The Chaser Report - Dutton Wants A Fukushima In Your Backyard

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Dutton shows off his political bravery with a radioactive new policy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. And Charles, today it is time to praise Peter Dutton because people have been saying a deeply unfair thing about him recently. They've been saying that the man has no policies. I read some snarky commentator this week, Charles, saying Scott Morrison didn't hold a hose, but does Peter Dutton hold a policy? I'm here to tell you

he has not just a policy but one of the bravest policies in the history of Australian politics. Are you saying that Peter Dutton is the Bill Shorten of the Liberal Party? I'm saying that he's Bill Shorten multiplied by John Husson. It is the most crazy, brave thing

I've ever seen. I'm not making this up. This isn't heavy hand of sarcasm? And for, you know, Listeners unfamiliar with the great text of the English language. Bravery in politics is always bad. Bravery is the thing that you never do. It's the thing you never do. If you compare Bill Shorten with Albo,

Shorten had a whole bunch of policies, including changes to tax. He's going to get rid of negative gearing. All this stuff lost the election because they ran a negative campaign against him. As we know, John Houston brought out fight back this whole comprehensive tax plan that gave Keyes in the sweetest victory at them all. No one thought he would win, but he did because the opposition came up with policy that Keating could run against.

So how brave is Peter Dutton for going to the next election with a plan for nuclear power, Charles? A plan to introduce nuclear power to Australia. Look, I've actually got a theory about this, because actually I didn't realise it was the nuclear power one that we were going to talk about. I assumed it was some sort of potato-based policy. Well, I'll explain in more detail after this. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important.

Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. No, I wasn't building up for some sort of potato reveal. He's come up with what's increasingly looking like a detailed plan to bring nuclear power. to Australia at scale, Charles.

Okay, so can I just tell you, and I feel a little bit like, you know, Blackadder telling Baldrick, but there might be just a tiny little problem with putting detail on the nuclear policy. Because at a very helicopter view level, there's a certain genius to nuclear energy, right? Sure.

Because it's a solution to a problem that will take at least 30 or 40 years to deliver. In the meantime, you don't have to have any other policy, for climate because you've got this silver bullet that's just 40 years away and and it allows you to just neutralise the issue without actually having to do anything at all right like so at an abstract level at a non-detail based level it's an active genius yeah but the moment you start putting detail on a nuclear energy plan it is like a who wants a Fukushima in their electorate they literally there is no great I mean if you're thinking that the

scare campaign that the no campaign ran on the voice, which was full of misinformation, was a particularly egregious piece of, you know, the lowest common denominator politics, then wait until you see the do you want a Fukushima in your suburb shits that the Labor Party are presumably preparing right now. See, okay, two points to make about this, Charles. The first thing is when this policy was first introduced, do you remember that they're all talking about the smaller safer reactors. There was this whole model, I think in the US,

they started to roll this out. The smaller safer reactors, this was the big thing. You don't need the scary ones that have meltdowns, the large ones. You just need these small kind of fun-sized ones that are safe, that are fine, that you don't have to worry about. They don't work, it turns out.

So the small reactors are simply a joke, okay? The SMRs, the small nuclear reactors. Should Peter Dutton, if you were advising him, would you suggest that he just keep vague about the size of the reactors or would you say no no we're going to need some large ones well you've got to stay vague

this is the whole point at no point the moment you start drilling down on this policy it is a disaster stay vague he should just go oh we need medium size ones yeah and a new technology that isn't out yet right you make it like that's right exactly it's perfect

you just say oh I've been into the new like we should run the whole energy sector on water I mean And actually, people are doing that. That's the hydrogen dream, isn't it? That's true, actually. Apparently that's being rolled out and is looking really good, but that's another subject.

Well, Charles, okay, so you wouldn't commit to the size. That would be very foolish. But the thing you've alluded to, Charles, with your knowledge of politics, is that saying where you would build the reactors, the places where you put them, that would be an act of electoral self-harm. Yeah, it's totally right. Yeah, like, that is literally, there is no electorate. Like, I reckon nuclear is one of those things that everyone, secret.

deep down wants to happen at some level you go that would be great if you know like i don't know the north shore of sydney could have a nuclear reactor but you just don't want it near you like i'm happy for to be at point piper like that's that's completely fine i'm happy for adelaide to have nuclear i'm happy for for melbourne brisbane but maybe not you know i mean adelaide looms large as a possibility isn't yeah i mean maybe that's the way we do the roll out is we choose a city we don't really care about anyway and test out all the, especially if the reactors don't really work. If you can hear my daughter crying in the background, by the way, that's because she's scared

of this. You know where we test it? Canberra. Canberra. That's it. If it's safe enough, it can be in camera. Well, Charles, here's the thing. The ABC's got a list here of seven possible sites for these reactors.

Oh, no. Are they in marginal seats for chance? Because what they've done is Peter Dutton came out of Channel 7 this month. morning. And he said, what they want to do is replace retiring coal plants with nuclear power stations. Yeah, we'll be releasing detail shortly in relation to our plan. But as I say, if there's a retiring coal asset, so there's a coal fire generator that's already got an existing distribution network. The wires and poles are already there to distribute the energy across the network into homes and businesses. That's really what we're interested in.

And not just any large ones. They've admitted that the only way to get to net zero is by having large nuclear plants. And it makes sense, right? If you're going to build a big nuclear power plant, build it where there's the poles and wires already for large scale generation. Yeah, yeah. Transmission is a huge puzzle. And so the coalition didn't want to say where this was going to be.

But the ABC just went, well, okay, where are some coal-fired power plants that are closing down? And they've got a list here. It's in the federal divisions of Gippsland in Victoria, Hunter in New South Wales, Maranoa and Fleeting, Queensland and O'Connor in Western Australia. Those are the seats. There's also partial closures in short.

land as well in the central coast. So there's some pretty important electorates that now are front and centre, potentially having a large nuclear power plant built in them. That is brave shit, Peter Dutton. But I actually have a strategy for Beta Dutton to get around the whole, you know, because Labor will clearly run a scare campaign in those electorates and they'll win them, right? Like scare campaigns just win, especially if you're talking about like nuclear, you know,

three mile island Chernobyl, you know, comes to the hunter. Especially, you know, the wine growers, wouldn't the wine growers love a nuclear industry next to them? Well, this is the thing in The Hunter. The Hunter is the only label. This is the other amazing thing about this list that they've got here is that they're almost all coalition seats except for Hunter. And full credit to the Nationals MP, Colin Boyce, it says that the Calide Power Station at Billow-Ela in central Queensland, that's the most likely one. That's in his lecture and he's going, yeah, not a bad idea. So brave. So brave.

He says, having said that, we'd have to go to the key. community engage their thoughts on it before making any decisions. What do you think the community is going to say? I'm going to say, well, this is the thing. See, this is my strategy. I've got a strategy for Peter Dutton, which is what he should say is nuclear is never going to happen. He should explain, he should be kind of like, this is a sophisticated communicator

that Peter Dutton and strategy is very good at nuance, isn't he? You go and reassure each electorate that, no, no, nuclear is this pipe dream. It doesn't actually make any sense. commercially. It's never actually going to happen. If it did happen, you'll all be dead anyway. It's like 2055 is the absolute earliest that it will happen. So this is actually just a way for us to, I, have a sort of climate change policy that means we don't actually have to invest in solar and wind. But also, it's a great way to siphon money out of the government. But it doesn't come with all the other problems that the other methods that they

have for siphoning money out of their things. Because if you look at coalition policies. They're usually based on just siphoning money out of the government to give to their money. That's exactly what this is, yeah. Refugee camps, Palladden. Remember that it was like the company didn't even fucking exist and then they got billion dollar contract.

The car parks. They never built a car park, but they got billions of dollars. What was the Great Barrier Reef thing with the tiniest office in the world that got like $500 million or something? That was a, I wish I'd own that company. Consultancies.

They got like 40 or 38 billion. dollars in their last term of government. But the problem with all of those is that people can turn around and go, well, hang on, we didn't get our car park. Hang on, where's our refugee camp to mistreat all the refugees? Whereas with nuclear, there's no deliverable. You don't have to deliver anything because it doesn't make any sense. Well, there's an obvious solution here, Charles, to try and reassure voters that the reactors

won't actually happen. Commissioner of the nuclear program, the man in charge of the construction and the planning, Scott Morrison. Put Scott Morrison in charge of the nuclear rollout, and it won't happen this century. It's absolutely guaranteed. We'll turn around, and he's already the head of the nuclear commission. More on this in a moment, because it's pretty extraordinary what they're saying.

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Unsurprisingly, Charles, Anthony Albanesey is absolutely salivating at this. He says, I look forward to the debate about where this is going to be. He also says, large nuclear reactors, they need to be near populations and they need to be near water. So I think Albo is feeling pretty comfortable with the whole renewables are cheaper argument at this stage. Yeah, because all the analysis, because I was trying to explain to my son, because my son, like, it's a generational thing. We all grew up with hippie parents who thought that nuclear was bad, right? Yes. But, you know, there is an argument to say, if we'd actually started nuclear 30 years ago, we'd be in a much better place carbon-wise now, right?

But the thing that is quite interesting about nuclear, so Gen Z and like millennials and teenagers all think that nuclear is a great idea, right? Do they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, it's a completely generational development. Are they aware that there's another kind of pollution that lasts for thousands of years that comes from nuclear power? Well, but their whole thing is we need to do anything about climate change. We need to do, like, and they've watched their parents and their grandparents do literally fuck all for 40 years, for the past 40 years. And so their attitude is, well, we don't fucking give a shit.

So they're going to love this policy from Dutton. So this Dutton's on a winter, you're telling me, with the kids. Yeah, well, yeah, that I was explaining to my son that actually the first 10 years, all the projections, like even the coalition will tell you this, which is the first 10 years, you don't even start designing the plants for the first 10 years. Oh, perfect. First 10 years, you have to skill up your workforce. You've got to actually start training your nuclear physicists and your safety offices

and your Homer Simpsons who are going to run the safety offices, you know, blah, blah, blah. And then in 10 years' time, you start going. okay well let's sketch out you know where to plot this thing down and like so there's a huge lead time in it during which time solar and wind become cheaper and cheaper every year at a sort of asymptotic rate

so there's there is no like it just it's just not going to happen so you're saying it makes it when you talk about this what you're really doing is giving solar and wind and all the renewables even more time to become cheaper and obvious so is this like a secret stealth green campaign by Peter Dutton? I think that's what we're

facing here. I think what Peter Dutton has done is he's looked at the success of Max Chandler Mather and he's got in Brisbane, which is where Dutton comes from and he's going, how do I get a piece of that action? He wants to go greener. Well that's perfect isn't it? Yeah. Because I mean what he says he actually

agrees with you on this child. He says, you know, you can't compare your old Soviet nuclear power stations. He said it's like comparing a motor vehicle you're driving off the showroom floor in 2024 as opposed to 1954. So he wants It's the cutting edge nuclear meltdown Fukushima. He doesn't want your sort of 1950s version.

Yeah, because the thing that you want is with nuclear, what you want is just new designs that have never been tested before. Yeah. That's what I want to. Be the test bed. I think Petter Dutton's electorate is the perfect place to give it a go. Put your money where your mouth is. This is how we get rid of the Queensland problem that has plagued Australia for years. In the seat of Dixon.

Well, Queensland problem is in getting rid of Queensland en masse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well. He's going back to Menzies. It's very foundational to the Liberal Party, the Brisbane line. Remember, Menzies wanted to cede everything north of Brisbane to the Japanese? We'll just cede it to radiation. Yeah, that's right.

I think North Queen, I mean, imagine the footballers, they'd breed in North Queensland with radiation. Oh, I imagine. State of origin would have a bit of stakes if the players were all. irradiated. So I need to be fair here. The good news about this is that they're going to release their policy. So they've promised. Dutton's promised to get even more specific about locations and design. So they're going to have a big, fat, chunky policy out there. But your theory that this is just a delaying tactic to give renewables more time is this Dutton's strategy to win back the teal seats? Yeah, no, because think about it. It's the perfect

policy. It is actually the perfect policy because there's a whole constituency of Leibs who just don't care about climate change so that's tick because it's never going to happen yeah but it's so it's never going to happen they they go good it's never going to happen we don't care about the climate then there's a whole group of people who do care about the environment but don't want it to affect any tax or anything that they do yep or they want to pay out from their mates in government whenever the lives get in tick it'll do that and and then it allows them to win back the teal seat because they say, but we've got the biggest, boldest climate policy of all. Under the wind farm, solar sort of thing, you've got to rebuild all the transmission lines,

you've got to build a whole of the stuff. It's all very complicated. You've got to do stuff right now. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Under ours, we have, like, it's a much bigger bolder policy. We're going to actually blow up Australia. It's pretty impressive. I mean, it's bold, it's big, it's expensive.

And it also, it's none of this sort of get the private. It's the orcus of energy policy. Well, I mean, this is part of the argument that he's making is that we like nuclear now because we've got orcas. Can't we just get some more submarines and hook them up to the power network? Wouldn't that work? Get a whole bunch of submarines on land? Just by the by, I should note that you know how there's now a sort of return to send a policy on uranium?

Yeah. So you know how we sell uranium? We do. Very good at it. Across the world, especially to the French, ironically. And they send it back, right? So we have a growing stockpile of nuclear waste. Guess where we store that waste, Dom?

I hope it's not at Lucas Heights. No, it's somewhere in South Australia. I don't really care. But where we store it is a temporary holding facility because they haven't worked out where to store it because it's electrical dynamite or actually electoral uranium waste. We can't even work out where to store the nuclear waste

that we already have, let alone the nuclear waste that we're going to generate with seven big nuclear waste. a power station. How confident are you feeling about your call Dutton winning the next election given this, I mean, the Scare campaign rights itself. You think you can pull it off?

Never underestimate Labor's ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I think even with this, even with, even with the, you know, the wind to his back, I'm sure Albo will find a way to, you know, trip over in the fourth quarter.

Well, the one thing we can be certain of, though, for most of this conversation, is that whichever party wins the next election, we will not have nuclear power in Australia. That's right. You know what, though? I think, I reckon the best theory is that Dutton's copying Max Chandler-Mata. I think that is, I think that's what's going on.

I mean, the most well-discised green I've ever seen. It's an extraordinary piece of that of fusion. Exactly. He's been playing the long game here, Charles. And you know what will happen next? Dutton will grow out his hair. Mark my words. And we're cftads.

That I want to see. It'll be a long-haired hippie. Is Peter Dutton? The Secret Green. I think we've answered that question today, Charles. Our Gehry is from Road, we're part of the Iconiclass Network, and we'll catch you tomorrow. See ya.

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