#BrisPol

Nice to see some sensible policy for a change. Alas they have no hope of getting in :(

That's right Cronulla, your likely next local member isn't actually local. But, he promises he will be real soon!

Good luck with that!

Having lived in super safe-seats and marginal seats, I promise it's far better to live in a seat that flips every election!

He could have made a decent prime minister—too bad it never really panned out.

Anyway, here's Malcolm discussing Trump on MSNBC.

https://youtu.be/aGvzfOkdFMg?si=14WksVCbGTTQvR4M

@australianpolitics #auspol

Just discovered this. I will pin this as it may be useful to come back to in discussion

Peter Dutton's nuclear plan is just terrible public policy.

The truth is that, in an Australian context, with nuclear power more expensive per kilowatt hour than either grid scale solar & storage or coal, nuclear just doesn't make economic sense.

The UK has a mature nuclear industry. Its new Hinkley Point C plant, started in 2016, is now expected to not be complete until 2031, and costs £35bn.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/23/hinkley-point-c-could-be-delayed-to-2031-and-cost-up-to-35bn-says-edf

So how much would it cost to replace all of Australia's coal power plants with nuclear ones?

We'll, at current exchange rates, £35bn — that's the cost of just one Hinkley Point C sized reactors — works out to A$67.6 billion.

So building just 10 nuclear reactors the size of Hinkley Point C costs $A676bn, making the AUKUS subs look like Home Brand corn flakes in comparison.

(Just for comparison, ScoMo's AUKUS subs cost $368bn, and Daniel Andrew's Suburban Rail loop is estimated at around $100bn.)

That's assuming Australia, starting from scratch, could build nuclear plants as quickly and cheaply as the UK, which was one of the first nations on Earth to split the atom.

So is it debt & deficit to fund this? Big new taxes? Even by the LNP's own measuring sticks, it's a crap policy!

The Australian Federal Government has previously examined the prospect of building nuclear power plants in the Switkowski report: https://webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20080117214749/http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/79623/20080117-2207/dpmc.gov.au/umpner/docs/nuclear_report.pdf

The big thing that's changed since it was published is that grid solar + storage is now cheaper than coal or nuclear power.

So would you support holding up the closure of coal plants for 15 years until nuclear plants are completed, then paying substantially more on your power bills, while the federal government pays hundreds of billions of dollars in government subsidies, while also hiring thousands of additional public servants to regulate it all?

#auspol #nuclear #ClimateChange #australia @australianpolitics

oh this is gonna be good! (there's video)

What a winner.

Hold on a sec, weren't we all told that privatisation would lead to cheaper electricity prices?

Weren't we told that repealing the carbon tax would lead to cheaper electricity prices?

Weren't we told that sticking with (more expensive) coal and gas power over (cheaper) renewables and storage would lead to cheaper electricity prices?

From the ABC:

"At the heart of the price gouging inquiry, initiated by the ACTU and led by Allan Fels, is determining in a high inflation environment what's general inflation and what else might be influencing pricing behaviour, the main offending price gouging industries, how they do it and how it impacts everyday Australians.

"Part of the problem is Australia is awash with oligopolies, which means there isn't as much price competition as there might otherwise be, which helps explain why real wage growth has been low and why the real prices of so many goods are so high.

"And while most of the media attention has been on Coles and Woolworths, the report will include other sectors accused of customer gouging and breaching trust such as energy, airlines and banks.

"Sydney University professor Lynne Chester, from the school of social and political sciences, supplied the inquiry with a detailed submission ... [which] said electricity prices have been escalating since 2005, largely due to increases in the charges paid for the generation of electricity. She said the charge for electricity makes up a significant component of the electricity price paid for by consumers.

"A key issue was that the regulation was designed for a competitive market, assuming competition would deliver lower prices, but the market was never competitive due to the presence of big powerful generator companies that have been merging with retail companies to create giants such as AGL, Origin and Energy Australia."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-05/price-gouging-grocery-prices-energy-bills-airfares-inquiry-actu/103420574

#auspol #australia #economics #energy #privatisation #electricity #ClimateChange @australianpolitics #politics #business

• The government's tax cuts will pass parliament with the support of the Coalition
• The federal opposition will attempt to amend the bill but will not stand in the way if that fails
• The prime minister dared the Coalition to oppose the bill ahead of its introduction

Looks like we are finally working towards a fuel efficiency standard.

Will be interesting to see what the final details are, especially the year at which manufacturers have to hit zero emissions, and if it's going to be a linear change to get there or otherwise.

No doubt legacy parts of the industry will be busy lobbying for their own interests instead of the planet's.

The origin of at least $57m – amounting to about a quarter of all funding to major political parties – is unknown, according to an analysis by Guardian Australia.

The analysis of annual political returns, released by the Australian Electoral Commission on Thursday, show between 21% and 27% of donations and other receipts to Labor, the Coalition and the Greens were from unnamed sources.

For the longer term, the Stage 3 decision has burst a dam, unleashing a much wider tax debate.

The pressure is coming from two directions – from those whipping up scares of what the government might do and those who want the government to undertake a range of ambitious reforms.

It was a political rivalry so utterly self-destructive that one cabinet minister compared it to being "strapped to a suicide bomber".

"The Turnbull-Abbott tussle was very torrid, not just for the Liberal Party internally, but for the government more generally for years and years and years," says former Coalition minister Bridget McKenzie. "You knew something horrific and catastrophic was going to happen."

In interviews for the ABC political docuseries Nemesis, dozens of former Coalition ministers and MPs have spoken of the toxic rivalry between Liberal giants Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, and how their relentless internecine conflict crippled both men's governments and helped destroy each other's political careers.

Over months of filming and 60 on-camera interviews for the ABC's landmark political docuseries Nemesis, the free character assessments between former Coalition colleagues fly thick and fast. But as well as the blue language and invective, there are also moments of remorse and regret.

Watch the first episode of the ABC's political docuseries Nemesis on Monday at 8pm on ABC TV and iview.

Some choice quotes:

What [Barnaby Joyce] says next, referring to Turnbull, stuns me. Let's just say it's a four-letter word, connected to another four-letter word.

In one interview, Turnbull is called a "turd" by one of his former supporters.

For his part, the former prime minister recounts being told to "f*** off" by his predecessor Tony Abbott.

The last Coalition prime minister Scott Morrison is labelled "smug" and an "arrogant arsehole" during an interview with one of his former backbenchers.

ANU economist Ben Phillips ran the government's proposed stage 3 tweaks through his PolicyMod simulator to weigh up the winners and losers.

He finds about 6.2 million households will benefit from the Albanese government's changes, while just 1.1 million households will lose out compared to the tax laws passed under the Coalition.

The government's gamble is that nearly six-to-one winners to losers presents pretty good odds for the widespread financial benefits to outweigh the cost of a broken promise.

The government will halve the stage 3 tax cuts for the highest earners and use the money to deliver an $804 tax cut across the board.

The prime minister will tell press club the reversal was motivated by changing economic circumstances.