With the polls looking especially unfavourable for Scott Morrison and the Coalition at the moment, ADVANCE thought it’d be worth listening to the Liberal Party’s most successful Prime Minister in decades: Tony Abbott.

As reported over the weekend, Mr Abbott says the Prime Minister should go to the election promising nuclear power as a major point of difference to Labor.

The former PM said the fact that the Morrison government planned to build nuclear-powered submarines “does, in logic, open the door over time to Australia developing a civil nuclear industry… It doesn't seem right to say yes to nuclear power at sea but not on land.”

He said there were not many points of policy difference between the Coalition and Labor, and “there is going to have to be something that the two parties are arguing about at the next election”.

“If we were to say: over time we are going to move to a civil nuclear industry in Australia, that would be a way of sharpening the difference between the Liberal-National Coalition and the Labor opposition, and that might not be a bad thing.”

ADVANCE and our 152,000+ supporters wholeheartedly agree, Tony, and here’s why:

• Of the world’s top 20 economies, 17 have nuclear power, with Australia, Italy and Saudi Arabia being the exceptions. In fact, Australia is now the only G20 country without nuclear power.
• A mid-2020 poll conducted by market research platform Glow found more Australians support the use of nuclear power than oppose the idea, with almost 40 per cent in favour and 31 per cent against.
• According to the Minerals Council, Australia exported 290TWh of “zero-emissions electricity generated by Australia’s uranium exports”, enough to generate “109 per cent” of our domestic electricity.
• The only thing the government would need to change to legalise nuclear power is to remove four words – ‘a nuclear power plant’ – from Section 140A(1)(b) from the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Commonwealth).
• The government has already cleared the way for a remote Australian site to store nuclear waste because the reactor in Lucas Heights (less than 30km away from Sydney’s CBD) is running out of capacity.
• Nuclear power is more sustainable than solar and wind because reactors last for 80 years while solar panels and wind turbines need to be replaced every 10 to 15 years.
• Over the past 50 years, the use of nuclear power has reduced CO2 emissions by more than 60 gigatonnes – nearly two years’ worth of global energy-related emissions.
• Nuclear has the highest capacity factor out of any energy generation technology – meaning one would need three to four renewable plants (each of 1 GW size) to send the same amount of electricity onto the grid.
• Nuclear requires less maintenance relative to gas and coal plants and are designed to operate for longer stretches before refuelling (typically every 1.5-2 years).
• A typical 1000-megawatt nuclear power station could supply the needs of more than a million people while producing only three cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste per year; while a 1000-megawatt coal-fired power station produces approximately 300,000 tonnes of ash and more than 6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, every year.

As Mr Abbott argues, there’s currently no difference between Labor and Liberal when it comes to energy.

Both refuse to build more coal-fired power plants. Both refuse to legalise nuclear power. Both are backing pie-in-the-sky green pipedreams like “green hydrogen” and a majority solar/wind-based grid. And both are frolicking around at Glasgow hobnobbing with globalist elites like Prince Charles who’s just called for a “vast military-style campaign” to marshal a “fundamental economic transition.”

If the Liberals don’t get on with the job of legalising nuclear soon, they’re guaranteed to lose the next election and put a Shorten-Bandt Labor-Greens government in power for the next four years.

Millions of Australians will never forget and never forgive…