Quarterly Essay 28 Exit Right: The Unravelling of John Howard by Judith Brett

Author:Judith Brett [Brett, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Leadership, Political Ideologies, Political Parties, Political Science, World, Political Process, Australian & Oceanian, Writing, Conservatism & Liberalism, Politics
ISBN: 9781921825279
Google: dd39AAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18294490
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2007-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

REACTION

TIME

Correspondence

Guy Pearse

I was at the National Press Club in 2005 when Ian Lowe gave his prescient warning about the dangers of Australia proceeding further down the nuclear path, and I recall his speech going against the grain for many people there. It wasn’t that they disagreed with what Lowe was saying – they just thought he was jumping at shadows. Nuclear power was not high on the political agenda, let alone the greenhouse policy agenda, in Australia at the time. Only a year before, the Howard government had made clear in its Energy White Paper that nuclear power was not happening in Australia: “Use of uranium reserves raises cost, safety and disposal issues in power generation … Australia is not contemplating the domestic use of nuclear power.” Senior ministers, including Ian Macfarlane and Nick Minchin, dismissed nuclear power as something that would never be viable – not even for a hundred years. But Ian Lowe saw something else coming – the inevitability that climate change would be taken seriously in Australia, and the political irresistibility of nuclear power once that occurred.

When Howard had his nuclear conversion, most observers failed to take it seriously. Many in the business community, the environmental movement, political and bureaucratic circles were dismissive when John Howard appeared to back-flip on nuclear power in 2006 after a trip to Washington. For them, Howard’s agenda was simply wedging Labor on uranium mining and facilitating an expansion of that industry. There were no serious plans to support uranium enrichment, to make Australia the world’s radioactive waste dump, and no one really thought nuclear power would ever be viable in Australia. As for a sceptic prime minister who had twice blocked emissions trading suddenly embracing a carbon price high enough to make nuclear power competitive in the low-emissions energy market? The prospect seemed remote to almost everyone. It would cut across the government’s whole approach to climate change and its heavy focus on “clean coal.” Or so most people thought.

However, most observers missed a few things. They failed to appreciate the powerful influence of the various Howard–Bush tête-à-têtes on climate change and energy policy and the consistency of a pro-nuclear stance with the approach locked in at these meetings. They failed to appreciate the tenacious ideological support for the nuclear industry among neo-liberals within the Liberal Party. And they failed to notice the confluence of interests between many in the fossil-fuel and uranium industries. Nor did they distinguish between the short and long term. Had more people been more mindful of these factors, they would have seen Howard’s nuclear conversion coming and taken it far more seriously.

John Howard has had a symbiotic relationship with the Bush administration in general, and his climate-change response largely mirrored that of his US counterpart. As I describe in my book High and Dry, the first meeting between the two men on the eve of the September 11 terrorist attacks in Washington and New York was a decisive moment. Not only did going through something

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