Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Thursday, 18 February 2016

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

SA nuclear findings distorted by ‘market’ brainwashing

Australia’s economic future is being sabotaged by free market assumptions that decision-makers impose on infrastructure planning. A stunning case in point is the tentative findings of South Australia’s royal commission into the nuclear industry, announced this week.

While the royal commission did concede that nuclear power is safe, which is a major leap forward, it concluded that Australia should be denied this safe, energy-dense power source, on the basis that nuclear power generation would be economically unviable here. Without going into all the detail, this finding was based on certain flawed assumptions:

That the cost of building a 1,125 MW nuclear power plant would be more than $9 billion; nuclear experts, however, put the actual cost of a plant of that capacity at less than half of that.
More glaring is the royal commission assumed a borrowing cost—cost of capital—of 10 per cent interest. This is not even a flawed assumption, it is fraud, born of the brainwashing that comes from the “free market” ideology, which insists all economic functions should be for financial profit and opposes government intervention in the economy. The truth is that the world today is stuck in record low interest rates, even negative rates in some places! To assume a 10 per cent interest cost is not a miscalculation, but a transparent attempt to stack the deck against nuclear power.

An Australian nuclear industry could easily be funded. The very best way would be for the Australian government to establish a national bank modelled on the original Commonwealth Bank, which could create credit at 1-2 per cent interest to finance this project; because nuclear power would be transformative and productive, the credit would be secure. However, that would require a political shift, to return to national banking; short of that, the government right now could borrow at its own bond rate of 2-4 per cent to fund this project. Alternatively, the government could make it a special investment project for everyday Australians, by announcing an infrastructure bond issue that pays 5 per cent, reserved for Australian retirees and super funds to invest in a transformational Australian project, and that the investment will be guaranteed. Just as the people of Egypt lined up to invest in the New Suez Canal, Australians would rush to invest in such a project.

To assume financial parameters that make infrastructure unnecessarily expensive, just so private investors can extract huge profits from a project, is fraud. This also applies to Infrastructure Australia’s latest Australian Infrastructure Plan, which the 17 February Australian Financial Review reported “calls for the creation of a national transport market, completion of national energy, water and telecoms markets, more user charges and a radical upheaval in the way governments plan and fund infrastructure” (emphasis added). The latter refers to user-pays charges for all roads, involving “GPS tracking and big data to charge vehicles according to actual usage”—essentially a private surveillance apparatus enforced by the state to extract corporate profits, which is the very essence of fascism (corporatism).

Australians must reject these assumptions and realise that with a national bank, and an intention to put to use the $2 trillion in Australian superannuation funds, for infrastructure investments that will increase the nation’s productivity—the only way to create prosperity and to properly fund retirements—there is plenty of money.

Click here for a free copy of the CEC’s vision for Australia’s future economic development, The Infrastructure Road to Recovery, which includes a detailed proposal for an Australian nuclear power industry.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

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