A pro-nuclear group is behind a campaign professing to fight rising power prices, fronted by a former Liberal staffer and with a website registered to the National Party’s think tank, the Page Research Centre.
🕵️ Who's actually running it? Affordable Energy Australia (AEA) is the latest project from the Liberal and National-Party aligned environment group Coalition for Conservation. The campaign is fronted by the head of anti-offshore wind group Responsible Future Illawarra (RFI), Alex O’Brien, and Zoe Hilton, a former senior advisor in the previous NSW Liberal Government.
A Senate inquiry into climate and energy misinformation used O'Brien's RFI as a case study, detailing AI-generated imagery linked to the group and astroturfing allegations, alongside O'Brien's own claims of genuine community opposition.
Former NSW Treasurer Matt Kean, now chair of the federal Climate Change Authority (the agency responsible for providing advice on climate change policy), quit the Coalition for Conservation in 2024 over its shift toward nuclear advocacy.
When asked about the AEA campaign, the Climate Change Authority declined to address it specifically.
Instead, a spokesperson said “inauthentic accounts [are being used] to spread misleading and false climate narratives" which are "increasingly focused on creating uncertainty about issues like cost of living, energy prices and impacts of the energy transition."
This was highlighted extensively in the Senate Inquiry into climate change and energy misinformation.
🔍 The website trail: As of July 2026, a domain lookup shows the Affordable Energy Australia domain is registered to the Page Research Centre, the National Party's think tank.
However, the campaign's website explicitly states, “Affordable Energy Australia is not a think tank or a passive research group.”
🤷 Not us: Gerard Holland, the former CEO of the Page Research Centre, denied any involvement. He told the National Account the campaign was pitched by a consultant a year ago.
The Page Research Centre declined, but the consultant had already built and registered the website, expecting a yes, then sold it on to someone else.
Hilton confirmed the Coalition for Conservation bought the domain from that consultant, and said the Page Research Centre had no involvement in the campaign.
She told the National Account she didn't know the domain's registration history, and declined to name the consultant, citing confidentiality agreements.
📝 The campaign: Hilton said the campaign's goal is to stop Australia "banning" any form of energy generation.
When asked if that included nuclear power and extending the life of coal-fired power stations Hilton said:
🗣️ "It includes every option, that is what we're fighting for, we want every single option on the table."
“Every option” would include nuclear energy, an option the CSIRO said would take 15 years to get onto Australia’s power grid.
When asked how the country would be powered during those 15 years Hilton said:
🗣️“I don't think I need to go into all the detail of, we need this particular one and this particular one.
I'm not an energy economist at AEMO that's going to be going through and making the whole plan, right?”
💬 On the numbers: Hilton pushed back on CSIRO's most recent GenCost report, which found renewables backed by batteries are the lowest-cost way to build new electricity generation.
She argued the report measures the cheapest path to a net zero target, not the cheapest technology outright.
The CSIRO's GenCost 2025-26 report states solar and wind are the "lowest cost" of any technology compared in the report, excluding the cost of building poles and wires.
Watch the National Account's Archie Milligan below: