Anthony Albanese’s climate target gives opponents a bullseye

Anthony Albanese in the crowd at the 42nd annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade in Sydney on Saturday.

By wedding Labor to a 2050 zero net emissions target so early in the term, Anthony Albanese has revealed a structural weakness in his leadership and gambled away an important political advantage he had over Scott Morrison.

In embracing climate policy purity, the Labor leader has peeled back the divisions that were papered over under Bill Shorten’s leadership as the party went to an election it thought it couldn’t lose.

The lack of consultation with his caucus colleagues on adopting this position has also risked undermining Albanese’s authority.

Just days before he announced labor’s adoption of the target on February 21, a memo was hastily sent to some senior MPs that the decision by the shadow cabinet had in fact been taken on January 29 and was about to be announced.

Others found out on the Thursday night prior to Albanese’s speech the following morning. Some weren’t told at all. This secret was ostensibly kept from the caucus for weeks. What has angered some MPs has simply puzzled others who can’t understand why Albanese would so readily abandon his strategy of small-target politics which until now had allowed Labor to keep the blowtorch on the government.

One of Albanese’s accomplishments thus far has been to stop Labor talking about itself. That he appears to have buckled to pressure from Mark Butler, the South Australian MP and climate change spokesman under both the Shorten and Albanese regimes who also carries a large section of the soft left, has added to the resentment.

Even if accepting that a zero net emissions target was the most benign of all outcomes, there are now myriad pitfalls ahead.

The lingering structural issues exposed by Albanese’s gamble are obvious. On one side is Butler, on the other is the convener of the Right faction and veteran NSW MP Joel Fitzgibbon, who faces an existential threat in his Hunter Valley seat over coal.

What Albanese would view as a sensible compromise has now allowed tribal divisions in the Labor caucus to line up along more robust traditional ideological lines that have split the party in the past on totemic issues such as this one.

The so-called Otis Group — named after the Canberra Otis restaurant despite the group’s first meeting being at rival diner Kokomo’s — has been portrayed as a ginger group of pro-coal MPs numbering 20.

The group was created by Fitzgibbon and right-wing South Australian heavyweight Don Farrell in response to Albanese and Butler’s declaration of a “climate emergency”. Its number would swell beyond 30 should Fitzgibbon decide to embark on a recruitment campaign.

But the Otis group is aligned on issues beyond just energy, coal or resources. Its principles are based on conservative Labor positions on religious freedom, the role of government and taxation, to name a few. This should be of broader concern to Albanese, who in the meantime, and without a policy of his own on how to get to a 2050 zero net target, would be hoping that Scott Morrison can get Labor at least halfway there with his technology roadmap.

But it may not be enough to inoculate Labor against fears that its policy would inevitably involve a carbon price. The real pressure points inside Labor will be further tested when the more pressing issue of a medium-term target hits the deck. The future stability of Albanese’s leadership and even Labor’s election prospects may ultimately pivot on whether he decides to listen to Fitzgibbon or Butler.