James Campbell: Scott Morrison crab walks Australia to Labor’s climate change target

If you found out in 2018 that the prime minister wanted net zero carbon emissions by 2050, you would assume we had a Labor government, writes James Campbell.

Imagine back in 2018 when Scott Morrison replaced Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister if someone had told you that in May 2021 the Australian Government would be about to announce a target of net zero emissions by 2050.

Now imagine they’ve also told you that by now Australia would have experienced its fastest growth in debt and spending since the end of World War II.

Finally, imagine that same Nostradamus had predicted that this government — the one that had presided over this massive expansion of debt and spending — was about to release a budget that rather than focusing on repairing the Commonwealth’s balance sheet was instead explicitly focused on driving down unemployment.

Now consider what your answer would have been if having been painted this picture you’d been asked to predict whether Scott Morrison or Bill Shorten was going to win the 2019. My guess is that given the above is that without hesitation you’d have answered Shorten.

Yet here we are two-and-a-half years later in the middle of a global pandemic with massive debt and deficits and Josh Frydenberg is about to unveil a budget with a very Labor-like employment target.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will hand down the budget next week. Picture: NCA NewsWire /Philip Gostelow

And despite the fact that it is less than three years since Turnbull lost his job for his attempt to introduce the far more modest National Energy Guarantee, Scott Morrison is, with hardly any complaint from a compliant Liberal Party, moving Australia’s climate change targets to a point that would have seemed like science fiction when he took office.

Yet inside the Government the only people whingeing about the policy change are in the National Party and more or less openly derided as a rump on a rump.

Outside the Government there’s been whingeing aplenty, of course, from people who wouldn’t vote for Morrison even if he promised to shut the coal industry tomorrow.

Last week’s complaint was that he hadn’t turned up to Joe Biden climate zoom-fest with a promise to half Australia’s emissions by 2030 as the new US President has pledged to do. Never mind the new President’s pledge can be described as aspirational at best — if that — it was enough for Adam Bandt and the Greens leader’s Labor counterpart to chorus the Prime Minister had “embarrassed” Australia.

Scott Morrison with a lump of coal in parliament.

The other complaint about the way Morrison has crab-walking the Government towards a stronger climate challenge policy is that he doesn’t really believe in what he is doing or that his change is not sincere.

Fair enough I suppose given it was only in 2017 he was passing around a lump of coal during an impromptu parliamentary show-and-tell during question time.

But for those of us who, like Queen Elizabeth I, have “no desire to make windows into men’s souls” why Morrison does things is of far less interest than what he does and how he goes about it.

His crack last month that “we will not achieve net zero in the cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities” was a classic demonstration of how he does things. Morrison must have known that throwing that chum into the water would bring the fish to the surface accusing him of waging phony culture wars.

But it served the purpose of sending a signal to the people he needs to keep in the cart that he is not selling them out even as he junks what until recently been orthodoxy among the Liberal Party and its camp followers. This week the British journalist Andrew O’Sullivan observed that the sweet spot in Western politics right now is economic leftism and cultural conservatism. We already knew that as a church-going Christian Morrison had the second part nailed.

But what hasn’t really been grasped is that the heroic age in which centre-right parties drove free-market reforms has long passed.

US President Joe Biden ran a Zoom summit on climate change last week. Picture: Oliver Doulierry/AFP

From London to Canberra Big Government conservatism is in.

In Australia this new spirit manifests itself in big spending ‘nation building’ boondoggles like dams and inland rail in combination with large-scale welfare spending such as today’s announcement of increased subsidies for childcare.

You can rail against this all you want but it’s basically what people want: a watered down Labor agenda without the pain of having to put up with the Labor Party.

Labor folk, who can be forgiven for being down in the dumps as they contemplate the ease with which Morrison is stealing their clothes on climate change, should console themselves with the thought that there is danger for the Government in what the Prime Minister is doing.

For almost 20 years two of the best clubs in the Coalition’s electoral golf bag have been boats and climate change. Bill Shorten neutralised the boats to accept turn-backs. He didn’t even try to get Labor’s climate policies to converge with the Government’s however. Now to everyone’s surprise Scott Morrison has done the job for Labor. If Anthony Albanese goes to the next election saying “yup, we agree net-zero by 2050” and then shuts up on the subject, the government will have nothing to attack him with.  Remember that 2007, the last time Labor went to an election with an interchangeable climate policy to the Liberal Party, was also the only time it has won a majority since 1993.

Originally published as James Campbell: Scott Morrison crab walks Australia to Labor’s climate change target