The third speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the dynamics of division and delay in Australian climate and energy discussions. Australia has had a long history of ‘climate wars’ over the appropriate climate policy; during the last election, the conservative opposition pushed for a nuclear energy initiative in part as a means to delay the transition towards renewable energies, for example.
Australians’ understanding of climate change and of the current energy mix is generally limited, and there is considerable opposition especially on the conservative side to net zero policies, fanned also by right-wing and far-right media outlets like Sky News Australia. These outlets also frequently platform dubious think-tanks that push climate disinformation, as well as fake grassroots groups that oppose renewable energy and promote nuclear power.
Carly’s project focusses on policy submissions to a parliamentary inquiry on nuclear power, as well as news reporting about climate policy, and engages in an LLM-assisted analysis of actors, actor types, and stances towards various energy options. In the case of the submissions the actors are the submitters, in the case of news content the actors are the societal actors named in news reporting. Once processed, these actors and their stances are then mapped as discourse coalitions favouring specific policy settings.
The network analysis of stances in submissions shows clear polarisation between pro-climate, pro-renewables, and anti-nuclear groups on one side, and pro-nuclear, anti-renewables, and pro-fossil groups on the other; anti-nuclear submissions came especially from community groups and advocacy, while pro-nuclear submissions came from fake community groups, right-wing think-tanks, some actors representing themselves as scientists, and fossil industry actors.
The network of actors within news reports is somewhat similar, but pro-climate and pro-nuclear actors are considerably closer to each other; the overall network maps largely onto the political spectrum from the conservative Coalition and the centrist Labor Party. Business groups are especially prominent on the pro-nuclear, anti-renewables side, and right-wing think-tanks are especially prominent on the conservative side.
This might point to some degree of destructive polarisation as well, which is also asymmetrically distributed across the various sides of the debate; obstructive actors are clearly aligned with pro-nuclear, pro-fossil, and anti-renewables stances, and there is a need to further indicate how such obstructive actors affect public debate and delay Australia’s urgently needed transition towards renewable energies.
