For Albanese, climate has changed to put up or shut up

Scott Morrison in question time on Wednesday. Picture: Gary Ramage

Suddenly, Labor is under pressure on climate change.

Within 48 hours of the ­Coalition’s precarious and perilous climate change plan Scott Morrison will take to the election, the ALP is facing demands to reveal its own plan, which can be as perilous and precarious as the government’s.

While bewailing the Prime Minister’s failure to produce details and modelling of the “economic and trade” plan to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 after “eight long years in office”, Anthony Albanese’s opposition seems ill-prepared.

Morrison has achieved a ­Coalition commitment to 2050 net-zero carbon emissions, is producing an updated plan for the UN and the Glasgow climate conference, has produced an outline, will release the modelling and has a series of announcements on spending and investment on emissions reductions, especially in rural and regional areas, to be announced before the election.

Almost as importantly, Morrison is already campaigning to sell the Coalition’s plan, explain the commitment to 2050 net zero and reassure families and workers about costs and jobs. He is rejecting compulsion and legislation, ruling out taxes and nationalistically repudiating foreign calls for Australia to match foreign targets for emission reductions.

What’s more, Morrison is now in a position to set his benchmarks for Labor on carbon emissions about legislating targets, setting more ambitious interim targets and detailing and costing how those legislated targets would be achieved.

Labor’s aim for more ambitious carbon cuts and an inability or refusal to put a price on those ambitions contributed mightily to Bill Shorten’s defeat in 2019.

Three years on, Labor faces the same choices it did then and cannot afford to simply adopt the ­Coalition plan and targets – climate change spokesman Chris Bowen has ruled out any bipartisan support – and maintain its ­superior claim to authenticity.

Anthony Albanese in question time on Wednesday. Picture: Gary Ramage

The Opposition Leader was dead right in his initial response to the Nationals’ final approval for a 2050 commitment when he appealed to those wanting action on climate change, declaring that Labor believed in the target and Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce was not a believer.

On the same basis, and beyond the incentives for electric cars and the need to improve the national power grid, Labor must show it will go further than the Coalition, than just “Tony Abbott’s 2030 ­targets” and Morrison’s 2050 ­commitment.

It can’t continue to bank on Coalition climate change failure. Certainly the divisions will continue but it’s not enough to rely on failure and diversion of votes to minor parties to defeat Morrison.

Albanese has to offer a credible, costed, positive alternative on climate change if he wants to overcome the argument that ­Morri­son is building about an Australian middle course built on trade, economic management and job protection that rejects both com­pulsion and foreign ­interference.

Barnaby Joyce in question time on Wednesday. Picture: Gary Ramage

Bowen said on Wednesday: “After weeks of melodrama, after weeks of chaos and dysfunction, after eight years in office, we’ve got a slideshow and a sideshow.

“Now, that is not a climate ­policy”.

Bowen and Albanese both call for more detail, more time, for the modelling to be released and to wait until after the Glasgow conference for Labor to make the hard decisions on interim targets and legislation.

Of course, there is enormous pressure on Morrison over ­climate change but he knows it and is out there running a campaign to at least neutralise the issue and at most weaponise the issue against Labor once more in rural and regional Australia.

Labor needs to recognise that it too is under pressure now and cannot afford to wait too long and let Morrison repeat the epic ­recovery of the 2019 election.