Going nuclear – not a politically failsafe strategy

Understandably, the Labor opposition in reaction to the Taskforce promised to "campaign locally by warning that nuclear plants could be built in neighbourhoods to towns if the government was re-elected", thus scuttling all hope of debate or bipartisan support.

While the Rudd-Gillard government quickly buried the Taskforce report, the subsequent Coalition federal government made no effort during its nine years in office to exhume it. Nor did it capitalise on the South Australian Labor government's 2016 Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission which urged the state government to "pursue removal at the federal level of existing prohibitions on nuclear power generation to allow it to contribute to a low-carbon system if required" while acknowledging issues of commercial viability.

It was only in 2019 that the Coalition initiated a House of Representatives parliamentary inquiry into nuclear energy, but despite its good work, its report was divided on partisan grounds.

All in all, the Coalition missed an opportunity for the strategic policy and political development of this controversial issue. These issues, as the move to the GST showed, take time, persistent effort, and clear processes of public engagement.

Certainly, Dutton's sudden pro-nuclear announcement has put the issue back on the agenda and given the Coalition a point of difference to the government, but is this the best way to win the politics so necessary to progress such a complex issue?

Indeed, in the current pre-election environment this issue faces the same fate as the 2006 Taskforce when all discussion was reduced to narrow, simplistic election sloganeering and scaremongering and so risks putting any progress on this issue off for another decade.

The Coalition needs to do it better.