Liberals are heading for net zero votes

The Coalition suffered its biggest ever defeat because it looked like it was backwards and out of touch. Dumping net zero will only reinforce that perception, writes Joe Hildebrand.

Federal Opposition Leader Sussan Ley speaks ahead of NSW Liberal Leader and Leader of the Opposition Kellie Sloane delivering her inaugural speech as party leader. Picture: Brendan Read

It is one of the starker lessons of history that if you fight a war on two fronts you are almost certainly destined to lose.

Just ask Germany.

And yet that is the position that the Liberal Party has somehow managed to place itself in by junking net zero in an effort to placate its conservative base and its junior Coalition partner.

In this war, net zero is like Jerusalem. It means both everything and nothing.

For zealots on both sides it is literally a matter of life and death, but for the vast majority of us, as with the holy city, we know we’re never going to see it but we like to know that it’s there.

But of course it is the zealots who wage the wars, and so it is that for the past six months the Liberal Party has been tearing itself apart over a climate target that is effectively a MacGuffin – the Hollywood term for a meaningless object that serves only to spur characters into action.

Does the brains trust of the Liberal Party seriously think the Coalition’s stunning election loss was because Peter Dutton wasn’t conservative enough? Picture: Adam Head

Indeed, the only action net zero seems incapable of spurring is probably net zero itself, but let’s leave that little factoid to one side.

The first question is what on earth the Liberals are doing once more obsessing over this to the point of near self-destruction?

They have just suffered their worst-ever defeat at an election where climate change was barely an issue, and yet they have decided that reversing their own position on it is the most urgent priority to solve the party’s woes.

This is bonkers stuff.

And as the Coalition’s self-immolation over this issue continued it somehow managed to plumb ever-new depths in the polls, as it either blindly missed or wilfully ignored everything the electorate had just told it and kept marching in the opposite direction.

This is no ideological or moral judgment.

This is simply a matter of mathematical fact.

Does the brains trust in the Liberal Party seriously think they suffered their electoral wipe-out because Peter Dutton wasn’t conservative enough? Or that its nuclear power plan wasn’t its policy centrepiece?

There are reams of research – not to mention the election result itself – that show voters were utterly repelled by the nuclear proposal, as they were by Dutton’s perceived sympathies for Donald Trump, hailed as the trailblazer in dumping net zero.

And even after the Coalition spent six months destroying itself and left both parties dumping the target, it still sits at record lows.

Again, this is without making any pronouncements on the merits or otherwise of net zero.

Purely by any political calculus the Coalition’s positioning on this issue is verging on the suicidal.

Some in the Coalition believe net zero has been seen as a political, not an economic issue. Picture: Brendan Read

Nor is the endless arguing about the minutiae of net zero or whether it is driving up power prices likely to change that.

As noted, net zero is actually a MacGuffin.

Unlike the obsessives on both the hard left and hard right, most people don’t wallow in the mechanics of it.

It is just a cipher for them saying that they are concerned about the future.

Some in the Coalition say that this is precisely the problem: that net zero has been seen as a political issue, not an economic one, and that if the economic realities can be explained to the electorate then public opinion will change.

Notwithstanding the passing strange phenomenon of politicians disregarding the politics of an issue, this is a courageous election strategy to say the least: force people to care about an issue they don’t really care about, tell them they were wrong in as much as they did care about it, and tell them you have all answers to fix it even though they are opposite to the answers you had when you were last in government.

Once more I offer no moral judgment, but if that’s the silver bullet I’d be keen to put my money on the werewolf.

There are reams of research – not to mention the election result itself – that show voters were utterly repelled by the nuclear proposal.

One thing I wouldn’t put my money on is Australia actually achieving net zero, but again that’s an argument that only the zealots on either side obsess over.

Most people just want us to be – as a famously successful election campaign slogan modestly put it – heading in the right direction.

The Coalition suffered its biggest ever defeat in May because it looked like it was heading in the opposite direction, that it was backwards and out of touch with the needs and desires of modern families.

Dumping net zero – literally going backwards – will only reinforce that perception and cause it even more electoral pain.

In politics perception is quite simply reality.

Thus the Liberal Party has decided to fight a rearguard action in a desperate effort to shore up its base but in so doing has lost even more ground at the front.

It is the surest way to lose a war.