Heat’s on Scott Morrison to pull off balancing act

After a week of trauma, Scott Morrison must navigate a new climate path.

Many people reject as improbable Scott Morrison’s job of restoring Australian climate change credibility, not just at home but abroad. Picture: AAP

As the global pressure escalates for more ambitious climate change targets with boisterous Boris Johnson the new drum beater, Scott Morrison is navigating towards a new Liberal Party position — his purpose being to enshrine technology before targets and taxes.

Morrison confronts an extraordinary national and international balancing act in 2020. At home he must find a centrist path between the climate change and fossil fuel lobbies whose political warfare has the potential to ruin his government. On the global stage he will operate between Johnson as the Tory champion of zero carbon emissions and ­Donald Trump who is marching America out of the Paris Agreement in a show of contempt for multilateral targets.

As host of the Glasgow end-of-year climate change summit, Johnson has honoured the rhetorical rituals, declaring 2020 a “defining year” in saving the planet, pledging that Britain, as the first country to industrialise, will lead the way to decarbonise, and calling on nations to accept zero emissions by 2050. The pressure on Australia will be immense.

Showing his credentials, Johnson says he will ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035. Among his many guises, Boris as the hero of Brexit also appears as a change-your-life green Tory, a fair distance from his friend Scott.

The bushfires were in Australia but the climate change action is in Europe. And it is coming loaded with threats. The new president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has warned the world’s fossil fuel producers they need more ambitious carbon targets along with carbon pricing or they will be punished by an EU tax on imports.

While China was in the EU line of retaliation, Australia cannot be far behind. The EU says it will spend this year sorting its punitive scheme to promote global green virtue. Nothing will excite Trump’s anti-EU instincts more than European trade barriers in the cause of climate change.

That will constitute a form of protectionism the world’s arch-protectionist will find intolerable. US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has begun rattling his sabre, saying that depending on the form of the border tax, the US will retaliate.

Many people think this week’s climate change dramas in our national politics mean nothing has changed for the past 10 years. But appearances deceive — a lot is changing. For a start, a showdown is coming over global warning that must affect Australia. This is because the chasm is too great between the demands of the science to limit temperature increases to 1.5C or 2C and the ability and will of governments to implement the policies to achieve this.

The Paris-based multilateral system faces failure or a supreme effort that imposes far more radical policies on societies and economies that will change the way people live.

In navigating these treach­erous waters, Morrison is hostage to Australia’s dismal decade of climate change policy but driven by the political need to change the terms of a domestic ­debate the Coalition is destined only to lose.

Cartoon: Tom Jellett

While the government is fractured between a pro-coal minority and a majority sentiment to be more active on climate change, there is overwhelming support among Liberals for the “technology as a solution” stance of the Prime Minister and his Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister, Angus Taylor.

The government’s plan is not just to bury the old idea of carbon pricing — neither Coalition nor Labor support it — but to offer an alternative scheme.

It is the Nationals, not the Liberal Party, that entered an identity crisis this week. The competing visions offered by surviving leader Michael McCormack and the Barnaby Joyce-Matt Canavan team reflect different strategies on climate change and the meaning of last year’s election for the ­Nationals’ future.

Many people reject as improbable Morrison’s job of restoring Australian climate change credibility not just at home but abroad. Reversing the prejudice towards Australia will be a tough call.

“Technology now needs to be a centrepiece of the international approach to climate change action,” Taylor told Inquirer, signalling the message. “I believe this debate is ready to happen. The lesson from the United States is that technology and capitalism offer the way forward in making the ­energy transition.”

Former head of the Prime Minister’s Department and climate change policy specialist Martin Parkinson summarised the current position: “I think the internal policy dynamics mean the government is unable to embrace anything other than a technological solution.

“That’s fine but it’s only half the answer. The amount of investment needed to make a real difference means you end up with a lower surplus or higher taxes or cutting spending elsewhere.

“But the bigger dilemma is what is the incentive for firms to adopt the new technology,” Parkinson said.

Morrison runs a government with MPs holding competing world views about climate change. The point to grasp, however, is that climate change is not our Brexit — it is not a binary choice, one way or the other. This is a false view. The brutal, inescapable reality is that Morrison must follow a compromise, centralist, shifting stance that will alienate the polarities but is the only way to save his government and devise a new Liberal policy. He knows this.

The first step is obvious: curbing the populists on the right still anxious for a mad fight on whether human-induced climate change actually exists. “If you don’t believe the problem exists then by definition you can’t solve it,” a ­Liberal MP said after this week’s party meeting.

The small group of populist conservative MPs who insist on denying climate change promote themselves but doom their government by allowing it to be branded as climate deniers. There is a widespread and accurate view among Liberal MPs that the public is largely unaware of the government’s climate change response because the “deniers” label is sticking and the credibility test has been set by Labor, the Greens and progressive media benchmarks.

The latest emission projections, however, show renewable energy in the National Electricity Market will exceed 40 per cent by 2025 and 50 per cent by 2030 — good news for the government that also exposes its hypocritical attacks on Labor during the campaign.

Morrison’s new framework is a work in progress with its destination not yet defined. The polarised politics, as this week revealed, allow nothing else. New Greens leader Adam Bandt foments anger, plays to extremism, brands the government “climate criminals” and calls for a radical New Green Deal. In truth, this will threaten Labor more than it threatens Morrison.

Meanwhile Joyce and Canavan, from the Nationals backbench, are unleashed to campaign for fossil fuels as essential baseload power for regional industry. After the leadership ballot Canavan was not agitating to return to the ministry and his policy tensions with Morrison have been widely known. Canavan will be busy ­giving effect to his vision for the Nationals as “the true party of the worker” against the progressive Loud Australians who would take away people’s jobs, attack development and resource industries and stop people from controlling their own land.

While this institutionalises an internal Nationals conflict, the high profile of Joyce and Canavan gives the party more scope to counter right-wing populists such as Pauline Hanson. This suggests positives as well as negatives from this week’s Nationals trauma.

The Nationals’ upheaval mocks claims that the age of political instability has finished. Meanwhile, David Littleproud as the party’s new deputy is the main internal winner from the week.

Morrison knows his government must convince the public it is pledged to serious action in the transition of the energy market. This means transcending the one-dimensional Tony Abbott anti-carbon tax legacy but it also means shifting the parameters of the ­debate.

The government rejects national pricing schemes, higher taxes and arbitrary emission targets as the global answer. Morrison says — a complete truism — that the Paris model suffers from “real weaknesses”.

This is an argument for a better approach, not for Australia’s departure from the Paris Agreement. Morrison backs a greater role for gas as the transition fuel, more investment in renewables and storage and the coming draft Technology Investment Roadmap to be released for public ­debate.

This paper will examine more than 100 technologies including hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, biofuels, lithium production and advances in agriculture to reduce methane emissions.

Perhaps Morrison will land somewhere between Johnson and Trump — paying lip service to targets but backing the Trumpian path of technology and capitalism. Morrison stands by Australia’s 26 per cent 2030 target but doesn’t want to be judged by the target. Hence his position: keep the target but beat it.

Morrison’s calculation is the public wants to see credible ­climate change action but not ­extreme action, not action that drives higher power prices or costs jobs.

This will be his coming pitch to the partyroom — he offers the progressives more serious action on emissions and he offers the conservatives a priority on maintaining economic growth.

Whether the Paris system succeeds or fails, the government will pursue its pivot to the new technology model. It will offer government intervention in technology innovation as the pathway to decarbonisation around the world. It will sketch emission reductions in the short term (to 2022), medium term (to 2030) and long term (to 2050).

“The carbon pricing model we have clung to for so long is not working,” Taylor said, referring to the global system. “The key to success is to decouple economic growth from emissions and this is best achieved by technology, not taxes.”

The viability of this policy remains to be seen. The flaws, identified by Parkinson, are the incentives and disincentives needed to ensure industry embraces the path of new technologies. Ultim­ately, this is a cost and economic issue. The reality, however, is that many people won’t like the Morrison message. Climate change advocates now reflect a bizarre mixture of science and religion; the ideological war is set only to ­intensify.

There is only one option for Morrison in this conflict — negotiate a position based on lower emissions but a strong economy. He cannot become anti-coal without inflaming the Queensland ­regions that voted for his government last year. But he cannot remain deaf to credible emission reductions without losing the suburbs in Melbourne and Sydney.

This dictates a policy geared to regional differences. And this is Taylor’s approach. He recognises the energy transition in Queensland where regional industry depends on coal-based power must follow a different trajectory to capital city energy transition.

Managing the competing Liberal and Nationals constituencies will be daunting but not necessarily more daunting than Anthony Albanese’s challenge in drawing a credibility line against the Greens. After he thwarted the Joyce challenge, McCormack said Australia didn’t need more ambitious emission reduction targets. Decoded: his own party cannot live with them.

But this raises the ultimate climate change question for Morrison this parliamentary term: does he possess the flexibility and political base to embrace the net zero carbon emissions stance by 2050. Some MPs would see this as a betrayal; others as a necessary step to credibility. Events are moving quickly and this will be enshrined perhaps in Glasgow as the new global benchmark with lots of nations signing up (most having no policy to get there) with those not signing risking exposure and ­retaliation.

Pressed on this 2050 target, Morrison defined the test he would apply: “I wouldn’t make a commitment like that if I couldn’t tell (the public) what it would cost them. I don’t believe the action you need to take is about putting taxes on people, putting their electricity prices up or driving industries out of regional areas. Our government doesn’t believe that either.”

Morrison, however, pledged at the Pacific Islands Forum to review the 2050 targets. Given the onerous tests he has applied he could change policy — one assumes — only after an independent inquiry had investigated and ­reported.

Morrison’s decision would be a small sample of the shattering politics likely to flow from the 2050 benchmark becoming the new normal for rich countries. Who carries the cost burden? Good question — the answer is that much of the burden would be carried by the working and lower middle classes — the people who instigated the populist ­rebellion that took Trump and Johnson to office.

Senior British commentator Philip Stevens, writing in the ­Financial Times on January 23, nailed this dilemma: “A large swath of voters looks at green policies through the same prism as Mr Trump — something that wealthy globalists inflict on the poor when they are not hopping from continent to continent on their private jets. In their own minds, the left-behinds have already been swindled by globalisation and robbed by the bankers. They are in no mood to be cheated again. The question I have is whether the liberals leading the decarbonisation charge are ready to finance the big income transfers needed to make it politically sustainable.”

You might also ponder how Canavan would react, given the mini manifesto he released on Friday explaining his decisions this week.

Rallying Nationals supporters, Canavan said: “Our wealth-producing industries, like farming, mining and manufacturing, have never been under greater attack. Farmers have had their land rights stripped off them, dams are being stopped because of some snail or frog, and mines get sabotaged by rich, city-based whingers who threaten and bully law-abiding businesses.

“I believe we must fight fire with fire. That’s what I did on Adani. I didn’t get ­intimidated. I didn’t back down to the bullies.”

The politics of climate change works in action and reaction. For each hit by one side there is a counter punch by the other side. New forces were released this week that will play into an unpredictable political dynamic.

Morrison’s task is to read the currents; those who fail will be swept away.