Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance and Administration) Share this | Hansard source

Most of the things I say are eminently full of common sense. And it is certainly true that Australia should only adopt nuclear power as and when that becomes commercially viable. I think it is always risky and dangerous for a country like Australia, which has built its economic wealth and prosperity on low-cost energy, to become one of the most internationally competitive and successful economies in the world. It is a fundamental of Australia’s economic structure that much of our capacity and standard of living is built on our abundance of low-cost electricity, because of our fossil fuel endowment in coal and gas. The fact is that nuclear power costs anything up to two or three times the power that is produced by coal or gas. And Australia has benefited from the relatively cheap electricity we have been able to generate from coal or gas. So unless there is some intervention which results in the artificial, by virtue of the government intervention, rise in the cost of power produced by coal or gas—