There’s something spookily familiar about how Dutton handled his nuclear plan

The August 2010 federal election campaign was conducted amid continuing shock waves from the Julia Gillard coup against Kevin Rudd, a little less than two months earlier.

So, you may be forgiven for forgetting much that happened in the actual campaign, and specifically, how the federal Coalition didn’t bother releasing costings of its election promises until just 48 hours before voters went to the polls.

It had already refused to submit the policy promises for independent analysis — which in those days was done by Treasury and the Department of Finance rather than the Parliamentary Budget Office.

That refusal might not have mattered too much to the broad sweep of history if the election result had been different. But a knife edge result left three crossbench House of Representatives MPs to make the call on which side of politics would get their support and, therefore, be able to form government.

In making their decision the “Three Amigos” — Tony Windsor, Bob Katter and the subsequently infamously loquacious Rob Oakeshott — relied heavily on a Treasury and Finance analysis requested by them post-election.

Its findings? That the Coalition’s claimed budget savings were out by almost $11 billion. In the current age of announcements measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars, that might not sound like a lot.

But given that the claimed cost of Coalition policies was originally only $31.5 billion, that’s a rather spectacular …. miscalculation.

It felt for all the world like the work of an ill-prepared, lazy opposition that thought it could coast to office amid the chaos of a dysfunctional government. And it almost did.

A perfectly timed announcement

There’s something spookily familiar about the circumstances now, as the opposition finally unveiled its much-promised nuclear energy costings on a Friday one week before the country closes down entirely for Christmas.

There may be a lot more detailed modelling in the document prepared by Frontier Economics for the Coalition than there was in 2010.

But the modelling, and more importantly the Coalition’s political message wrapped around it, doesn’t answer the myriad of questions raised by the idea of nuclear energy. And this belated release of what we are led to believe is a signature policy for the election comes as the Coalition still hasn’t released details of most of its other key policies — from tax to immigration.

The decision to release the costing on December 13 feels like the Coalition is once again playing voters for mugs at a time when it is up against a federal government which has spent the year apparently determined to prove it is not very good at politics, or persuading voters that it knows what it is doing.

The Frontier modelling does implicitly raise important questions about the government’s own energy plans: just how much coal-fired power will the system need as we move towards a system that is dominated by renewables, and for how long?; how much gas will be needed (and is it in the right place) to be used to “firm” or underwrite the system?; how much can we really rely on battery technology that is still evolving to store renewables? and just how much transmission infrastructure do we need (and where) for a mostly renewables future?

The government has “sort of” answered these questions. Most analysts will tell you that it is almost impossible to answer them precisely because the wheel is still in spin. Prices and technologies are changing.

But up against an opposition leader who is better at cut-through messages it will need to do a lot better than that.

Crucial to the political debate is the fact that much of the uncertainty around these decisions arises because they are being made by individual investors who are taking on all the risks in building new energy capacity.

And this must surely be the threshold point of difference with what the federal Coalition is proposing.

For the one thing that the Coalition documents released on Friday don’t seem to get around to mentioning is that its proposal for nuclear power involves taxpayers taking on all the massive financial risks (apart from the other sorts) and costs.

The Coalition wants this big shift to be overseen by a public sector which it usually loves to point out is notoriously bad at running big projects, either directly or via massive subsidies.

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The nuclear divide

The electorate is a lot more disengaged than it was in 2010, but the politically dangerous part of the nuclear policy from the government’s perspective is how it plays to regional Australia and, a bit like Brexit, likely divides the country into two very different blocks of voters.

Many regional voters, most pollsters will tell you, are worried about job losses as coal mining disappears, are unconvinced renewables offer job replacements, and are very exercised about the proliferation of wind and solar farms, and by the transmission lines to link them to the grid.

Earlier talk of small nuclear reactors has disappeared from the model set out using the Frontier modelling, and that modelling doesn’t seem to make provision for the fact that there are usually high costs for a first build, or that most expert opinion says it will take until at least 2040 to have the regulatory system and build in place for a first nuclear reactor to be functional, not 2036.

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While the modelling doesn’t seem to allow for much potential cost blowout in the construction costs, it does talk about potentially big blowouts in the cost of transmission infrastructure.

This is at the same time it claims that being able to plug nuclear reactors into existing sites of old coal-fired power stations will reduce the demand for new transmission.

This overlooks the fact that much of that transmission capacity will be accounted for by projects already in place, or underway, meaning that, at the very least, transmission will have to be duplicated.

And none of this will necessarily reduce the already contentious transmission lines in place, or underway, many of which were actually signed off by the former Coalition government — such as those that will link the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project to the grid.

All of this to build a system which is projected to provide significantly less energy to the country than the government model.

The Coalition has been pledging all year that its plans would lead to lower energy prices for stressed households.

But Peter Dutton had to sidestep on that issue on Friday because there is no clear mechanism for his plans to bring down those costs any time soon.

All the energy experts will be poring over the details for days. One could say they would be poring over them for weeks but (almost as if it was planned that way) the media coverage and the debate seems likely to come to a screeching stop in a week’s time as everything shuts down for Christmas.

Like the 2010 election costings, not many voters may remember the details of any analysis.

But the Coalition will have to be hoping there is no political equivalent of the Three Amigos to answer to this side of the 2025 election.

Laura Tingle is 7.30’s chief political correspondent.