‘We need to at least have a conversation about nuclear power’ is classic political strategy. The LNP doesn’t…

‘We need to at least have a conversation about nuclear power’ is classic political strategy. The LNP doesn’t want nuclear power, it’s electoral suicide. But they want to sow seeds of doubt in peoples’ mind, and leverage that doubt for votes. That’s what they’re up to. /1 #auspol

It’s what they did for the referendum too, planted seeds of doubt. That’s all you have to do to win, in populist politics. Just make people uncertain, a feeling they hate, and then offer them the fake comfort of a ‘solution’ that apparently eases that feeling. /2

People always act socially. The facts of nuclear power make it easily the most ridiculous option to even consider for Australian electricity. But that’s irrelevant to a party that hasn’t written public policy in 30 years. It doesn’t even believe in the public as a thing. /3

When it wins it opens the doors of Treasury to its donors and chums, and when it loses it wrecks, to expedite access to the Treasury again. In opposition it does no reflection or new policy work, it just destabilises, hoping for quick and easy populist surges in votes. /4

All public policy replaced with quick, cheap and easy slogans. Nuclear power, like the referendum, is being seen by Dutton only as a way to get quick traction into the public mind. Miles behind in the polls after the last election, the LNP is looking for a quick way back. /5

‘Stop the Boats’ is back too, they’ll throw everything at it. Like the desperate Tories in the UK right now. And they can get away with this because under populism all that matters is who wins the votes. It doesn’t matter how they do it, if they get the votes, they win. /6

I saw somebody drunk on the slogans say yesterday that small modular reactors were worth thinking about, because we could have reactors ‘the size of a microwave oven’. How would that ever be a GOOD thing? One plus of nuclear currently being enormous plants is security. /7

You can at least put measures in place to control the operation. Imagine a world where every sociopathic loon could have a reactor in their own backyard. That’s progress how? But not to digress on the facts, because ‘having a conversation’ is how the LNP wins. /8

Everybody reporting on this has a responsibility to ask the hard questions now. To ask if these reactors even exist? To ask where they’ll go and where the waste will go? To ask what the costs will be, relative to using renewables instead? Not allow a fake ‘conversation’. /end