For three elections now, the “teal” independents have eaten the Liberals’ lunch with such gusto that the once-great conservative party is electorally starved.

It is malnourished to the point of near oblivion in the nation’s inner-metropolitan seats – those populated by voters often lazily written off as “elite”, but who become much harder to dismiss when you realise how numerous they are.

The teals have engineered this lunch-eating with an effective campaign line: the National Party runs the Liberal Party’s climate and energy policy. And a vote for Scott Morrison/Peter Dutton is actually a vote for Barnaby Joyce.

The teals might have to adjust that last line now that Joyce is engaging in an attention-seeking sulk outside the Nats’ party room, and is flirting with joining One Nation.

But the claim that the National Party is running the Liberal Party’s energy policy? It is no piece of campaign puffery. The Liberal Party seems hell-bent on proving its truth.

It appears increasingly likely that the Liberal Party will dump its commitment to a net zero emissions by 2050 policy, its hand forced by the Nationals’ public rejection of net zero. (For which, on Tuesday, Joyce claimed credit, saying: “I’ve played my part. I could be faux humble and say, ‘Oh no, no.’ Definitely, I played my part. Had a big part.”) Never mind that it is the policy the Coalition adhered to during a near-decade spent in government.

Now they’ve changed their minds.

Nationals leader David Littleproud cited “lived experience” for the pivot, and said there was a “cheaper, better, fairer way” to reduce emissions. He did not say why the Coalition did not institute that cheaper, better, fairer way when it was in government. Perhaps they hadn’t discovered it yet. They still haven’t enunciated it now.

As for the Liberals, their true thoughts and feelings on whether it is important for Australia to have a credible strategy to reduce its emissions are obscure. While the party is officially conducting a sober review of the net zero policy, the situation is starting to feel so emotionally dysregulated that it’s almost as if it doesn’t matter what the Liberal Party says any more.

And as Opposition Leader Sussan Ley must surely see, even if the Liberal Party does keep the policy, the events of the past few months have killed off any illusion that net-zero-by-2050 can be a fixed or reliable position for the party she leads – something that voters can count on.

The problem, as Ley must also see, is that once you pull the thread of net zero, the whole Liberal ball of wool starts to unravel.

What, exactly, can the voters count on when it comes to the Liberal Party? What do the Liberals believe in? Lower taxes? Aspiration? Market-driven solutions? The stringent policing of prime ministerial T-shirts?

Ley showed promising strength early in her leadership. She faced down Littleproud when the Nats split from the Liberals for a week in May. She banished (to the backbench) Jacinta Nampijinpa Price following the latter’s inflammatory comments on Indian migrants.

But since then, she has made some silly mistakes regarding T-shirts, and her insistence that Australia’s ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd, be sacked.

And Ley cannot seek any comfort in history because history shows that every Liberal Party leader since Tony Abbott has been felled by the issue of climate action, one way or the other.

Abbott won a landslide victory campaigning against the Gillard government’s carbon tax, but it was an oppositional position which didn’t translate well to government. He was necked by Malcolm Turnbull two years into his prime ministership.

As prime minister, Turnbull ratified the Paris Agreement, which committed Australia to the global goal of restricting the warming of the planet to “well below” two degrees. In line with that commitment, Turnbull came up with the “National Energy Guarantee”, a sensible energy policy (albeit one which few voters understood), which imposed reliability and emission reduction obligations on energy companies and big energy users.

Whatever – it doesn’t matter what the NEG was about because it was blown up by the Liberal party room, despite having been agreed on by cabinet. The short-lived NEG formed the catalyst for Turnbull to be toppled by Scott Morrison in 2018 (the PM’s poor polling results didn’t help).

Morrison literally cuddled coal in parliament and was lambasted for his inert response to the catastrophic bushfires of 2019-2020. Those fires, and the apocalyptic images that came from them – of people trapped behind walls of flame, of burnt koalas keening in pain – were probably the first time the Australian public began to panic a little about global warming.

Under international and voter pressure, Morrison signed Australia up to net zero before the Glasgow climate summit in 2021, but the damage was most likely done.

He was not seen as a credible leader on climate and energy policy, and the internal pressure from the Nationals, who hated the policy, was too obvious to paper over.

When Peter Dutton took the Liberal leadership in 2022, he attempted to side-step the whole emissions mess by coming up with a fiction, so implausible voters saw right through it – an energy policy that had the taxpayer part-financing the construction of nuclear reactors that would take decades to produce any energy.

Credible energy policy is a fundamental issue for any party that wishes to govern. But here is the sad thing – the Liberals have self-sabotaged over energy policy not because they are fighting for something.

Right now, it is difficult to name something the Liberals are for.

If the Nats, and the conservatives within the Liberal Party, get their way, and the commitment to net zero is abandoned, then what is left? Something a lot less than net zero.

Jacqueline Maley is an author and columnist.

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