The Coalition has done Australia a favour – now we have to decide who we really are

The Coalition’s big reversal on climate and energy policy has triggered a mixture of self-congratulation, angst and confusion, but amid all that, the Liberal and National parties have done all Australians a good turn. In keeping with the ancient Greek maxim “Know thyself”, their abandonment of the previously bipartisan target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050 ensures that we will learn a lot about ourselves between now and the next election.

It feels unseemly to be talking about another election when we had one just a few months ago, but one of the most important battle lines for 2028 has already been drawn.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

Stripped down to its essence, the Coalition’s new offering is: Forget about climate change as a serious problem. Renewables are too expensive and the cause of all increases in energy costs. They’ll send all of us broke. The only thing that matters is having cheaper energy prices.

It is a position focused exclusively on the here and now, resting its hopes on the assumption that most Australians are motivated only by their own immediate interests.

The government is all-in on net zero by 2050, at least in principle. It’s continuing with its problematic and possibly inadequate energy transition. It’s implicitly banking on Australians being willing to accept some costs in a large-scale shift to renewable energy with firming coming from gas and a declining number of old coal-fired power assets as Australia’s contribution to reducing climate change.

That is now the contest.

It will be a test of our society – a test of our view of ourselves within society, and of our sense of obligation to each other.

Even among some conservatives, there’s an enduring nostalgia for the Hawke and Keating years as a period of bold reform in which economic shibboleths were challenged and defeated. No question, those governments led the changes, but the fact is that they required the support and sometimes the direct involvement of ordinary Australians to take effect. It was not all top down; to succeed, it relied upon the tolerance and backing of much of the voting public.

For example, the establishment of Medicare and universal superannuation were kicked off by the workforce agreeing to redirect pay rises either awarded by the Arbitration Commission or won via industrial action to those programs. How much of that spirit still lives and can be applied to the energy transition, with its bumpy trajectory and cost issues? The fortunes of the Coalition and Albanese government at the next election will be resting on the answer.

One thing that has to be said about those who engineered the Coalition’s energy policy shift is that they’ve got a fair bit of front and won’t shuffle off this mortal coil still wondering what might have been. Set aside what you or I might think about the desirability or otherwise of the net zero by 2050 target and look at the Coalition’s new position.

Net zero was Coalition policy for four years, from 2021 to a few days ago, across two elections under the leadership of Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton. The only reason for adopting the target would be that you believe what scientists were saying, and that climate change is such a threat to humanity that it is necessary.

Having reached that conclusion and argued for it, how is it possible to walk away from it, disassociating yourself from a full-throated effort to devise ways to reach it?

Liberal leader Sussan Ley was at the pointy end when the target was adopted in 2021; holding down the role of environment minister. She then went on to be deputy to Dutton when he came up with nuclear energy as the way to reach the target.

Ley hasn’t been able to explain why the target has been downgraded. Last week, in a sop to the moderate Liberals who helped her win the leadership and who she has now left out in the cold, she averred that reaching net zero by 2050 would be a “welcome outcome”. But she’s abandoned even that half-hearted formulation and has this week taken to deriding net zero as an “ideological target”. It’s apparently not even based on science any more, just another crazy left-wing frolic!

Despite being tagged as a moderate in recent times, Ley has always been a political shapeshifter, never appearing to come from an identifiable philosophical base. As the leader she is now but a placeholder, to be moved on by her party room and succeeded by someone who, unlike her, is more genuinely committed to the battle against the government’s energy transition.

Ley’s most likely successor is Andrew Hastie, who has made noises about leading a more populist Coalition, following the examples of Trumpism in the US and Nigel Farage’s Reform party in Britain. Those movements are built on voters’ sense of exclusion from politics.

What’s going on overseas doesn’t necessarily have much bearing on how our system operates now or will operate in the future. Australia has a different society and political system, with its own unique attitudes and history, plus compulsory preferential voting, which acts to keep more of us politically engaged, even if only infrequently and fleetingly. More than 90 per cent of enrolled voters filled out a ballot paper at this year’s election. Compare that with the 59.7 per cent who voted in Britain’s election last year. Surely that partly explains why the freshly elected Starmer government lost support so quickly: there was too little initial buy-in. Hastie assumes a lot, in my view too much, about how applicable those foreign movements would be here.

With two-and-half years to go, the scene is set. In an age when life seems to get more daunting and a world that’s becoming more complicated and unpredictable, it won’t hurt us to find out a bit more about ourselves.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.

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