Andrew Charlton (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Lyne is a serious person who has thought a lot about the issue of nuclear power in this country. I respect his advocacy on this important issue. But I also feel sorry for him, because he's right. He's right that the fundamental problem we have in the Australian electricity grid is the need to have power that can firm up renewables. We need to have power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. He's exactly right about that.

But here's the problem. The Liberal Party solution has moved precisely away from that solution. They have a situation now where they're proposing baseload nuclear power in conventional nuclear power stations. That is not a type of power that firms up renewables. It's a type of power that you can't turn on and off and that you can't scale up and down. Now that they have abandoned the small modular reactor pie-in-the-sky proposal in favour of conventional nuclear power, the type of power they are proposing is exactly the type of power that we do not need in Australia. Unfortunately all of his arguments—his correct analysis of the problem that we have in Australia—are not tailored to the solution that his party is now proposing.

Friends, nuclear power is not a new proposal in Australia. It's a proposal that's been around for a long time. Since it's now being raised seriously as an alternative proposal by the opposition, it's worth thinking about that history of nuclear power in Australia. The first serious nuclear power proposal in Australia came in 1970. The then Gorton-led coalition government proposed a 500-megawatt nuclear power station. They were serious about it. They set aside $2½ million in the budget, they selected a site in Jervis Bay in New South Wales, they built an access road and they put powerlines into the site. They were going to build a nuclear reactor in New South Wales.

There was just one problem, friends. They got a bit ahead of themselves. They built all the site security and they put in the access road, but they hadn't waited for the Treasury analysis. That Treasury analysis came 12 months later. The Treasury analysis showed in 1971 that building that nuclear reactor would be up to 10 times more expensive than the alternative of a coal plant. Sure enough, very quickly thereafter, the project was shelved. They quietly filled in the access road and cut the power to the site.

We didn't hear much more about nuclear power until a couple of decades later. That came in 2007, when John Howard is Prime Minister. His back is up against the wall and he's going into an election having done nothing about climate change. He needs a policy. So he releases the taskforce report by Ziggy Switkowski saying that Australia should build up to 25 reactors by 2050. He takes that policy to the 2007 election. This time the policy isn't undone by Treasury, friends. He doesn't make the mistake of asking Treasury this time, of course—smart fellow. This time the policy is undone by his colleagues. John Howard, in the middle of the 2007 election campaign, has a nuclear policy.

One by one his candidates, in seats around the country, were asked at press conferences whether they would be happy to have a nuclear reactor in their electorate. You could see the blood draining out of their faces. You could see their political lives flashing before their eyes. One after the other they distanced themselves from their Prime Minister's own policy. In the 2007 election we had no less than 22 coalition candidates distancing themselves from John Howard's nuclear policy. Safe to say, straight after that election, nuclear policy was ditched by the coalition and we didn't hear about it for a long time—until today, friends. Here we are, back—the third chapter in the Liberals' flirtation with nuclear power, pushed by the right wing and pushed by Barnaby Joyce from back in 2019. Morrison didn't want to go anywhere near it. Morrison tried to kick it to the kerb.

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