Labor and Greens return to carbon emissions policy combat

Greens leader Adam Bandt. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

Labor and the Greens are once again embroiled in a game of mutually assured destruction over climate change policy.

The parliament is facing a back-to-the-future moment.

And certainty for industry over mandated emissions reductions is no closer to resolution.

The Greens have drawn a line in the sand over its support for the government’s signature emissions reduction plan.

And the Coalition’s position is largely irrelevant.

This is a battle between forces on the left over political territory.

The Greens are now refusing to support Labor’s changes to the safeguard mechanism – a Coalition policy – without a commitment from Labor to end all new gas and coal projects.

This is not a demand that the Albanese government can accept. It would have been difficult to make prior to the current energy price crisis. It is impossible now.

While insiders say there is goodwill on both sides for a détente, the stakes are now as high as they were 15 years ago.

If the Greens follow through with their threat to use their Senate power to block Labor’s broader scheme, the parallels with the Rudd government’s failure to reach consensus with the Greens in 2009 will be repeated. Having rejected the imperfect, it will also deny what may be acceptable.

The safeguard mechanism changes being proposed by Labor are the most significant climate policy changes in decades. There is no prospect of the Albanese government reaching its emissions reduction targets of 43 per cent by 2030 without them.

The Greens reluctantly backed Labor’s targets last year despite its own claims of a 75 per cent reduction.

It has rolled over on other policies, as well. But Adam Bandt has clearly been saving up the party’s balance-of-power muscle to have a fight this year over core Greens policy, in an attempt to reassert its new parliamentary authority.

If the Greens concede on this issue, without securing a future ban on coal and gas, it becomes politically irrelevant to a significant cohort of its constituency. Yet if it persists with an all-or-nothing approach, as it did with Kevin Rudd’s carbon pollution reduction scheme, it risks disenfranchising a broader support base.

The cost-of-living crisis once again complicates the problem for Labor. Its last attempt to impose an effective carbon tax came amid the global financial crisis.

The retail politics of climate change and energy prices are once again stacked against Labor, which is pursuing a totemic social and economic policy amid a time of great economic uncertainty.

This complicates the political fight it is once again having with the Greens, who are acutely aware of its own political vulnerabilities; the minor party cannot afford to give Labor a victory through appeasement on a policy that underwrites its existential principles.

Nor can Labor afford to fail on achieving a core election pledge on emissions reductions.

Whereas the Greens may have boxed themselves into an ideological corner again over coal and gas, the channels for Labor to fulfil its key election promise are narrowing.

The irony is that Labor and the Greens are now locked in an argument over what is essentially a Coalition policy.