The big problem with Albo’s choice of Matt Kean for climate change

OPINION: There is no doubt former NSW Treasurer Matt Kean is qualified - or even over-qualified - for his new role, but that is precisely the problem.

When the Gillard Government picked a celebrity to spruik their ill-fated carbon tax they chose Cate Blanchett.

They should’ve picked Shane Warne.

Blanchett was an ultra-successful, highly decorated and well-connected figure who was already outspoken about the need to tackle climate change. She was the ultimate insider and thus the worst possible choice.

To ordinary households who were worried about rising power bills or blue collar workers worried about losing their jobs it was almost insulting.

Likewise anyone for whom Blanchett was an inspiring voice was almost certainly already all in on climate change.

Indeed, if you ran a Venn diagram over Cate Blanchett fans and Teal voters I would predict a 99.9 per cent overlap.

Anyway, we all know how that went.

The appointment of Matt Kean to be the Albanese Government’s new climate tsar has all the hallmarks of a similar bout of self-harm.

I have no doubt Kean has the expertise for the role. If anything he is over-qualified, and that is precisely the problem.

He is already such a high-profile, well-known and outspoken figure that I doubt he will change a single mind. All his supporters already agree with him and his detractors will dismiss anything he says precisely because it is him saying it.

This makes him a singularly odd choice to be the chair of the Climate Change Authority, which is charged with advising the government on what is shaping up to be its most dangerous policy battlefront.

How will Kean’s leadership make the CCA a more persuasive and relatable voice among, say, blue-collar coal miners or gas workers? Or the battlers of south-western Sydney?

A better move would have been to appoint a more mainstream and non-partisan figure who would bolster the Authority’s credibility among cynics rather than true believers.

As for splitting the Liberal party, the moderates for whom this appointment might have caused a crisis of conscience have all but been wiped out by the Teals.

And those on the right of the party — now ascendant under Peter Dutton — already see Kean as a political Judas. This appointment will hardly disabuse them of that folly. If anything it will energise them even more in the new climate wars.

And so even as it is already besieged by conservatives on their favourite fighting grounds of immigration and climate change, the Albanese government has decided to give the bear another poke.

Or, worse still, it has fallen into the Canberra bubble trap of thinking that everybody supports Kean’s climate crusade — just like everyone opposes nuclear energy — except for a noisy few.

That might be true in halcyon days but in hard economic times it doesn’t take much for those few to become very many very quickly.

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Originally published as The big problem with Albo’s choice of Matt Kean for climate change