THE NUCLEAR FILES: The Liberal-National Coalition’s yet uncosted nuclear energy election pitch would prolong coal and expand gas generation. This makes it incompatible with the UN Paris agreement’s staged path to net zero by 2050, to keep global heating to a maximum of 1.5 to 2 degrees centigrade. So why did the opposition ever agree to pursuing net zero, just a few years ago in 2021, when it was the Australian government? Hint, it’s not because it suddenly went green!
A leading figure in Australia’s unofficial nuclear club, conservative lobbyist and University of Queensland adjunct professor Stephen Wilson, has told this story repeatedly, in public and in private as well.
It goes like this.
In 2021, when Scott Morrison was Liberal Prime Minister, he was politically desperate to land the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal with the US and the UK.
Even though this meant breaching a prior $90 billion contract with another ally, France, to buy 12 of its conventionally powered submarines.
But standing in the way was Australia’s long time hold out on committing to net zero by 2050, which continued at the time under a Liberal National government that had been in power since 2013. The Nationals in particular were highly opposed.
According to Wilson, who is now a pro nuke energy security champion working with the influential conservative think tank and lobby group, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), Morrison’s dilemma went like this:
There is no way he could have got the AUKUS deal with (President) Biden and (Prime Minister) Johnson. I’ve tested this with some pretty senior retired politicians. There’s no way he could have got a deal if he didn’t get on a plane and go to Glasgow, and pledge net zero, OK?
On this account, Morrison was stuck between a National Party rock and an AUKUS hard place.
Nuclear energy by submarine stealth?
Wilson is no stranger to political strategy involving nuclear submarines, having been a contributor to a 2020 book, titled An Australian Nuclear Industry: Starting with submarines? which foreshadowed the extraordinary AUKUS switch a year later.
Alongside Wilson, the book included chapters from a number of pro nuke advocates who are now prominent voices in an intense debate triggered by the opposition’s plan to build seven taxpayer funded nuclear power stations around Australia.
The book, from niche conservative linked publishing house Connor Court, overtly anticipated using nuclear submarines as a stepping stone to nuclear power stations, saying in its “Where to from here?” concluding chapter:
Acquiring nuclear powered submarines that will operate well away from population centres might familiarise the public with the general benefits of nuclear power and lead the way to a comprehensive nuclear industry…
This is a familiar playbook – policy change by stealth, but things then unfolded at surprising speed.
Out of the political blue, Morrison announced AUKUS in September 2021. The then Labor opposition, now the Australian government immediately swung in behind it to avoid being wedged on national defence.
Why not have reactors on land too?
Now, just a few years later, the nuclear powered submarine program, and especially its requirement for Australia to accept and dispose of high level radioactive waste from reactors, is being used to justify pushing for nuclear power stations as well.
While this was officially denied by the Morrison government at the time, Wilson’s version of history directly connects the coalition’s internal breakthrough on support for making a global commitment to net zero by 2050, ahead of COP26 in Glasgow, to AUKUS.
It clearly asserts that the former was the compulsory quid pro quo for winning the latter from the US and UK governments, and the circumstantial evidence for this is strong.
It speaks directly to the geopolitical complexities that Australia bulldozed into with the AUKUS deal, a surprising and high stakes political announcement less than a year out from the 2022 election, the last big powerplay by a fading Morrison government.
The UK’s new Labour government is simultaneously pro-nuclear energy, pro-AUKUS and pro-climate action.
There was a lot happening internationally too. A politically embattled Conservative Party in the UK led by Boris Johnson was to host COP26 that November, and wanted a global showcase event in the wake of Brexit.
Meanwhile, the British Labour Party, which won a landslide victory in July this year, was supportive of AUKUS, but was publicly adamant that Australia needed to show greater climate commitment.
In the US Democrat President Joe Biden was moving decisively to deal America back into the Paris agreement and global leadership on climate action, which former president Donald Trump had sidelined in 2017.
Biden appointed high profile Secretary of State John Kerry who was a 2004 US presidential candidate in his own right, as America’s special climate envoy so that COP26 in Glasgow was an early opportunity to reassert the US’s position at the UN.
The Fifth Estate put the Wilson scenario to Australia’s then Ambassador in Washington DC, former Senator and top political advisor Arthur Sinodinos. While he said he couldn’t validate a direct connection between the AUKUS deal and the net zero commitment, Sinodinos did confirm that climate action was a very high priority at the time for Biden and Kerry.
The politics of AUKUS and climate are alive again
This whole issue is live again this year, especially because Trump is running to become US President for a second term, and again vows to pull America out of the UN Paris agreement.
The UK’s new Labour government is simultaneously pro-nuclear energy, pro-AUKUS and pro-climate action.
The coalition’s energy plans, including nuclear, so far appear to be totally incompatible with Paris and the NDCs, because they would slow renewables, prolong coal and boost gas.
Meanwhile, Australia goes to the polls by May next year with the opposition controversially putting nuclear on the campaign agenda, with strong backing from conservative lobbying groups and the mining industry (see more in The Fifth Estate’s “Nuclear Files” series).
While insisting it is still committed to net zero by 2050, the coalition refuses to back Australia’s current 2030 net zero interim target of 43 per cent renewable energy, which is likely to rise to between 65 and 75 per cent for the 2035 interim target (which complies with UN Paris agreement’s five year binding Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs).
The coalition’s energy plans, including nuclear, so far appear to be totally incompatible with Paris and the NDCs, because they would slow renewables, prolong coal and boost gas.
If Wilson is right, and he appears on a publicly-available video telling his version, then it rewrites the official history of how Morrison came to make Australia’s commitment to net zero by 2050 at the Glasgow 2021 UN Climate Summit, known as COP26.
Basically “Scomo” had to deliver it, dragging the Liberals’ coalition partners the Nationals against their will, because it was non-negotiable for Johnson and Biden. Thus, in this analysis, it was never about the Morrison government going even a little bit green. It was all about political expediency, doing what had to be done to land the highly-politicised deal they had to win!
Wilson’s off-script name-dropping
Based on a number of video presentations reviewed by The Fifth Estate, it is clear that Wilson has a habit of playing to the camera and the crowd in his numerous presentations, and frequently goes off script to name drop and tell anecdotes.
He was a keynote speaker at the 2023 conference of the Australian Nuclear Association (ANA), the nuclear club’s big annual event, where he was meant to be talking about the no-doubt exciting topic of The Effect of Nuclear Energy on Total System Electricity Costs.
At one point he really drifted off topic, saying:
All my conservative old…right wing nutcase friends are really mad at Morrison for signing up to net zero in Paris (Wilson clearly meant Glasgow in 2021, not the landmark Paris Climate Summit, COP21, in 2015).
My view is he had no choice. There is no way he could have got the AUKUS deal with Biden and Johnson. I’ve tested this with some pretty senior retired politicians. There’s no way he could have got a deal if he didn’t get on a plane and go to Glasgow, and pledge Net Zero, OK?
Was that the right thing to do? Yes. I think it was, because energy security is really important.
Sharing the story with the IPA influencers
Wilson was adamant in his ANA address. But was he just grandstanding?
Possibly, except that he said much the same thing, without the histrionics, to a private retreat the IPA held in Canberra on 12 May 2023, where he was updating the IPA elite on his then new energy security project, commissioned by the IPA, with funding from mining industry supporters.
Wilson’s notes for his behind-closed-doors presentation, unearthed and made public by The Fifth Estate, show that he told the IPA decision makers that:
We are past half-way from 1990 to 2050. But nowhere near halfway on reductions. Most countries are likely to fail to meet their commitments. Things are going to get harder and harder. How we play this game will be crucial.
In my assessment, the two wider concerns that backed the conservative side of politics into the bipartisan geopolitical corner on emission reductions were:
1. The need to agree to Net Zero by 2050 before the Glasgow Conference of the Parties on climate change to secure the agreement on AUKUS, and 2. The concern that Australia’s access to debt and equity capital markets would be curtailed in the absence of joining the emissions reduction bandwagon
There’s no public record to show if anyone disagreed with this analysis by Wilson.
But again, it’s very definitive and not at all ambiguous, and consider who he was addressing.
To put it bluntly, this was not an audience you’d want to mislead about anything related to climate change and the coalition. Not given their sworn agenda to oust the Labor government, after Morrison lost power in the May 2022 election and finally left politics altogether earlier this year.
Thus with the benefit of hindsight and Wilson’s insights, common sense says that Morrison was caught in the vice of timing and circumstances.
The stakes were high
Remember, this was high stakes geo-politics for Australia, in dangerous times for the world, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, and with Russia already marshalling its invasion forces on the borders of Ukraine.
Morrison had to dump a huge existing non nuclear submarine contract with France, an important ally for Australia in the South Pacific, and in Europe, a move that led to French President Emmanuel Macron publicly and damagingly accusing him of lying.
In nuclear-powered submarine terms, Australia was the complete new kid on the block, trying to join the party with two long-standing nuclear powers, the military and industrial superpower US, and the still nuclear weapons-capable UK.
Morrison was not in a great position to call all the shots, and Biden and Johnson had strong domestic and global reasons to want Australia signed up on net zero by 2050, after its years of refusal to do so.
Glasgow in November 2021 loomed, and AUKUS just months earlier provided very strong leverage behind closed doors, in the rooms where it mattered.