Liberals have no choice but to bite the bullet on net zero
Late on Wednesday, Tehan emerged from a marathon Liberal Party meeting to declare that there was unanimity around two fundamental principles: first, that electricity affordability and reliability were paramount; and second, that the Coalition had to be serious about emissions reduction.
Forgive my scepticism, but affordability and reliability have only been jeopardised because governments have been obsessed with emissions reduction and have regarded minimising fossil fuel-generated electricity as the easiest way to get them down.
Let’s see whether Tehan can succeed in “threading the needle” on energy and emissions policy, as he said he thought he could. His difficulty, all along, has been that both sides of this debate want fundamentally different things. Liberal “moderates” want to keep net zero because they think doing anything else will cost them seats. Some of them might actually believe that the “climate crisis” is real and that fixing it requires Australia to lead the world in reducing emissions.
And while staying tied to net zero destroys any opportunity to skewer Labor over the cost of living, that hardly bothers the “teal Liberals” given the affluent suburbs they represent.
Liberal “conservatives”, on the other hand, want to dump net zero because they think that the emissions obsession is costing jobs, driving heavy industry offshore, and exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis that is voters’ number one concern.
They are also alive to the reality that their greatest electoral opportunity is out in aspirational suburbs where power bills bite hard, and voters feel abandoned by a Labor Party more focused on woke than workers.
That’s not to say these MPs don’t care about the environment; in fact, it’s their passion for Australia’s landscape and coastline that has them reject the degradation that comes with the rollout of renewables.
That’s why net zero still has make-or-break potential: not just for Ley’s leadership, but for the electorally essential coalition with the National Party, and perhaps even for the very survival of the Liberal Party itself.
On Wednesday, the Liberal partyroom reportedly split 28 against keeping the net zero objective, 17 for keeping it in some form, with four undecided. Almost certainly, the net zero adherents are going to be disappointed, unless the policy that Tehan said would be announced on Thursday turns out to be some kind of fudge.
All things being equal, voters support a fall in emissions but are not signed up to arbitrary targets if it means a worse life for them, or if other countries’ inaction makes Australia’s cuts globally meaningless. It’s like the voice, where heartfelt goodwill towards Aboriginal people didn’t extend to racial separatism. Which demonstrates there’s an opportunity here for a political party that can marry practical policy measures with a sensible timeline.
But sensible is not what we are doing. Consider the madness of energy policy in Australia right now: we’re subsidising renewables to drive take-up; subsidising consumers to avoid bill shock; subsidising coal plants to keep the lights on when the wind drops and the sun disappears; and subsidising heavy industry to keep manufacturing going in the face of unaffordable power.
There’s an easy solution to all this: junk the net zero straitjacket; junk the 2050 timeline that almost no country will meet; and reset our climate policy to be in Australia’s national interest; economically and environmentally. Nowhere in the Paris Agreement is the term net zero used; Paris is, after all, a non-binding treaty; and all it commits signatories to is achieving “a balance between anthropogenic emissions … and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century” – so not net zero by 2050, but carbon neutrality by 2100.
When the Abbott government agreed to reductions of 26 to 28 per cent of emissions under Paris in 2014, it was predicated on the rest of the world pulling its weight. We have met our targets, yet few other countries have – meaning we are well within our rights to slow down our emissions reduction trajectory, as Liberal conservatives argue, rather than speed it up, as Labor demands.
If Australians better understood this reality, and the true cost of net zero, the public mood would shift. But as long as the centre-right is joined at the hip with Labor on climate policy, they’re absent from this fight. Should they change course this week, they might just find they’re back in the game politically.
The Liberals have been in this position twice before: in 2009, in opposition, when Malcolm Turnbull wanted the Coalition to support Labor’s Emissions Trading Scheme; and in 2018, in government, when Malcolm Turnbull wanted the Coalition to adopt the so-called National Energy Guarantee, thus ending the “climate wars” (he said) with a policy that Labor would support.
On both occasions, Turnbull lost the leadership in a Liberal partyroom revolt – and on both occasions the Coalition went on to do far better than expected at the subsequent election: Tony Abbott reducing a first-term government to minority status in 2010; and Scott Morrison winning his “miracle victory” in 2019.
After winning the Liberal leadership by just one vote in 2009, Abbott had a further formal ballot; with the Liberal partyroom voting 54 to 29 to oppose then-PM Kevin Rudd’s ETS and a united Coalition soon forcing Rudd to dump his own policy.
After abandoning the NEG in 2018, in the face of MPs’ threats to cross the floor, Turnbull spilled his leadership and ultimately lost to Scott Morrison, who never revived the NEG (even though it was originally promoted by the man who became his deputy leader and treasurer, Josh Frydenberg). Morrison won the subsequent election, in part by campaigning against the claimed half-trillion-dollar cost of Labor’s then policy to cut emissions by 45 per cent by 2030.
There are two lessons here: first, that the Coalition prospers when it is a strong contrast to Labor, not a weak echo; and second, that fundamental policy differences can’t be fudged, they must be resolved.
What’s required is not compromise but for the leadership to adopt a clear position and then to vigorously make the case to voters.
If the Liberal Party does dump net zero, which is the only way to oppose an energy policy that has net zero at its heart, Ley will need to argue with great conviction every day that cutting emissions at the pace Labor demands is not worth the cost to the economy, the loss of jobs, the destruction of habitat, the price rises to consumers, the changes in lifestyle, and the deindustrialisation of Australia that net zero by 2050 necessarily entails.
She will have to maintain that a strong economy rather than a weak one will enable us to cope much better with any emissions-driven climate change; the “adaptation” model that former climate zealots like Bill Gates now favour.
In other words, Ley will have to become a tough political warrior, capable of overturning an elite consensus – something she has never been – if changing the policy is also to mean a lasting change in the Liberals’ fortunes.
As for senator Andrew Bragg’s announcement that he’d resign from the frontbench if the party dumps net zero, that just reinforces the argument for change.
If he were to take some others with him, even better; give me a frontbench of lions, not lambs any day!
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On net zero, the problem for the Liberals all along has been that neither Opposition Leader Sussan Ley nor energy spokesman Dan Tehan have wanted to declare a position without a partyroom consensus first; yet the consensus they seek is unlikely to emerge until after the leader has declared a policy and demonstrated the ability to persuasively argue the case.