Hanson told the ABC Victoria should look at nuclear

In a rare interview with the ABC, published Sunday around One Nation’s Saturday night event in Marnoo, Pauline Hanson said Victoria should put in new coal-fired power stations and also look at nuclear.

“We used to have coal-fired power stations that delivered the power to this nation,” she said. “Put in new coal-fired power stations, you can build those, but also look at nuclear as well.” She declined to say how One Nation would fund them. She said renewables were failing to deliver affordable power.

Monday is still the formal energy launch at Yallourn. Marnoo was the preview. This slug is the interview: a federal leader, on the ABC, putting coal and nuclear in the same breath for Victoria.

Marnoo is a Wimmera town that does not usually make a national slug. On Saturday night it did. Farmers Fightback, a farmer-led group that has been campaigning against the VNI West transmission project and against large-scale renewable kit on agricultural land, packed the recreation reserve. The ABC counted a crowd of about 1,000. Hanson was the headline. Barnaby Joyce was on the bill. Victorian One Nation leader Warren Pickering was the local voice. Farmers Fightback chair Ben Duxson co-hosted. The Weekly Advertiser had flagged the 29 August date as far back as 12 August. The event was always going to be about poles and wires. It became about the mix.

Pickering told the crowd that a One Nation government would strip VicGrid of compulsory acquisition powers for the transmission line meant to bring wind into the grid. “But more importantly than that, we’ll abolish the renewable energy zone that we are on here tonight,” he said. On coal and gas he went further. Expanded projects, he said, would be funded by private investment. He would not put a figure on the cost. “Back to the energy resources that made us the most abundant state in the country in the first place,” he said. Then the line that will travel: “Any government in this country that doesn’t support mining in some way, shape or form will preside over the death of this nation.” He declined to say how the party would unwind existing contracts on VNI West and the renewable energy zones. More detail, he said, would come at Yallourn on Monday.

Hanson’s ABC answers are the federal sentence. Victoria should put in new coal-fired stations. Victoria should look at nuclear. Funding: declined. Renewables, in her telling, are not delivering affordable power. Those are her words on the national broadcaster, dated to Sunday’s piece by Tamara Clark. She has said versions of this before. On 17 June at the National Press Club she put a reactor on the east coast and coal stations in South Australia and Queensland. The Victorian version is new only in the postcode. The state that closed Hazelwood in 2017, that has Yallourn scheduled for the middle of 2028, that still runs Loy Yang, is being told by a federal leader on the ABC that the next plant can be coal and that nuclear is no longer a dare.

Yallourn is the right backdrop for Monday and not only because it photographs. The station sits in the Latrobe Valley, the old heart of Victorian brown coal, and its scheduled exit is a reliability problem with a date on it. AEMO’s 2026 Electricity Statement of Opportunities puts Victorian reliability gaps from 2030-31 on the conservative Committed and Anticipated Developments assessment, the same year as New South Wales. If you take anticipated projects out, the operator’s own language around 2029-30 gets colder. Origin’s Eraring run-on to 30 April 2029 is the New South Wales holding pattern. Victoria’s holding pattern is thinner. A party that wants new coal in this state, or a nuclear conversation that becomes a site, will have to do it against that clock, not against a slogan.

Nuclear remains a long lead. Anyone selling a reactor as a retail product for the 28 November Victorian election is selling a poster. The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Act 1998 and the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 still sit on the Commonwealth books. Repealing them is a Canberra job. Siting a machine is a state job and a local one. ANSTO’s OPAL reactor at Lucas Heights already exists; it is a research and isotope plant, not a generator. Hanson’s Press Club version in June was a 1,400-megawatt-class pressurised-water unit on the east coast, private capital not ruled out, no cheque promised. “If we can get private investment in it, we will look at that, but I’m not making that decision now. This is all on the table,” she said then. Sunday’s ABC interview did not add a site, a cost, or a year. It added Victoria to the list of places where the word can be said.

The room in Marnoo was not a nuclear seminar. It was a transmission fight. Simon Schinkel, who owns an agricultural equipment business, told the ABC: “Don’t wreck the farms. There’s a lot of big buildings in the city; they could put solar panels on them and get their own power.” Buloke Shire mayor Graeme Milne said One Nation was “saying the right things” on VNI West, and noted that the Coalition had also promised to cancel the line. “Once you get the farmers or the mainstream people in the bush offside, you’ve got to do a lot to get them back,” he said. Cathy Ross, a farmer, said she remained undecided, and rejected the idea that mining and farming could sit easily on the same ground. “How can they coexist together when one destroys the land and the other one’s trying to put either animal husbandry or cropping there? It doesn’t work.” Pickering said proposed mineral-sands mines in western Victoria would be looked at one by one. “If it’s an impediment on food and fibre production, productive food and fibre land, then we’re not for it.”

The candidate list came with the rally. Donna Buxton, a speech pathologist and former primary-school teacher, will run in Ripon. Stuart Robinson in Wendouree, Paul Ballinger in Eureka, Vaughn Williams in Western Victoria. Joyce and Hanson were due in Gippsland on Monday for the Yallourn launch. They arrived in the state on the back of Saturday’s Secret Harbour by-election in Western Australia, where Luke Herdegen took the seat for One Nation on 39.08 percent of the primary and 57.04 percent of the two-candidate count. A Victorian tour that started as a transmission argument now sits next to a Labor seat on the Indian Ocean changing hands. The ABC’s own write-up said the pair were “buoyed” by that result. The energy sentences do not depend on it. They are easier to say in a week when a booth has already moved.

What happens next is dated. Monday is Yallourn. Pickering promised more on how coal and gas come back, and more on what happens to the contracts already attached to VNI West. Hanson has now said, on tape, that Victoria should look at nuclear. She has not said who pays, which valley, which year. The November election will test whether a state that has spent a decade treating coal as a closing credit is willing to hear a reopening, and whether nuclear is a conversation or a poster. Construction will not arrive before the writs. The spoken sentence already has.

The interview stays on the page. The reactor does not. A federal leader, on the ABC, putting coal and nuclear in the same breath for Victoria, dated to Sunday, with her words on the tape. Marnoo was the preview. Yallourn is the next slug. First concrete, when there is some.