Hanson tests Coalition resolve on net zero

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley is under threat from an emerging populist bloc on her party’s right flank, threatening splinters on its contentious net zero emissions pledge, woke culture and immigration as MPs fear a further slump in the polls.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson is poised to seize on Ley’s shift towards a more centrist style, describing herself as Australia’s answer to UK populist Nigel Farage and on Monday used a Senate motion to wedge the Coalition over its net-zero-by-2050 pledge.

One Nation has four senators after the May election: Tyrone Whitten (left) and Warwick Stacey (right) joining Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Ley directed her senators to abstain from the vote, and most did, except moderate backbenchers Jane Hume and Andrew McLachlan, who voted against Hanson, and right-wingers Matt Canavan and Alex Antic, who supported One Nation.

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young labelled the Coalition weak for largely not showing up to the vote on the climate target that has become totemic in the debate on the Coalition’s future direction.

Ley and her shadow ministers have held the line on the party’s review of the energy pledge in the face of campaigns led by Hanson and maverick Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, who tabled his own private members bill to ditch net zero on Monday.

Joyce told reporters outside Parliament House that he felt compelled to push the net zero issue even though Ley preferred a more sober review. His community felt too passionately about the wide scale rollout of solar and wind farms in the regions for him to speak softly about the issue, Joyce said, adding that the 2050 target would “have absolutely no effect on the climate”.

Coalition MPs led by Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack (right) walk to a press conference about energy policy on Monday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

After the first sitting days of parliament featured acerbic debates on energy and Welcome to Country ceremonies, Hanson predicted Ley would not maintain unity in the opposition as Peter Dutton had, paving the way for her to lose the leadership before the next election.

“If she wants to move further to the centre, to the left, to appease those moderates in the party, I’m quite happy to scoop up those votes,” Hanson said in an interview.

“We are the Reform of [Australia] because everything that Nigel Farage stands for, I’ve been talking about for years, for nearly 30 years.”

Hanson’s anti-immigration party, which has courted controversy for decades for its stances on minority groups, added two senators at the May election, doubling its number of seats.

Credit: Matt Golding

Joyce’s campaign has gained support from backbenchers Garth Hamilton, Tony Pasin, Alex Antic, a slew of Nationals, and the expanded right-wing Senate bloc of One Nation and United Australia Party’s Ralph Babet. Frontbencher Andrew Hastie has also been fighting internally to overturn the net zero pledge, with the policy under review within the Coalition.

Liberals have also spoken out about Indigenous welcome ceremonies after Ley indicated support for the practice. And in another sign of internal angst, former frontbencher Sarah Henderson argued in last week’s private party room meeting that the Coalition should adopt as formal policy a push by Antic to enshrine in law the existence of only two genders. Henderson declined to comment.

Taken together, the thrusts underline the depth of feeling among right-wing Coalition MPs as Ley aims to correct course from the perceived failings of the Dutton era.

Institute of Public Affairs deputy head Daniel Wild said in Australia, as in the UK, there was a growing gap between the wishes of right-wing voters and the offerings of centre-right parties on cultural issues, immigration and green energy.

Opposition spokeswoman for defence industry and defence personnel Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (left) and Senator Sarah Henderson.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

“What you’re now seeing is a new bloc, whether it’s people from One Nation or Barnaby Joyce, and others, giving voice to those concerns in a way that they haven’t before,” Wild said.

“I don’t think Liberals are going to die out, but I think the risk of irrelevancy is increasing.”

Hume, one of only two Liberals to vote against Hanson’s motion, pushed back against the One Nation leader, saying voters “made it clear at the ballot box that they expect serious, credible action on climate change”.

“How can we keep the seats we have and win back the seats we’ve lost without hearing that message?” she said.

The UN’s chief climate diplomat has urged Australia to continue its push towards net zero, warning that failure to stabilise the climate would cut living standards $7000 per person per year by 2050.

LNP member Garth Hamilton.Credit: Sydney Morning Herald

“Climate disasters are already costing Australian home owners $4 billion a year – and that figure is only going one way,” said Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Outspoken conservative backbencher Hamilton warned of the risks of a Labor-lite agenda.

“We need to be wary of what’s happened to our sister party in the UK,” he said, cautioning that Australia’s preferential and compulsory system provided some protection from a third-party takeover.

Hamilton said public debate on the Coalition’s direction should not be silenced, arguing Dutton did not lose because Australians rejected conservative values but rather because of the Coalition’s deficient policy agenda.

Hanson said she was open to picking off Coalition MPs who felt uncomfortable with Ley’s more centrist approach by which she has spruiked the case for quotas for preselecting women, dumping the idea of building nuclear plants and installing Paul Scarr, who on Monday highlighted the positives of migration, into the immigration portfolio.

The Nationals and Liberal Party briefly split after the election. During that period, Liberal MPs discussed privately the prospect of creating a new city-based party to espouse small-l liberal values unencumbered by conservative regional MPs. Scott Morrison canvassed the idea among his close colleagues after the 2022 election, according to several sources involved in those talks who did not want to be identified.

Political historian Paul Strangio, an emeritus professor at Monash University, said Ley’s message of modernising the party risked her being received “as a kind of apostate”.

“Diagnosing what needs to be done doesn’t mean Ley can magic away a quarter of a century of a conservative populist creep by the Liberals dating back to the Howard era that in essence has involved the party fighting a rearguard action against the evolving direction of Australian society,” he said.

“The resistance she will inevitably encounter is already evident in the incipient revolt within the Coalition against a net zero carbon emissions target.

“A major question looms over whether Ley has the requisite network of allies, intellectual and rhetorical force, strategic nous and fortitude to perform the diabolically difficult task of reversing 25 years of rightwards Liberal drift.”

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