Achieving net zero using renewables or nuclear means rebuilding desolate public services after decades of cuts

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s plan to build seven nuclear power stations across Australia has drawn much criticism. But there is a striking feature that has received relatively little discussion or criticism: the nuclear power stations would be publicly owned and operated, like the National Broadband Network (NBN).

On the contrary, it was met with enthusiastic support from free market advocates such as Australian Judith Sloan, who noted: “This is how French nuclear power plants were first built.” This is how Australia built its largest single piece of energy infrastructure, the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

But there is a fundamental problem here. Over the last three or four decades, the federal public service has been hollowed out in the name of “new public management.” This became very clear during the Covid-19 pandemic, with state governments – which retained the ability to do much better – leading the bulk of the response. There is a very real question about whether we have the government’s capacity to achieve net zero.

From NBN to the National Nuclear Network?

Dutton’s recognition of the public NBN as a model worth pursuing is a welcome development for Malcolm Turnbull, one of his predecessors as Liberal leader.

Ten years ago, then Prime Minister Turnbull launched a disastrous mixed-mode overhaul of the NBN network. This reflected his belief – expressed publicly after leaving office – that a public broadband network should never have existed.

Labor is unable to oppose Dutton’s calls for public ownership. Labor governments in the states of Victoria and New South Wales have re-established public power utilities, while the Labor government in South Australia has floated the same idea.

Regardless of the technology choices we make, it is clear that the days of relying on the private sector to provide the infrastructure we need are coming to an end. The question now is whether the public sector can recover and take the lead.

The National Energy Market, for example, was intended to support competition and reduce electricity prices. Its failure to do so led to a number of government interventions, some of which were more effective than others.

Arguably the biggest failed intervention was the now defunct Energy Security Board, a politically driven response to the statewide power failure in South Australia in 2016.

The board sought to patch the National Energy Market with a capacity market, which was immediately dubbed “CoalKeeper” because of the incentives for old coal-fired power plants to continue operating, as well as new grid access fees, quickly dubbed “Solar Stopper” because of the disincentive to new investment in photovoltaics. Energy experts were not in favor of this approach.

In response to the major blackout in South Australia, the state government’s decision to fund the Horndale Large Battery, which at the time of construction in 2017 was the world’s largest utility-scale battery storage facility, was more effective.

Should the new government be private or public property?

Both main parties are signaling further intervention. The federal government stopped waiting for markets to provide clean energy and began seeking tenders for new renewable energy sources as part of its capacity investment program. The program received bids from renewable energy developers worth 40 gigawatts, well above the 6 GW target.

This change came in response to stagnant development held back by inadequate regulation and local opposition stemming from a combination of genuine concerns about environmental impacts and culture war-fueled science denial.

Labour’s current renewables strategy requires 10,000 kilometers of new, publicly-built transmission lines to meet our net zero targets. If we are to become a major exporter of clean energy, either in the form of electricity or products such as green hydrogen and ammonia, we would need even more transmission.

On the Coalition side, no private company will agree to the risk associated with creating nuclear energy from scratch. The government would have to lead.

As Nationals leader David Littleproud has now admitted in the wake of the nuclear site search, the country’s demand for clean energy is too great to allow “not in my backyard” adversaries – some of whom have only tenuous connections to the area – to slow or stop government plans.

If the government is to lead, it must have the capacity to do so.

Dutton’s nuclear gambit shows us that, surprisingly, Australia’s two main political parties strongly agree on the need to rebuild the nation’s capacity.

Whether it’s Labor working to get transmission lines and offshore nuclear power plants up and running, or the Coalition working to create a nuclear industry from scratch, it will take a strong government that can formulate a plan and the legal, financial and human resources to make it happen. to do. it’s reality.

All of these requirements were met when we built the Snowy Mountains Scheme, a decades-old federal government initiative in partnership with Victoria and NSW.

Are they still in place? Not yet. The government’s ability to act has been undermined by decades of neoliberalism. Particularly at the national level, public service expertise has been displaced and replaced by a reliance on private consultancies.

Rebuilding the federal government’s ability to operate will require recreating public service as a career that attracts the best and brightest graduates, many of whom now work in the financial sector.

The private sector continues to play a key role in building infrastructure, as it did with Snowy. But it is up to governments to take the leading role in finance and planning.

This poses a particular challenge for the Liberal Party, which has long favored the interests of small and large businesses and has historically opposed public ownership. However, from the late 1990s until relatively recently, Labor was also interested in privatization.

French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau once remarked that “war is too important to be left to generals.” As we are finding out the hard way, infrastructure investment is similarly too important to be left to private investors.