Scott Morrison has plenty of climate change ammunition in leftover Bill Shorten shells

Anthony Albanese has gifted Scott Morrison a climate change scare campaign that has been run so successfully before that the Coalition doesn’t even have to learn a new script.

“Labor wants a carbon tax!”

“Labor wants to stop coalmining!”

“Labor wants to destroy trucking and farming!”

All the old lines from election campaigns going back to Tony Abbott’s winner on opposing and then repealing a carbon tax have been run out since the Opposition Leader’s bold gamble announcing Labor’s commitment to zero net carbon emissions by 2050.

What’s worse for Labor is that the old lines fit perfectly into the new narrative created at the 2019 election that Labor today is high-taxing, job-destroying and can’t be trusted with the economy because its climate change policy was uncosted then and still is.

The Prime Minister, just a tad lamely but with some success, even sought to link Albanese with the damage done to Labor with Bill Shorten’s tax and climate change policies.

“The bill (Shorten) you couldn’t afford at the last election is repeated by this Labor policy,” Morrison told parliament.

It is clear Labor lost the unlosable election because voters rejected its high-taxing, high-spending agenda, didn’t trust it with the economy at a time of international uncertainty and, while not happy about slow wages growth, feared Labor was bad for job security. Shorten’s dismissive refusal to put a cost on Labor’s climate policies and emission reductions targets fed distrust and turned away traditional blue collar Labor voters.

Albanese has now picked up all that baggage by leapfrogging Shorten’s 2030 commitments with a 2050 zero net target and no explanation as to how this would to be achieved.

Albanese, Mark Butler and Joel Fitzgibbon energetically and enthusiastically backed the detail-free approach and pointed to “zero net emissions by 2050 is supported by 73 countries, including the UK, Canada, France and Germany” and support from business, farmers, livestock producers and Qantas.

Simply looking to other nations’ zero target commitments — most without any plan for meeting the target — isn’t an answer for Labor coming out of a crushing election loss for want of detail. Morrison was quick to point out that the European commitments exempt Poland, Europe’s biggest coal producer, and even Jacinda Ardern didn’t put out a blanket commitment without exemptions.

“Even the New Zealand government was smart enough not to include the agricultural sector when it came to their zero net emissions. It only happens to be 34 per cent of the emissions in New Zealand,” Morrison said.

A short-term political solution is giving Labor a long-term problem.