Liberals risk act of folly and self-harm on net zero
And it worked. The art of politics lies in timing, knowing when to hold your fire and when to strike. This art has deserted the Coalition parties in their forlorn yet frenetic crisis over net zero.
The Coalition, following its even more soul-destroying defeat at the 2025 election, has done the opposite of Albanese.
Spearheaded by its conservatives and its junior partner, the Coalition has lurched into an internal political warfare driven by the conviction that its revival depends upon a revisionist energy policy killing off net zero as part of its rush to maximise policy differences with Labor.
The upshot today is three consequences. First, courtesy of the National Party policy and the comprehensive Page Research Centre report, we know what net zero really means. It means changing the law to remove “net zero” as a target under the Paris Agreement, termination of much of Australia’s climate policies on the grounds they destroy living standards, the throttling of the renewable energy rollout, advancing nuclear, coal and gas, the stalling of emissions reductions (with a 30-40 per cent 2035 target compared with Labor’s 43 per cent by 2030), enshrining lower prices over clean energy as a formal policy goal, empowering local communities and landowners against clean energy initiatives, restoration of the Abbott government Emissions Reduction Fund as the key tool for abatement, abolition of Labor’s climate structure including the Safeguard Mechanism (a de facto cap and trade scheme) and the New Vehicle Efficiency Standards and defining success not by tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted but in jobs and industries created and retained.
It’s a top-to-bottom re-casting of policy and values that effectively buries climate change mitigation via meaningful emission reductions. There is much that will appeal in this sweeping blueprint, particularly in the regions. The Nationals did not sign up to everything in the Page Report but the report is their bible.
The message is simple and extremely contentious: opposing Labor’s policies won’t work unless you oppose net zero and then dismantle the entire edifice. It’s a thrilling and exciting idea, a bit like Fightback a generation ago. But the notion the Coalition has no option but to embrace this transformation is nonsense. There are plenty of ways of tackling Labor’s energy policy vulnerability.
True-believing conservatives intend fighting Labor by offering an alternative vision in a radical leap to the right. Just six months after an election, they are desperate to make themselves the issue. And Albanese Labor is happy to enter the battle on these terms. As my colleague Dennis Shanahan wrote on Tuesday, Albanese is running soft on the Coalition dilemma, content with the likely outcomes.
The second consequence, flowing from the first, is that this version of opposing net zero cannot constitute a viable stance for the Liberal Party as an alternative government.
This is not a policy for Urban Australia. It is not a policy for Middle Class Australia. This policy, however, may suit the National Party representing the regions, and under attack from One Nation. It is, however, about something else – the playing out of a struggle within centre-right politics over core beliefs.
The centre-right is consumed about itself, in a fashion similar to the periodic bouts of factional warfare that once plagued Labor. And the trap is that the Coalition is a victim of itself – its grassroots, its media backers, its conservative wing, and its junior partner.
It is a prisoner of its 2025 defeat that saw the Liberals reduced to a rump in urban Australia, the danger being that its climate policy is the policy of a party weak in urban Australia and destined only to get weaker still.
Most of the public is disengaged from this struggle in the centre-right. It doesn’t have a horse in this battle between the Liberal moderates and conservatives. Perhaps it doesn’t even care. But it will care if the outcome is a Liberal Party that walks away from a tenable climate policy, leaves the perception it has been railroaded by the Nationals, and that its policy is all about itself and not about the nation.
The Liberals have forgotten that Albanese won his 2025 victory by depicting the Coalition as a risky proposition. He didn’t win by running a brilliant government; he won by exploiting the idea that the Liberals aren’t reliable, can’t be trusted, and aren’t in touch with contemporary Australia. For six months the party has only deepened this fatal perception.
Staging a massive, immediate, post-election public disruption about net zero is some of the weirdest, wildest politics seen in decades, letting Labor off the hook at the precise time its vulnerabilities are being exposed on energy prices, uncompetitive industry, the return of inflation, and spending excesses. In retrospect, the Coalition should have duplicated Albanese’s post-2019 tactics: stay disciplined, plot your revival, and let the government unwind.
Do you doubt for a second the polls would be significantly better if that approach had been adopted? We live in a bizarre world: Labor faces devastating and mounting governing problems but feels no political pressure. Go figure.
The third consequence is the leader is being disastrously weakened. This is partly Sussan Ley’s fault but it’s not the main reason. That lies in the undisguised conservative campaign against her in cahoots with the pro-conservative media, with Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price having quit the frontbench. Right now the conservative campaign to re-make the Liberal Party resembles a train wreck that won’t easily be repaired.
John Howard said last week that Ley should be supported. Howard is a realist; he knows her limitations. But Howard praised her ambitious statements on the economy – pledging a personal income tax cut at the next election, committing to smaller government and putting industrial relations back on the agenda, in contrast to Peter Dutton’s leadership. Yet nobody cares. It doesn’t matter.
In truth, these are some of the most ambitious in-principle statements made by a new opposition leader in the immediate aftermath of an election defeat that we have witnessed in many decades. You read that right. But we live in an age of cults – and the cult is that Ley stands for nothing.
She has made many mistakes. Perhaps the most serious has been her failure to send decisive signals to the conservative wing about her values.
There are three things she should have done: stood in front of the Australian flag as a patriot; declared for biological gender – this is a man, and this is a woman; and repudiated the state ALP pushes for Indigenous treaties as examples of divisive racial separatism and in defiance of the referendum’s sentiments.
These stances would have been fully aligned with the party base and conservative beliefs while having overwhelming community support. In failing to take easier steps to appeal to conservatives, Ley might find she has to take far harder steps.
She now faces a diabolical dilemma. She must try to preserve the Coalition yet sufficiently distance the Liberals from the Nationals on net zero.
Is that possible? Can a compromise be found? Any notion she must ditch net zero just to save her political leadership would be a deeply flawed answer.
Here’s the question: who might lead a prolonged Coalition campaign against net zero fighting the onslaught from Labor, teals, greens and the progressive establishment branding the opposition as climate deniers? Neither Ley nor David Littleproud would have a hope in hell of prevailing in that political bloodbath.
The Liberals, penalised by the Nationals, have got themselves into a real fix – undermining Ley without having an alternative candidate at the ready. The only genuine alternative is Angus Taylor, a reality many conservatives thoroughly reject.
So what does the future hold? Is it ditching net zero, telling Middle Australia it must turn the clock back 20 years on climate policy, brutally overthrowing the party’s first female leader and expecting voters in urban seats to applaud with flowers and votes? But don’t worry, there will be plenty of conservatives assuring you things are playing out just perfectly.
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It is time to recall what Anthony Albanese did during the first six months after Labor’s devastating defeat at the 2019 election. Virtually nothing – he bided his time, concealed his hand and made his plans to re-position Labor to the political centre to deny Scott Morrison another negative campaign.