Election 2022: Don’t mention the climate wars
At the halfway mark of the campaign and on the eve of Anthony Albanese’s campaign launch, Labor’s B team is stumbling over party policy.
Julia Gillard, as Labor prime minister in 2010, was there before him: “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.” And in 1995 John Howard, then opposition leader, responded to an aggressive journalist asking if there would “never, ever” be a GST: “Never ever. It’s dead.”
Albanese’s pledge was driven by a recognition that the impact of a carbon price in whatever form was no longer theoretical but a political reality. As well, it is a sign that subcontracting out the climate change attack on Liberal MPs in affluent inner-city electorates to Greens warriors and Climate 200 “teal” activists is not a complete answer for Labor. There is still the same challenge of being able to promote climate action in the city while protecting jobs outside the city.
It also was a tacit admission that Labor is failing on explaining its policies and how they would work – not just to the general voting population but to specific areas of pivotal political importance.
At the halfway mark of the campaign and on the eve of Albanese’s campaign launch, which will contain the detail of policies three years in the making and likely involve US Democrat-style infrastructure spending as well as social support in housing and childcare, there is a need for more rigour from Labor.
Apart from the small-target strategy leading to a paucity of major detailed policy, there has been an inability to explain how the policies would work and what they would cost. Since the budget, central promises and policies from Labor such as the guarantee of 24-hour nurses in aged care, border protection, carbon pricing, China’s aggression in the Pacific, new agricultural visa limits and a wage rise for health workers have been paused, reworked, confused and poorly explained.
While Albanese spent seven days in Covid isolation at home his B team, particularly would-be deputy prime minister and defence minister Richard Marles, badly handled the potential impact of the price for carbon offsets for 215 industries – including 15 coalminers in the crucial Hunter Valley of NSW.
For a week before Albanese acted, the issue of job losses for mining communities in the Hunter had festered as former resources minister Matt Canavan campaigned for the Nationals in the seat of Hunter, where long-term traditional Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon is retiring. Local Labor MP for Shortland Pat Conroy, the party’s assistant climate change spokesman, and MP for Paterson Meryl Swanson both played down the threat of Labor’s policy of using the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to hasten the pace of emissions reduction and force companies to buy carbon credits to offset carbon emissions.
Conroy said the coalminers were exempt and Swanson said they would “work out” a convenient arrangement. Both were wrong and both were contradicted by Chris Bowen, the climate change spokesman. Marles, who is also employment spokesman, couldn’t explain the policy when it was announced and criticised six months ago for the potential to close businesses and oust 100,000 workers, and this week he simply couldn’t answer the questions.
As the Coalition moved into a strong regional phase of the campaign with Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce out in the bush and out of the headlines and Scott Morrison announcing the creation of 450,000 regional jobs over five years, in Queensland the coalminers’ fears were growing and spreading.
In response to Labor claims it was the same scheme introduced by Tony Abbott to get the removal of the carbon tax through the Senate, Morrison said: “What Labor is doing is binding them on this and issuing penalties on those companies so they couldn’t be more different. What Labor has is a tax, a sneaky carbon tax on traditional industries in this country, and that’s not good for regional Australia. It is not good at all.” Whitehaven Coal chief executive Paul Flynn said he feared Labor’s strengthened safeguards mechanism would be a “carbon levy by stealth” and it was not true it was the same as the Coalition’s safeguard mechanism.
“The fact the ALP sees such an enlarged role for the Clean Energy Regulator in negotiating with impacted facilities suggests some in Labor are only just beginning to turn their minds to what this policy might look like in practice and what the impacts could be across the economy,” Flynn told The Australian.
By not being on top of detail, not being able to carry an argument and, most crucially, not being able to say what the policy would mean until after the election, the Labor team was not just endangering the seat of Hunter – which was saved for Labor by One Nation preferences in 2019 – but also other seats in NSW and more broadly in Queensland and resource-rich Western Australia.
Labor needs to win seats in Queensland and to hold seats such as the Hunter if it is to have any chance of realising Albanese’s aspiration of a majority Labor government. That’s why Albanese had to cut the Gordian knot of a carbon tax from his home in inner-Sydney’s Marrickville.
When political leaders make firm declarations during election campaigns, the matter of most immediate importance is not whether they will be believed or whether they will breach the pledge – what is most important is why they said it. After years of avoiding absolute declarations, dodging tricky questions or batting away aggression why does a leader feel compelled to break all the election campaign rules and make an absolute promise that may have to be broken in some form in the future?
It’s because they believe they have no choice, that the issue is absolutely important in the electorate, is crucial to ensuring victory, and there needs to be an irrevocable denial to kill the debate.
Albanese and Morrison are revisiting the climate wars between the major parties when a bipartisan policy of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 would have seemed to be grounds for a neutralisation of the debate after decades of political infighting.
When Albanese released the ALP policy six months ago he said it was time to “put the climate wars behind us (and) unite around a common vision”. “We can become a renewable energy superpower,” he said. “Over the last decade the Coalition has announced over 20 energy policies and not landed a single one. Business has missed out on certainty, and Australians have missed out on jobs.”
The reason for the revisitation is because the common 2050 target means the implementation of the policy, the pace of change, the incentives or punishments used to achieve targets and the balance between jobs created and lost is now a real argument with real impacts on industry and workers.
It is not just a two-way fight between the ALP and the Coalition but also has the Greens and Climate 200 teal independents cannibalising each other and Labor as they try to oust inner-city Liberals such as Josh Frydenberg and Tim Wilson in Melbourne and Trent Zimmerman and Dave Sharma in Sydney. At appearances in his own electorate of Kooyong and neighbouring Liberal-held seats, the Treasurer was not asked about regional jobs threatened by carbon pricing but whether net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 was still Coalition policy and would transgender women be allowed to use new sports facilities.
At the other end of the fight Coalition and Labor MPs face challenges from One Nation and United Australia Party, which campaign on both the major parties selling out regional workers. Morrison’s continued commitment this week to his policy of net-zero by 2050, agreed at the Glasgow climate change conference last year, has cost the Coalition a lot of support among conservative voters.
So, Albanese and Morrison are still in the climate wars, it’s just that the dichotomies between city and regional areas are greater, there are more players and a carbon price – which Gillard had the foolhardy bravery to call a carbon tax – is much, much closer.
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Anthony Albanese has had his “never, ever” moment of this year’s federal election campaign: “There will be no carbon tax, ever,” he vowed on Wednesday under pressure during a radio interview.