Peter Dutton’s nuclear policy announcement and the Albanese government’s response to it are dominating the news, but no one has asked the obvious questions.

If, as seems to be clear, no comprehensive costings were ever prepared for the government’s renewables-only plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, why weren’t these undertaken in the policy development process? And if, judging by their hysterical reaction to the idea of nuclear energy, ministers appear completely uninformed about this alternative to wind and solar, what advice have they been getting from their public servants on this issue?

Some might think that deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy and protected from public view by our pathetically weak freedom of information laws, there are official briefings alerting ministers to the costs and risks of betting the house on intermittent, weather-dependent energy? Depressingly, the answer is almost certainly no.

It is not only public policy 101, but a basic requirement for rational action, that we accept there will always be different ways to achieve a given objective. The job of the public service is to identify all possible alternatives; assess the costs, benefits, risks and implementation challenges of each one; and recommend a preferred option. The government, of course, is not bound to accept this advice, but if it is comprehensive, well-grounded and responsible, ministers will be able to take an informed decision. They will not be flying blind.

In the area of climate change, these elements of policy-advising best practice are routinely ignored – and have been since the mid-2000s.

Here, the Canberra orthodoxy insists that ends (net zero) and means (a renewable-only policy) must be fused together. If we want to achieve net zero, we have no legitimate choice but to put all our chips on wind and solar. A high school student would spot the fallacy in this reasoning, but in our departments of state, including Treasury, it goes completely unchallenged.

In my time at Treasury, I had an instinctive distrust of anyone – regardless of how eminent, expert or morally pure they may have been – who claimed there was only one way to tackle a particular policy challenge.

The only people who dared argue this were ideologues and corporate carpetbaggers. This special pleading never cut the mustard in the public service, at least in the past. Now, tragically, it has been internalised by those who lead the public service.

We saw how ideology compromised policy thinking in the early Covid-19 years. Then, a locked-step alliance of health experts, senior bureaucrats and politicians asserted that there was no alternative to Beijing-style lockdowns (despite Australia’s pre-Covid pandemic plan recommending against them).

To justify this stance, they denied the considerable economic, social and community costs these would entail. And they stoked community fears about lighter-touch responses, which they claimed would result in the collapse of our hospital system. The dishonesty and manipulation were successful for a time, but the public ultimately saw through them.

How can those in the Canberra bubble be so disconnected from reality? The US experience during the Vietnam war may be instructive.

By the late 1960s, it was clear to many Americans that it was an unwinnable quagmire. Yet from President Johnson down, administration officials claimed the US was making solid progress. As Hannah Arendt pointed out after reading the Pentagon Papers (a secret 47-volume history of the war leaked to the New York Times), what was most surprising was not the public lying the papers revealed, but the degree of genuine ‘self-deception’ within Washington, D.C. about the progress of the war.

Two sets of actors were behind this, according to Arendt. Arrogant politicians and their political advisers who believed public opinion was infinitely malleable, but who ultimately – and alone – became captured by the parallel reality they constructed. And the legion of ambitious functionaries and technocrats who worked for them, feeding them tricked-up analysis designed only to confirm, and never challenge, the prevailing ideological view. Sound familiar?

As power prices rise and reliability falls, and as community opposition to the roll-out of transmission lines and wind and solar developments grows, the renewables transition is looming as our own national quagmire. A campaign too costly and unpopular to stay the course with, but one which the government and the renewable lobby cannot – having come this far, credibly or without suffering fatal losses – reverse course on.

I suspect this, more than anything else, explains their hysterical, fact-free and increasingly desperate response to the idea that we join the majority of the G20 and include nuclear power in our mix.

When ideology blinds governments and their officials to the facts, we get what historian Barbara Tuchman called folly (in The March of Folly, 1984), a particular species of misgovernment which involves the determined pursuit of a policy ‘contrary to the self-interest’ of the country concerned.

Tuchman identifies George III’s policy toward the American colonies, Hitler’s invasion of Russia and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution as among history’s greatest follies. I worry future generations will consider our dogged adherence to a renewables-only policy as just as self-defeating.

If Peter Dutton’s nuclear gamble achieves nothing else, it has made possible a debate we desperately need to have. He has proposed a policy alternative that, notwithstanding its costs, risks and complications – which I do not diminish for a moment – merits serious consideration.

It would have been better if this had happened a decade ago, before we started to dismantle our low-cost, efficient coal and gas-based electricity system. And it would have been better still if, at that time, a non-ideological, competent public service had assessed and costed all the options, including nuclear.

Time is definitely running out, as the near-crisis conditions in our electricity grid this winter make clear, but it is not too late.