Trump-lite: Coalition promises purge of experts who call out nuclear bunkum

The federal Coalition has given another insight into what life might be like under a Peter Dutton-led government, with the promise of a purge of experts who disagree with its policies, in a potentially horrifying redux of the mass sackings occurring right now in the United States.

The Dutton-led Coalition did not respond well on Monday to the Climate Change Authority’s conclusion that the Coalition’s nuclear power policy would result in a blow out of emissions, both in the short and long term, and make Australia’s Paris climate commitments impossible to meet.

There should have been nothing controversial about this analysis because the CCA was simply crunching the numbers on the impact of the Coalition’s own stated intentions – to keep burning coal, and more gas, for as long as it takes to build new nuclear. It even used the Coalition’s improbable and fanciful timelines.

Almost immediately, Coalition finance spokesperson Jane Hume indicated that a Coalition government would sack CCA chair Matt Kean – a former Liberal energy minister and treasurer in the NSW state government – and would seek to scrap the CCA itself, having eviscerated and ignored it when last in government.

“I cannot imagine that we possibly maintain a Climate Change Authority that has been so poorly, so badly politicised. It simply isn’t serving its purpose to provide independent advice to government on its climate change policy,” Hume told the ABC on Monday afternoon.,

Opposition energy spokesperson Ted O’Brien, the architect of the Coalition’s nuclear power policy, then described Kean and the CCA as “puppets” of the Labor government.

“The Climate Change Authority has become a puppet of Anthony Albanese and [Climate Change and Energy Minister] Chris Bowen, as its latest report parrots Labor’s untruthful anti-nuclear scare campaign,” O’Brien said in a statement reported by the AFR.

“I feel sorry for many decent public servants who work in the Climate Change Authority who have been thrust on the front line on the eve of an election taking a hyper-partisan position in favour of a government whose own record is to drive emissions higher.”

The Coalition’s attack on the CCA is not surprising, given it ignored its advice while in government for nearly a decade, and because it has attacked other key institutions, including the economists at CSIRO, and the engineers at the Australian Energy Market Operator, because they don’t like that they disagree on nuclear power.

The CSIRO points out that nuclear is very expensive and small modular reactors do not yet exist, and AEMO has pointed out that the future grid needs to be based on flexible and dispatchable generation, and is moving away from “alway on” baseload that requires its own massive back-up in case of trips and other failures.

The Coalition, now given a reasonable chance of returning to power according to the latest polls, is learning from Trump, which is to say that if a position is indefensible, then you attack the messenger, insult experts, tear down their institutions and flood the zone with misinformation and disinformation.

The new Trump administration has sought to castrate agencies, purge individuals and remove regulators that are seen as disloyal to the new government’s ideology or who represent a threat to its business interests, and those of its backers, including Elon Musk.

It has already announced it is quitting the Paris agreement – again – banned representations at key UN climate science talks, banned the use of word “climate” in government websites and programs, and it seems that the Australian LNP is keen to follow suit.

It has refused to commit to providing a climate target ahead of the next UN climate conference in Brazil. “This is more proof that the Peter Dutton’s only climate plan is to take any action off the table and give a green light to big polluters,” federal energy and climate minister Chris Bowen said on Tuesday.

The main thrust of the CCA report was to point out the elephant in the room, the emissions impacts ignored by the Coalition and not even mentioned in the Frontier Economics report that it has used to justify its policies.

“I can assure the committee is that you’ve got no chance of meeting (the Paris emissions targets) if you go down the nuclear scenario as proposed on the Frontier Economics model,” Kean told a Senate committee on Monday.

It should be noted that this should not even be a controversial point, as the Coalition has made clear that it intends to burn more coal for as long as it can.

“The implications that are very clear,” Kean said.

“The scientists, the economists, governments around the world, have told us that that will have catastrophic impacts on our environment, and modeling that we’ve also seen suggests that there would be a 10% reduction in GDP if you were to go down that path.

“There are huge implications for us not meeting those targets. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy to hit to keep things below 1.5 degrees. In fact, it’s going to be difficult.

“However, what we do know is that plans to slow down at the rate of decarbonisation of the global economy put us on a trajectory which could have devastating impacts for the environment and also the global economy.”

Government minister Tim Ayres, interviewed by the ABC at the same time as Hume before his appearance with Kean and CCA chief executive at the Senate Estimates, said that the Coalition’s clear intention was to bully people.

“That’s the alternative, bully people and sack people they don’t like. That is un-Australian, and it shows a complete lack of respect for independent organisations.”

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