If, as most, including Bill Shorten, seem to agree, Saturday’s election was a referendum on climate change and everything that hangs off that, like renewables and the cost of energy, then the corollary is that it was also a referendum on nuclear power.
While the Labor/Greens alliance are a discombobulated and destabilised rabble and given the immense authority and power derived from the public’s repudiation of Labor’s climate policies on Saturday, it becomes incumbent on Scott Morrison and the Liberals to pivot to nuclear as a first order of business and to immediately legislate the lifting of its 1998 ban which was only ever a political fix to curry favour with the Australian Democrats and the Greens.
The bonus in this Machiavellian political play is that it can only further place Labor and the Greens under pressure and off balance as they would be forced to prosecute and rationalise their desire for lower co2 emissions on the one hand and their disdain for the only energy source that can deliver their desired outcome on the other. That spectacle alone would be worth the price of admission.
As an embarrassing aside, Australia is the only G20 country where nuclear power is banned by Federal law.