Labor Finds Its Voice on Nuclear

It’s remarkable, isn’t it? The Australian Labor Party has rediscovered its moral fervour over nuclear power.

When the Liberal Party dared to suggest a nuclear energy plan to future-proof Australia’s grid, Labor sprang into action. Suddenly, every backbencher was a nuclear physicist. We were told it was “reckless,” “dangerous,” “divisive.” Press conferences were held, warnings were issued, and the phrase “think of the children” was just a breath away.

But when missiles flew across the Middle East when Iran armed its proxies and Israel defended its cities with the very real prospect of regional war Labor’s voice mysteriously vanished. A geopolitical fault line cracked open, and the Albanese government offered not leadership, not clarity, but tepid, evasive press releases designed to offend no one and accomplish even less.

We are governed, it seems, by a party that finds nuclear reactors intolerable, but nuclear-armed theocracies… negotiable.

Let us examine the moral hierarchy implied: a reactor built to supply power in Wagga is more troubling to this government than the IRGC’s reach from Gaza to Galilee. Domestic energy policy provokes high drama, ballistic threats against a democratic ally evoke bureaucratic murmurs.

Labor’s response to the Liberal nuclear proposal was incandescent. Chris Bowen, with the confidence of a man who’d read the executive summary of a Greenpeace report, assured us the technology was too costly, too slow, and too untrustworthy. Curiously, no such language was applied to the Iranian regime an entity far more committed to enriching uranium for ends rather more apocalyptic than powering an air conditioner.

And yet, not a word of condemnation with comparable force. Not a rally, not a slogan, not a talking point. Just the familiar choreography of hesitation: “We urge restraint,” “We call for de-escalation,” “We are monitoring the situation.” All delivered with the flat affect of a man reading a bus timetable.

It begs a simple question: why does Labor fight harder to stop a reactor in Queensland than to stop rockets in Tel Aviv?

The answer is not incompetence. It is moral cowardice. Labor fears domestic backlash far more than it fears international catastrophe. It will oppose the Opposition with vigour, but will never oppose tyranny with clarity, because tyranny doesn’t vote in marginal seats.

The Iranian regime, through its proxies, launched a war of aggression. Israel responded swiftly and effectively. And what did Australia do? Nothing. Or worse: we equivocated. We issued statements that sounded like they’d been generated by a committee of interns armed with a thesaurus and a hangover.

So let’s be blunt. If Labor showed half the spine on foreign policy that it shows on attacking domestic energy proposals, perhaps we might still be viewed as a serious nation. Instead, we are governed by people who find nuclear power outrageous and nuclear blackmail inconvenient.

They’ll go to war with Peter Dutton over kilowatts. But when the rockets come, they retreat into silence.

It’s not that they can’t speak. It’s that they choose not to.