Morrison walks fine line to retain electoral trust

Scott Morrison believes he has ­delivered a credible plan that seeks to balance community ­expectations on climate change against the global economic ­disruption he claims is inevitable.

The Prime Minister has kept fidelity with his 2019 election commitment, while acknowledging the difficulties of getting the Coalition to this point at all.

Central to this is the pledge to quarantine Australians from the cost-of-living impacts that all past iterations of climate policy have threatened.

But it begs the question as to what the tortured process of the past two weeks has been all about.

Morrison first signalled early last year that the government was moving in this direction. It was a matter of when rather than if it would adopt the long-term 2050 net zero target. The plan for how to achieve that — Angus Taylor’s technology investment road map — was released a year ago.

 

Aside from agreeing to adopt a long-term target, there is little in the plan that is new or should have come as a surprise.

There was no “Trojan horse” as the Nationals had feared. This was a formalisation of what was already in the planning. As Morrison himself described it; an evolution rather than a revolution.

Morrison was faced with three principal challenges.

The fact that the plan was so quickly condemned by the Left, will just confirm for Morrison that he has taken a sensible approach.

Critical to his ability to maintain faith with voters was that the net-zero plan was based on existing policies and that there would be no change to the much-sooner 2030 targets – given that they will be exceeded anyway.

Australians may be demanding action on climate change but they also want their jobs protected, their livelihoods sustained and the cost of living kept in check.

Morrison also needed to avoid a European pile-on over climate change while navigating the pincer movement from the US and Britain. This he appears to have achieved before even arriving in Glasgow with British Prime minister Boris Johnson giving the agreement his endorsement.

Morrison’s ability to manage the internal constituencies to reach a political consensus – notwithstanding pockets of dissent – has allowed him to chart a middle path that addressed the mainstreaming of net zero with a lower risk of alienating regional communities.

Morrison was not interested in a moral debate with Labor that he knows he couldn’t win.

Instead, he has sought to frame the debate as an economic plan.

Labor is now seeking to frame the argument as a referendum on Morrison himself and the issue of trust – chiefly that Morrison can’t be relied upon to deliver a climate change commitment in which he has no conviction.

This will suit Morrison, who believes this is easily countered by the argument that Labor can’t be trusted to deliver a climate change plan that didn’t involve a tax.