“So that’s a maybe?” he suggested. Marles voiced no dissent.
The place called “maybe” is dangerous terrain for an opposition, particularly on an issue on which passions run high. Just ask Jeremy Corbyn whose maybe/maybe not policy on leaving the EU is the principal reason the British Labour Party is looking for a new leader.
"Coal will continue to play a part within our economy for decades to come," @RichardMarlesMP tells @David_Speers on #Insiders #auspol pic.twitter.com/qnTyKCEdNA
— Insiders ABC (@InsidersABC) February 8, 2020
It is a while until our next federal election but we can already predict that climate policy will be one of Labor’s principal sources of grief, just as it has been at every election since 2010, when Julia Gillard received a mandate not to introduce the carbon tax she promptly did.
In last year’s election campaign, inviting Bill Shorten to share the costings on his 45 per cent emissions target was the surest way to make him lose his rag. His unsteady performance on the issue was one reason voters considered him shifty or worse.
His climate platform has been repudiated by his successor, leaving a great dollop of jelly where Labor’s policy ought to be.
Today Labor faces its own divisions while the Coalition, at least around the cabinet table, is united on climate and energy, probably for the first time since John Howard was in government.
Labor has spawned a ginger group that brands itself the friends of coal. They meet at Otis (the restaurant, not the elevator) in an attempt to move Labor back to the sensible centre.
That is the point on the spectrum where every Labor politician who aspires to win the next election wants to be, armed with a policy that unites the Collinsville miners and the knitting nannas of Marrickville in one happy family.
A cool, damp summer might have given Labor some breathing space. Instead, the climate debate has been charged with a new ferocity. Anthony Albanese is being challenged from within his party to hitch his wagon to the climate emergency.
He has wisely resisted, knowing that the moral argument is not one Labor can easily win. Labor’s discomfort
Adam Bandt’s elevation as the Greens leader has increased Labor’s discomfort. Bandt is taking the Greens further towards the extreme as he shapes a clearer divide between the parties of the left.
“Ultimately Labor’s got to decide where it stands,” Bandt told Michelle Grattan recently. “If Labor thinks it can continue to walk both sides of the fence, they’re going to stay in opposition for a very long time. The script that we saw playing out at the last election will just play itself out at the next election.”
Last week, after the existence of the Otis Group was revealed by the media, Albanese retreated further into maybe land. His claim that the party “is united in our position that climate change is real, that we need to act on lowering our emissions” these days counts as a motherhood statement. It puts him on a unity ticket with both the Coalition and the Greens while being slightly less convincing than either.
His rhetoric on coal, that it will continue to play a part in Australia’s economy for decades to come, is almost identical to Tony Abbott’s, as Bandt delights in pointing out. Brand differentiation is all but impossible.
The Coalition is offering Labor few favours by charting a steadier course on energy policy.
Malcolm Turnbull’s departure relieved much of the tension in the Liberals’ partyroom, while Scott Morrison’s anointing of Angus Taylor as the minister for bringing down energy prices gave a practical sense of direction to the policy challenge that has been lacking for more than decade.
A vocal group in the partyroom wishes the Prime Minister was driven less by the Paris target. Another vocal section urges him to do more. Yet the party has seldom been more comfortable in its own skin on climate policy, having reframed the question in economic rather than scientific terms.
Crucially, the energy policy challenge has evolved in the past three years since the closure of coal-fired power stations in South Australia and Victoria brought home the vulnerabilities of wind and solar.
The gap in the market is now supply that backs up renewables, rather than baseload, reducing the reliance on coal and putting the focus on the supply of gas. Labor shows no signs of coming to terms with this development.
The government is at last starting to parade its achievements, dispelling the myth that it has been sitting on its hands. Labor had expected to contain emissions at 635 million tonnes by now by imposing a carbon tax. The Coalition has managed to reduce emissions to 532 million tonnes without one. Wholesale electricity prices are down 35 per cent year on year. The retail price has fallen for four consecutive quarters. The carbon footprint of the average Australian is well on its way to being half as big as it was in 2005.
It makes it almost impossible for Labor to take a position sufficiently different from the Coalition to make a fight of it. Entering a bidding war with the Greens, as it tried to do last time, would put blue-collar seats in danger.
It is little wonder that a growing group in Labor is urging Albanese to sue for peace by adopting policies close to those of the government and seeking a bipartisan solution.
A couple of years ago the Coalition would have jumped at the chance to neutralise climate as an election issue. Its elevation as a party-political issue in the first place puts Australia at odds with most other Western democracies.
Right now, however, there is little enthusiasm in the Coalition for extending an olive branch. Much better to watch the opposition squirm.
Nick Cater is executive director of Menzies Research Centre.
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