such as in the US, have so far run into fatal cost barriers.
None of that has dimmed the enthusiasm of SMR optimists, including Bill Gates, Rolls Royce and for a time the Coalition.
But the latter’s embrace of nuclear has shifted away from its early focus on SMRs and it now appears set to land on advocating larger-scale nuclear plants on decommissioned coal sites.
A radioactive political issue
This points to a political challenge on top of the practical one.
The Liberal Party has tried, and failed, to start a conversation on nuclear power on more than a few occasions.
John Howard took a nuclear policy to the 2007 federal election, hoping public perception of the industry had shifted. It hadn’t.
Nearly two decades on, the Coalition is hoping it is right this time.
Coalition backbenchers have been agitating on the issue for years, urging the former Morrison government to take up the idea.
Those pleas weren’t heeded, beyond a very low-key parliamentary inquiry, as the party feared a scare campaign on nuclear reactors in the suburbs.
But the change in leadership after the 2022 election saw a surprisingly rapid shift — with new Nationals leader David Littleproud openly calling for nuclear power to be on the table just weeks after polling day.
Peter Dutton also flagged early enthusiasm, although at first only in principle. Then, shortly after the Dunkley by-election loss a fortnight ago, he confirmed this would become official Coalition policy.
An announcement is expected before the budget, which Mr Dutton has hinted will include a list of possible sites for nuclear, likely large-scale nuclear.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese can scarcely contain his glee at the prospect of a nuclear fight.
“I’ll give you this tip, when they release their policy, you’ll hear a very clear response … [from] the communities where these giant nuclear reactors are going to go,” he said this week.
“[Peter Dutton] is a guy who’s scared of a solar panel but thinks that a nuclear reactor will be well received. I’ll wait and see.”
But Coalition MPs are confident they can sell the idea to voters, insisting the issue plays well with younger voters in particular.
They point to published opinion polls, which suggest more than half of Australians are now either supportive of nuclear or at least open to the idea.
The most prominent such poll was The Australian’s Newspoll, which suggested approval from 65 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds.
That poll question asked about SMRs and described them as “zero-emissions energy on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired”.
Nuclear in my backyard
But if this has created some optimism in the Coalition, the announcement of locations looms as an early political hurdle.
Just a handful of regions have coal-fired power stations that could fit the bill. This includes the Hunter, Gippsland and Central Queensland.
MPs in those areas would have the difficult task of selling a nuclear reactor to their electorate. So far, they seem cautiously enthusiastic, though some want assurances the technology is safe. Gippsland MP Darren Chester warned community concerns would need to be “ameliorated”.
There’s also the question of where to put the waste. Mr Dutton has sought to “put things in perspective” by pointing out the waste generated in the US since the 1950s “would fit in the area the size of a football field, to a depth of about nine metres”.
But if selling locals a nuclear plant is challenging, selling them a nuclear dump would be even more so – although as Mr Dutton points out, the same challenge awaits on waste from nuclear submarines under the AUKUS agreement.
Bonanza or boondoggle?
Even if the Coalition can convince enough voters to back nuclear power and put them in government, that won’t be the last of the political hurdles.
Next comes the question of money.
Labor’s Chris Bowen has suggested “eye-watering” amounts of taxpayer money would be needed to make nuclear viable.
“Every country in the world with nuclear has required massive transfers of taxpayer wealth to the nuclear constructors,” he said.
The Coalition has been coy on whether its policy will include a taxpayer subsidy, but has hinted at details to come in its forthcoming announcement.
And energy experts say that realistically, any private sector contribution would only come if investors had enough confidence the project would make it through to completion. That would require bipartisan support.
Bipartisan support may also be needed to overturn the federal ban on nuclear power. State-level bans in NSW, Victoria and Queensland would need to be overturned too.
Labor’s national platform currently includes an explicit ban on nuclear power, and some key unions are resolutely opposed to the industry.
‘Niche’ at best
All of that points to a difficult road ahead. And it’s one many energy experts say it would lead to a small benefit at best.
Alison Reeve from the Grattan Institute does not see nuclear as part of the mix, but says that if anything SMRs could play a “last resort” role, supplementing renewables during winter troughs.
“That would be the only possible niche I could see for nuclear … but you’re having to build generation that’s only used for a couple of weeks every year,” she said.
“At the moment it looks like the most economic opportunity for that role is gas, with offsets to cover the emissions.”………………………………….. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-16/nuclear-power-in-australia-silver-bullet-white-elephant/103571824
Reversing Europe’s and Australia’s slide into irrelevance & insecurity – National Press Club of Australia speech- Yanis Varoufakis
First, Australia must restore a reputation tainted by blindly following America into lethal adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and, today, via its active and crucial complicity in Israel’s deliberate war crimes in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Children are not starving in Gaza today. No, they are being deliberately starved. Without hesitation or remorse. The famine in Gaza is no collateral damage. It is an intentional policy of starving to death thousands until the rest agree to leave their ancestral homeland.
Second, Australia has a duty to de-escalate the New Cold War. To understand that this can only be done if Australia ends its servility to a United States’ actively creating the threats that they then make us pay through the nose to protect us from.
Imagine an Australia that helps bring a just Peace in Ukraine, as opposed to a mindless forever war. A non-aligned Australia that is never neutral in the face of injustice but, also, not automatically aligned with every warmongering adventure decided in Washington.
Imagine an Australia which, having re-established its credentials as a country that thinks and acts for itself, engages with China in the spirit of peaceful cooperation – a far better way of addressing Beijing’s increasing authoritarianism toward its own peoples than buying useless, hyper-expensive submarines that only succeed in forcing China’s political class to close ranks around a more authoritarian core.
Imagine a truly patriotic Australian Prime Minister who tells the American President to cease and desist from the slow murder of Julian Assange for the crime of journalism – for exposing American war crimes perpetrated behind the back of US citizens in their name.
To conclude, if Europe and Australia are to escape gross irrelevance, we need separate but well-coordinated European and Australian Green New Deals.
DiEM25, our paneuropean movement, is working toward this goal.
Yanis Varoufakis – 14/03/2024
Europe and Australia are facing a common existential threat: a creeping irrelevance caused, on the one hand, by our failure properly to invest and, on the other hand, by our ill-considered slide from a strategic dependence on the United States to a non-strategic, self-defeating servility to Washington’s policy agenda.”
Yanis Varoufakis’s address at the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday 13 March, 2024
…………………………………. The three post-war phases that shaped Australia’s and Europe’s habitat
Our present moment in Europe and in Australia has been shaped by three distinct postwar phases.
The first was the Bretton Woods system. America exited the war as the only surplus, creditor country. Bretton Woods, a remarkable recycling mechanism, was, in effect, a dollar zone built on fixed exchange rates, sustained by capital controls, and erected on the back of America’s trade surplus. With quasi-free trade as part of the deal, Washington dollarised Europe, Japan and Australia to generate aggregate demand for the products of its factories – whose productivity had skyrocketed during the war. Subsequently, the US trade surplus sucked the exported dollars back into America. The result was twenty years of high growth, low unemployment, blissfully boring banking and dwindling inequality. Alas, once the United States lost its trade surplus, Bretton Woods was dead in the water.
The second phase was marked by the violent reversal of this recycling mechanism. The United States became the first hegemon to enhance its hegemony by boosting its trade deficit. Operating like a powerful vacuum cleaner, the burgeoning US trade deficit hoovered up the world’s net exports. And how did America pay for them? With dollars which it also hoovered up from the rest of the world as German, Japanese and later Chinese capitalists sent to Wall Street 70% of dollar profits made from their net exports to the US. There, in Wall Street, these foreign capitalists recycled their dollar profits into Treasuries, real estate, shares and derivatives.
This audacious inverted recycling system, built on US deficits, required ever increasing American deficits to remain stable. In the process, it gave rise to even higher growth than the Bretton Woods era, but also to macroeconomic and financial imbalances as well as mind-numbing levels of inequality. The new era came complete with an ideology (neoliberalism), a policy of letting finance rip (financialisation), and a false sense of dynamic equilibrium – the infamous Great Moderation built on hugely immoderate imbalances.
Almost inevitably, on the back of the perpetual tsunami of capital rushing in from the rest-of-the-world to Wall Street, financiers fashioned gigantic pyramids of complex wagers – Warren Buffet’s infamous Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction. When these crashed, to deliver the Global Financial Crisis, two things saved Wall Street and Western capitalism:
- The G7 central banks, that printed a total of $35 trillion on behalf of the financiers from 2009 to last year – a peculiar socialism for bankers. And,
- China, which directed half its national income to investment, thus replacing much of the lost aggregate demand not only domestically but also in Germany, Australia and, of course, in the United States.
The third period is more recent. The era of technofeudalism, as I call it, which took root in the mid-2000s but grew strongly after the GFC in conjunction with the rapid technological change that caused capital to mutate into, what I call, cloud capital – the automated means of behavioural modification living inside our phones, apps, tablets and laptops. Consider the six things this cloud capital (which one encounters in Amazon or Alibaba) does all at once:
- It grabs our attention.
- It manufactures our desires.
- It sells to us, directly, outside any actual markets, that which will satiate the desires it made us have.
- It drives and monitors waged labour inside the workplaces.
- It elicits massive free labour from us, its cloud-serfs.
- It provides the potential of blending seamlessly all that with free, digital payments.
Is it any wonder that the owners of this cloud capital – I call them cloudalists – have a hitherto undreamt of power to extract? They are, already, a new ruling class: today, the capitalisation of just seven US cloudalist firms is approximately the same as the capitalisation of all listed corporations in the UK, France, Japan, Canada and China taken together!
Continue reading‘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
1 This month
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
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