‘Like building a Blockbuster’: Liberal slams party’s nuclear plan

A former Liberal state treasurer has branded his own party “socialist” in an extraordinary broadside at the opposition’s plan to build nuclear power reactors.

Matt Kean, who now chairs the government’s Climate Change Authority, has also warned parts of Australia will become “uninhabitable” from worsening climate events such as the ongoing emergency from ex-Cyclone Alfred.

Mr Kean told the ABC’s Q+A on Monday the federal Liberal Party proposal for replacing coal-fired power plants with nuclear reactors was too expensive for governments and consumers.

“I’m not anti-nuclear, but I am anti-nonsense,” he said.

“There’s no private investors knocking down anyone’s door to build a nuclear reactor.

“In fact, under Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan, it won’t be the national energy market, it will be the nationalised energy market, because it will only be funded by the government.

Mr Kean is in a public spat with the federal branch of his party, with Liberal frontbencher Jane Hume suggesting he would be sacked from a Climate Change Authority (CCA) that had been “badly politicised”.

The CCA has modelled the potential impacts of the Coalition’s promise to build seven nuclear power plants by 2050, concluding it would result in an additional 2 billion tonnes of emissions.

Mr Kean, a treasurer and minister for energy and the environment in the previous NSW government, was appointed CCA chair by Labor in July last year.

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Nuclear power ‘like Blockbuster Video’

On Q+A, Liberal senator Hollie Hughes argued renewable energy — and the power lines to connect new sites to the grid — was also being subsidised by governments.

“The reality is, transmission is 50 per cent of your electricity bill,” Ms Huges told the Q+A audience in Wyong on the NSW Central Coast.

“How many wind and solar farms are being built without a handout from the taxpayer? They are all being built on subsidies.

“I absolutely think that we should be replacing some of those coal-fired power stations with small, medium-sized, modular nuclear reactors. The technology is developing, it’ll secure jobs in this region, and it will actually give us zero emissions, reliable baseload power.”

But Mr Kean argued smaller reactors as proposed by the Coalition “aren’t even invented yet” and offered no short-term cost relief for consumers.

“People talking about building nuclear today are the same people that are sort of arguing that we should be building a Blockbuster Video complex when Netflix is already here,” he said.

“I don’t think anyone in this audience believes that a nuclear power station that’s not going to be built ’till at least 2035 — and that’s the most heroic assumption anyone has ever said, right? — is going to help anyone with their power bills today.

“It’s just not, OK?”

Senator Hughes said of the Liberal nuclear proposal, “I own it,” prompting Mr Kean to point out: “Not the NSW Liberals.”

Both NSW Liberal leader Mark Speakman and Queensland Liberal Premier David Crisafulli have rejected nuclear as a short-term fix for energy cost and reliability.

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‘Poor planning’ on disaster risks

With ex-Cyclone Alfred still posing major a flood risk to parts of Queensland and New South Wales, Mr Kean warned of “whole communities being disrupted” by worsening climate conditions.

“There will be some parts of the coastline, there’ll be some parts that are flood prone, that will be uninhabitable,” he said.

“We need to make sure that we’re protecting those vulnerable people and dealing with the issue of carbon emissions, but also building in policies that help communities adapt to the new reality, which is a changing climate.”

Governments were also warned on Q+A by a former emergency response leader that they needed to make tough decisions on land zoning and whether residents should be allowed to rebuild in disaster-prone areas.

Carlene York, a former commissioner of the NSW State Emergency Service, said rescue crews were “coping and responding to poor planning decisions from decades ago”.

Ms York spent nearly five years leading the state’s disaster response, including the devastating Lismore floods of 2022.

“It’s really important that government look at the fire risk, bushfire risk, flood risk, coastal erosion, in the local councils and state government, about where they’re going to build into the future,” she said.

“They’re the discussions that we have to have to make sure the community is safe into the future.”

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