Bowen's brazen act
chris bowen’s weaponisation of the department for which he is responsible points to an energy minister under pressure as public support for lifting the ban on nuclear energy increases. by james mathias.
Chris Bowen’s brazen attempt to weaponise the department of Climate Change and Energy against the growing push for nuclear energy in Australia shows signs he is under serious pressure as the public backlash against his energy policy grows.
The impartiality of the public service is sacrosanct to the function of Australian democracy and the function of Government. However, in what are publicly unreleased figures, Bowen claims that his Department has reportedly attempted to cost Peter Dutton’s plans to consider the development of next generation nuclear technology.
Using the public service to cost the policies of an opposition may also be at odds with the Ministerial Code of Conduct, issued by the Prime Minister upon forming Government in May last year.
Section 2.6 of this code of conduct requires that Ministers in the Albanese Government ‘ensure that public servants are deployed only for appropriate public purposes’. Bowen’s act of diverting the work of public servants to serve what would seem to be a political purpose shows he is not living up to the spirit of this standard.
The heads of Mr Bowen’s department are respected officials who have served both sides of politics admirably. When this latest request came from Minister Bowen, they would have had good reason to ask: why are we being tasked with costing a proposal which your government has ruled out repeatedly and which is prevented by a legislated ban on nuclear power generation?
It’s not the first time Bowen has misused the public service in this fashion. In 2013, during his brief stint as Treasurer under Kevin Rudd, Bowen received an unprecedented rebuke from the heads of Treasury, Finance and the Parliamentary Budget office for seeking to distort public service analysis - which he branded as costings of opposition policies.
Bowen has overstepped the mark again and the most telling part of this release is the timing: the night before his appearance on last Monday’s episode of Q&A.
The Minister must have been spooked by the results of a Q&A poll taken months earlier in June where 50.4 per cent of respondents said they supported a nuclear energy industry in Australia.
Any curious person interested in seeing the details of these costings including how the Department arrived at its headline cost is set to be disappointed. This alleged ‘nuclear costing’ cannot be found anywhere on the Department of Climate and Energy’s website nor in a press release by the Minister. Rather the figures quoted have simply been dropped to the media on a just-trust-us basis.
What we do know from media reports is that the costing is based on the figures in the CSIRO’s GenCost 2022-23 report where they seek to calculate the dollars per kilowatt hour across all sources of current and potential energy production through to 2050. Others have expressed in greater detail their concerns with these figures, however there are two brief shortcomings of relying on this report to forecast the cost of small modular reactors (SMRs) in Australia.
The first is that the report assumes the longest possible lifespan of wind and solar energy farms at 25 and 30 years respectively, whilst it assumes the shortest lifespan for an operational SMR at 30 years. This is half the predicted lifespan that they are reported to reach.
The second, in short, is that the GenCost report relies on figures from 2018 and are yet to be updated.
Additionally, it’s worth noting that on 12 April this year, Bowen’s department took out a consultancy contract with PwC for management and advisory services to provide advice on a ‘Net Zero Emissions Strategy’.
This 218-day consultancy will cost the taxpayer $342,540 or the equivalent of over $1,570 per day. It suggests there must have been a capability gap in the more than 4,000 staff in his department by bringing in PwC.
Labor relied heavily on private consultants Reputex prior to the election to predict their energy policies would reduce everybody’s power prices by $275. Now it seems, its PwC’s job post-election to help them achieve an equally difficult forecast of achieving its 82 per cent renewable energy target by 2030.
Alas for Bowen though, his dog-eared bundle of projections from the department has managed to sway nobody – the poll results of over 11,000 Q&A viewers at the end of last Monday’s episode showed 59 per cent of people supported Australia dropping its ban on nuclear energy.
James Mathias is Chief of Staff at the Menzies Research Centre.