The opposition’s foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham has also weighed in on the nuclear power debate, saying there needs to be tough discussions within the Coalition about renewables.

“Politically, I’ve acknowledged that we had problems and that indeed led to our political demise. In policy terms, if you have a look at Australia’s emissions and how they trimmed down over that time, we did oversee a period of significant investment in clean energy,” he said on ABC Radio Melbourne this morning.

He said there was much more that needed to be done to achieve net-zero emissions, and there were “tough discussions” and decisions on how to track the path to net zero happening in the Coalition.

“Including previously unspoken topics in Australia, like questions around nuclear energy,” he said.

Host Raf Epstein asked if that was the problem, that the Coalition was “obsessed” with the most expensive option that would also take the longest to build.

“Absolutely not,” Birmingham said in response.

He said the Coalition wanted to achieve reliability in the grid, the lowest possible energy generation cost and ensuring net zero.

Birmingham said Australia was one of the few G20 countries without nuclear, or not looking at nuclear as being in the mix for energy.

“We will detail the policy we will take to the next election … why is it in the global environment we have, with so many countries pursuing nuclear, with Australia’s capabilities with that space with the reserves of uranium … that we have a prohibition on this technology,” he said.