00:00Peter Dutton has outlined this nuclear plan as something, he says, will be cheaper and
00:07cleaner and consistent power for Australia if the Coalition were elected to government.
00:13They've got modelling done by a group called Frontier Economics, which is comparing the
00:18scenarios of what the Coalition is proposing and what Labor is proposing, and says that
00:23what the Coalition is proposing will be $263 billion cheaper.
00:29So they have looked at the comparison of what the Coalition is suggesting, which is 54%
00:36renewable energy and 38% nuclear energy, so a mix of those two, with what Labor is suggesting
00:43it will do, which is a much more renewables-heavy plan, about 82% of renewables Labor is planning
00:51to have.
00:52The central feature of this plan is also that coal-fired power stations, some of which are
00:58already being shuttered, will need to stay open much longer to help with that transition
01:04to nuclear energy, and this is despite, as I said, a lot of power companies already saying
01:11that their power stations need to start moving on.
01:15So here is how Peter Dutton sold his policy just a short time ago.
01:22This is a plan which will underpin the economic success of our country for the next century.
01:28This will make electricity reliable, it will make it more consistent, it will make it cheaper
01:33for Australians, and it will help us decarbonise as a trading economy as we must.
01:40And the fact is that we can deliver a plan which is going to keep the lights on, and
01:45we have a plan and a vision for our country which will help grow businesses, not close
01:48them down.
01:52Interestingly, one of their big pitches is that their plan will be cheaper than Labor's,
01:58but the modelling didn't actually look at the cost of power bills.
02:01The Coalition says they're not able to say whether people's actual power bills will go
02:06down, just that their plan, they say, will be 44% cheaper than Labor's.
02:12One of the other assumptions that the modelling makes is that Australia will actually need
02:17less electricity than what Labor is saying.
02:21The Coalition says that they think that we'll be using a lot fewer EVs than what the government
02:27is modelling, and therefore there will be not as much need for power.
02:32And that's how some of their numbers around nuclear and renewables have worked out.
02:36Here's Ted O'Brien explaining that.
02:42They are basically assuming that the Australian people will be forced to behave in the way
02:48that the Labor Party want them to behave.
02:51We have a very different approach to that.
02:52We can still reach net zero by respecting the choices of the Australian people.
02:59At this time there's about 46 pages, but what we've been able to glean so far is that the
03:04proposal relies on what Peter Dutton thinks is going to be a smaller economy, less energy
03:10usage, and would cost taxpayers more than $300 million.
03:16The costings, which have been prepared by Frontier Economics, have found that the system
03:21with nuclear would be cheaper over a 25-year period than a system without it.
03:28That does contradict the findings of the CSIRO, which you might remember modelled what it
03:33thought nuclear power would cost in comparison with renewables, and it maintains that the
03:38cost of nuclear would be double what a renewable energy only energy mix would be.
03:47The lower result is also because the Coalition's costing spreads out the cost of nuclear over
03:5650 years, which is an accounting measure essentially that means the bulk of the costs of what this
04:02plan really will mean are coming after the 25-year mark.
04:08The costing is only for 25 years.
04:11So there are a huge amount of costs and a large number that isn't being counted in this
04:17and of course trying to predict any sort of costing 20 and 30 years out given the changes
04:24in global economics is incredibly difficult anyway.
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