The conservative minority has destroyed Malcolm Turnbull’s energy policy and made deep inroads into destroying his prime ministership.
Under the threat of challenge, Turnbull has been driven to an astonishing capitulation. His new energy policy has potential for a sharper electoral edge but he is exposed as desperate and his authority is grievously damaged.
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Turnbull has killed the national energy guarantee because he was not prepared to see it pass on Labor votes. Yet he fudged this reality for much of the day in an unconvincing retreat. The victory by the conservative renegades is vast, with unpredictable consequences.
Yesterday was a turning point in Australian polity and politics. The Coalition parties in a historic philosophical switch have embraced price intervention, new powers for Australian Competition & Consumer Commission intervention and last-resort forced divestiture of energy company assets.
The market-oriented NEG, with its vast coalition of support, is buried. The aim to integrate energy and climate-change policy is dead. Hopes for a bipartisan investment framework are finished. Energy policy is again hostage to politics, ideology and culture wars. And another prime minister has been hobbled by our poisonous energy/climate struggles.
The energy companies, like the banks, are architects of the state power retribution that now threatens them. The sweeping policy revision unveiled yesterday by Turnbull, Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg — if it were to come — should have come far earlier. Coalition confusion over emission reductions opens the door for Australia’s post-election embrace next year of Labor’s far higher 45 per cent target with greater priority for renewables.
The government abandoned the NEG because it failed the politics test. The single organising principle has become intimidation and intervention to secure lower energy prices before the 2019 election. But Turnbull and Nationals leader Michael McCormack looked shell-shocked yesterday, raising doubts about their ability to sell the new agenda. The victory for Tony Abbott’s brutal payback — his quest to kill the NEG and his demand that energy policy be an anti-Labor contest — is immense.
The scale of Turnbull’s reversal is remarkable. A week ago, he had a decisive partyroom victory for the NEG. In the past five days he has staged two retreats: the first reported on Saturday and the second yesterday.
The rebels, by their determination to cross the floor, put Turnbull in a humiliating position of needing Labor votes to pass the NEG through parliament. By Sunday the next message was unequivocal: if Turnbull sealed a consensus deal with Labor, the conservative revolt would torch his leadership and any last hope of holding the conservative base.
In parliament yesterday afternoon, Turnbull finally conceded the truth: he would pass the NEG only on Coalition votes and those Coalition votes were not available. He paraded his weakness in his effort to explain himself to the House. The NEG is now exposed as a policy unable to encompass the political coalition needed to bring it into existence: the Coalition partyroom and the ALP.
Senior ministers say the NEG is not dead; it is merely unlegislated. So let’s be more polite — the NEG is a sleeping beauty awaiting a Prince Charming. And there is no prince in sight!
Turnbull won kudos for his policy revamp from conservatives such as Craig Kelly and Barnaby Joyce. Joyce said the message to energy companies was “if you play up, we can break you up”. Have no doubt, however, about the resentment within sections of the Liberal Party about the tactics the conservatives have used. These events will deepen the personal and policy tensions within the party.
Bill Shorten effortlessly exploited the reversals and turmoil within the government in parliament yesterday. His message: you can’t be sure what Turnbull thinks or believes. The bottom line is the conservatives have outmuscled Turnbull. In the end their threats to cross the floor broke his policy. He is exposed for sticking too long with a position that failed to muster the required political numbers.
Turnbull is left with a compromise engineered by himself, Morrison and Frydenberg — he is weakened and awaits opinion polls in coming weeks only likely to reflect the astonishing degree of disunity on display.
Liberals face elemental crisis
The Liberal Party’s view of Australian capitalism — the model it has known all its days — is facing a death sentence.
Let’s not give in to this threat
Australia must not allow what makes it great to be undermined by tribalism.