VOTERS SPLIT ON NUCLEAR POWER
The Sydney Morning Herald leads today’s paper with a poll on generating nuclear power in Australia, showing voters are split: 41% back the idea while 37% are against it.
“Many people are willing to consider nuclear power even if they are not sure about it yet, highlighting the large numbers of voters who could be convinced to back either side. But renewable projects have far stronger support: 73% are in favour, amid warnings that investment in wind and solar may weaken after [Peter] Dutton promised to set up seven nuclear plants if he wins the next election,” the story says.
Coalition voters are more likely to be in favour than Labor or Greens voters.
Meanwhile, The Australian warns of a “deepening energy crisis on two fronts”, after the Australian Energy Market Operator “cautioned the industry that the largest suppliers of gas storage on the east coast … could run out of gas before the end of winter” and a consultancy group said the yield from major wind farms “was easily the worst in the past five years”.
Clearly the stage has been set for a major debate on energy, with Labor expected to mount counter-arguments to Dutton’s proposal as Parliament returns today. Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating has already weighed in: he issued a statement at the weekend accusing Dutton of “seeking to camouflage his long held denialism in an industrial fantasy” and resorting “to the most dangerous and expensive energy source on the face of the earth — nuclear power”, according to The Conversation.
Speaking of climate denialism: Guardian Australia reported on Sunday that just 60% of Australians accept that “climate disruption” is caused by humans and that it would be costlier to face its impact than to tackle it. That’s among the lowest rates in any of the 26 countries surveyed.
IS MORRISON ALBANESE’S TRUMP WHISPERER?
Could Scott Morrison become a crucial link between Anthony Albanese’s government and Donald Trump in the event the Republican wins a second presidential race? That’s what a story in The Saturday Paper suggests. “With Australia’s current ambassador to Washington, Kevin Rudd, spearheading Canberra’s meticulous planning for a possible second Trump administration, Morrison has emerged as a useful line of communication to the notoriously mercurial former president and his inner circle,” the story says.
Rudd recently launched Morrison’s book Plans For Your Good at the Australian embassy in Washington, drawing several former high-profile officials from Donald Trump’s time in the White House. According to an unnamed Australian insider in Washington, Morrison could become somewhat of an informal envoy, helping Albanese and Rudd “build relationships with the people who will count in a second Trump administration”.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
The past weekend included the longest day of the year, or the shortest one, depending on where you live. In Europe, where most countries have some form of midsummer celebration (often ones that predate the arrival of Christianity), people danced around maypoles, lit fires, gathered at ancient rock monuments, feasted, and drank.
In the southern hemisphere, winter solstice was celebrated instead. In Hobart, about 3,000 nude swimmers plunged into the River Derwent to mark the coming lengthening of the days, the BBC reported. Elsewhere in Australia, some may have been fortunate enough to observe a special edition of the strawberry moon — the pinkish hue that tends to appear when the moon is full in the month of June. According to Radio New Zealand, midwinter and the strawberry moon only coincide every two decades.
Say What?
It appears that Illinois officials are struggling with the concept of having an Indian reservation in the state.
July 2000 US Interior Department memo
A Native American tribe may soon get compensated over land stolen by the US government about 175 years ago. Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation chief Shab-eh-nay signed a treaty with the federal government in 1829 to preserve a reservation for him in northern Illinois. But about two decades later, the land was sold to white settlers while the chief visited family in Kansas. Current-day lawmakers in Illinois who are planning to transfer a state park to the tribe as compensation have no reason to dispute the land was illegally sold and still belongs to the Potawatomi — part of the evidence is a July 2000 memo from the Interior Department that found the claim valid and refuted arguments to the contrary, the Associated Press reports.
CRIKEY RECAP
“Seven chief executive Jeff Howard has admitted the company lost the trust of audiences over the handling of its Spotlight interview with former Liberal staffer Bruce Lehrmann. Howard, alongside Nine CEO Mike Sneesby and News Corp Australia executive chair Michael Miller, fronted a joint select committee hearing on social media and Australian society on Friday morning, primarily to discuss the ills of social media and the news media bargaining code.
Most recently, Miller argued at the National Press Club for the introduction of a ‘social licence’ for tech companies that publish in Australia, saying companies should be ‘liable for all content that is amplified, curated and controlled by their algorithms or recommender engines’. Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who was present at Miller’s NPC address, said on Friday she wanted to address ‘the hypocrisy of some of the things that have been said this morning … Seven West hasn’t had the most glorious of years … the hypocrisy is what I think the community would be raising right now. Trust in news and trust in public interest journalism must be paramount.’”
“As we’re witnessing right now with the impact on investors caused by the Coalition’s promise to ‘cap’ renewable energy projects, the energy industry is, more than most commercial sectors, strongly exposed to changes in government sentiment. That’s because energy markets are always heavily regulated, from location, construction and safety through to pricing, and because the capital needed is usually large and the assets long-lived. That’s less the case with wind and solar, which require much less capital to establish and don’t rely on sourcing, digging up, transporting and storing fuel, but it definitely applies to coal, gas and nuclear power.
Energy investors are thus highly sensitive to even potential changes in energy regulation — which is how Peter Dutton is able to sabotage renewables investment even from opposition. And power generated by nuclear power is even more sensitive than other forms of energy, because it is regulated even more tightly, and the money required to build it is so much greater.”
“The Coalition has unveiled the policy on nuclear power generation that it plans to take to the next federal election. But as Capital Brief and others have pointed out, Peter Dutton’s plan raises more questions than it answers. Below are some of the crucial question marks the Coalition will need to straighten out in order to convince its critics.
How much will it cost? This is perhaps the most crucial question. The CSIRO has estimated that seven 1,000MW reactors would cost $8.6 billion each, for a total of $60.2 billion. But the first rector built would be much more expensive, and as Crikey’s Bernard Keane has pointed out, ‘that does not include a cost blowout of 20-30% of a kind that has characterised nearly all major infrastructure projects in Australia over the past two decades’.
Dutton has said the reactors would be publicly owned, meaning taxpayers would foot the bill.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Netanyahu defends decision to go public with complaint about US weapons supplies (CNN)
Death toll at Hajj pilgrimage rises to 1,300 amid scorching temperatures (Associated Press)
Top comedian sworn in as Malawi’s vice-president (BBC)
Synagogue, church attacks in Russia’s Dagestan kill police (Al Jazeera)
Israel’s Iron Dome risks being overwhelmed in all-out war with Hezbollah, says US (The Guardian)
Ukrainian Atacms blows up over Crimean beach forcing sunbathers to flee as Russia claims five killed (The Telegraph) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
I’ve seen all the ‘landslide’ polls — but they can’t tell us what’s really going on in this election — John Harris (The Guardian): “A small but very noisy section of the British news media seems to have come close to losing its collective sanity. The election campaign is maybe not quite what the people concerned would have wanted: the Tories are locked into an ever-deepening crisis, now crystallised by a gambling scandal, Labour is capably holding itself together, and the limited fireworks let off by Reform UK do not threaten the election’s seemingly inevitable result. So, for want of any other excitement, they have turned to another source of fun: opinion polls.
Has there ever been a campaign so dominated by them? For seven or eight years now, the most powerful polling companies have been developing so-called — and yes, I had to look this up — multilevel regression with poststratification (or MRP) surveys, which contact tens of thousands of voters, calculate results based on a range of granular demographic details, and result in findings that can be sifted constituency by constituency. The fact that YouGov used this method to unexpectedly predict 2017’s hung parliament has given it an air of quasi-scientific magic; now, the publication of one such poll after another is greeted in some quarters with a huge level of expectation.”
Young people are taking on more debt. We should all be worried — Victoria Devine (SMH) ($): “This week, Australians were handed a stark reality check on what the true price of the ongoing cost of living crisis could be for younger generations, even well after it passes. According to analysis from credit bureau Illion released this week, the risk of defaulting on loans has decreased for Australians aged over 30, but for those aged under 30, and in particular those aged under 25, the risk of default has actually increased.
While the risk of default grew across all age groups in 2023 following ongoing changes to interest rates, in the first quarter of 2024, the risk dropped for Australians aged 41-50, and was unchanged for over 50s. But for those aged 26-30, the risk grew by 2%, and for Australians aged 25 and under, it grew by 2.5%, marking a clear generational divide between those who are slowly getting back on track and those who face a growing risk of falling behind.”
