Liberals must focus their energies on putting out fires

Likening the national energy guarantee to a carbon tax was a naked attempt from Tony Abbott to raise the stakes in his personal battle with Malcolm Turnbull.

It was a pointed reminder to colleagues that Turnbull has been down this road before.

“If you lose two years of Newspolls, that does tell you something … I used to say in a different context, you don’t need to change the leader but by God you do need to change the policy,” he told 2GB’s Ray Hadley.

Many of Turnbull’s colleagues (Abbott, obviously, not being one of them) have been prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt over the NEG, based on assurances from Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg that it would not be an energy intensity scheme.

But the release of the draft ­detail design report for the NEG — the nuts and bolts for how it will work — appears to have confirmed that it will indeed be an EIS, if not by name then by its effect.

Conservative MPs have dismissed the protestations by the government-appointed chair of the Energy Security Board, Kerry Schott, who yesterday issued a ­colourful rejection of such a ­proposition.

Even Labor has confirmed that, as far as it is concerned, it is an EIS, to the extent that it will adopt it and inject it with steroids because it doesn’t think it goes far enough in the setting of emissions targets.

This is the political danger with which Turnbull is now presented. He and Frydenberg will be asked to explain to the Liberal partyroom today why they think it won’t be an EIS, after promising that it wouldn’t be.

The semantics over acronyms rather than the scheme’s design merits or flaws are not irrelevant. The demonising of acronyms can be the most effective way to kill a policy, as history has shown.

As far as punters are concerned, an EIS may not mean anything, but it may be remembered as something the government promised not to do.

The optics of releasing the ­report at 5pm on Friday, after the close of business and ahead of a weekend, hasn’t helped, either, if assuaging concerns of the party room was indeed a concern.

This sort of practice is typically known as “taking out the trash”.

Ministers were told in a hastily assembled phone hook-up just ­before its release, but most ­Coalition MPs had to read about it in the newspapers.

There is no question the issue will be raised yet again at the party­room level today. The question is how heated the discussion will become now that MPs who are concerned about it have some meat on the bone to rip into.

Frydenberg’s response is likely to be that it is a “draft final” report and a “final final” won’t be presented until stakeholders have had a chance to make submissions. This is unlikely to wash if it all goes off to COAG before it comes back to the partyroom again for final tick-off.

Frydenberg has understandably become hypersensitive to scrutiny or criticism of the NEG. This is a reflection of the general level of political anxiety in the party­room over the government’s decision to get back into the ­energy price and carbon emissions space again.

Frydenberg, who was handed the proverbial sandwiches more than two years ago, might be right that the NEG in principle is the best solution to the energy price and supply crisis, and the seemingly intractable political impasse over reducing emissions in the process and by how much.

But what was sold to the partyroom as an election-winning issue for the Coalition 18 months ago has now become an issue that it may simply need to neutralise.