A decade of Coalition bluster on climate change

United Nations climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell has urged the Australian government to set an ambitious 2035 emissions reduction target — arguing “bog standard is beneath you”. Of course, Labor boasts its own depressing record of disproving that statement, in the face of mounting pressure to act. But just how you define “bog standard” depends on context. And boy, have the Coalition plunged deep into that particular bog.

Indeed, the resumption of parliament gave the opposition an opportunity for another bout of self-involved paroxysm on climate. First, former party leadership rivals Michael McCormack and Barnaby Joyce formed a Tuco and Blondie-style alliance based on their shared desire to destroy Australia’s commitment to net zero, or, failing that, to destroy current Nationals leader David Littleproud.

The Australian featured the two in a dual interview, promising to collaborate on passing Joyce’s private members’ bill to repeal net zero. McCormack, when asked what he thought of Littleproud’s leadership of the Nationals, tried a little callback humour: “He’s the leader and I’m ambitious for him”, he said — just like Scott Morrison said about Malcolm Turnbull about 15 minutes before he replaced him in that role. Hilarious! Also: stop wasting our fucking time.

Coalition senators then split on One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s attempt to wedge new Liberal leader Sussan Ley on net-zero targets. Ley directed her senators to abstain from the vote — she was defied by both moderate backbenchers Jane Hume and Andrew McLachlan, who voted against Hanson, and right-wingers Matt Canavan and Alex Antic, who supported One Nation.

But this is simply the latest broadside in a decade of great gales of conservative sound and fury over Australia’s international commitments to action on climate change.

We’ll always have Paris

In December 2015, Australia, along with many other countries, signed up to the Paris Agreement, which called on the 196 party signatories to limit climate change to “well-below” 2 degrees, and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees. After roughly five minutes, there was consternation within the conservative government that had signed up — then Liberal Craig Kelly posted on Facebook that the deal was a “farce”, while fellow climate sceptic Dennis Jensen told the ABC that the agreement was “a lot of hype about essentially nothing”.

The rolling of profound climate sceptic Tony Abbott earlier that year for the far more moderate Malcolm Turnbull didn’t prove to be quite the game changer on climate action many hoped, perhaps best summed up by the following phrase: “Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal.”

This was then treasurer Scott Morrison during question time in early 2017, brandishing a lump of the black stuff as an attempt to ridicule the opposition over its renewable energy targets.

NEG-ligible policy

In 2018, Turnbull attempted to wrangle his party in support of the National Energy Guarantee. It was an ineffective compromise of a policy, but a policy nonetheless. He proudly announced at the time: “It’s been endorsed by the partyroom already and it will be endorsed again. It’s got absolutely overwhelming support”.

Within a week, that overwhelming support had disappeared amidst (yet another) right-wing rebellion. Turnbull further watered down the policy. It changed nothing. By the end of August, the man who had famously stated he would “not lead a party that is not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am” was proven right… just not in the way he’d hoped. His replacement, Morrison, almost immediately sought advice on using taxpayers’ money to provide subsidised loans to “clean” coal plants.

Morrison’s kingdom of nothing

In November 2019, after Scott Morrison’s “miracle” win in that year’s federal election, a report compiled by 14 NGOs, think tanks and research institutes from around the world found Australia’s response to climate change was the third worst in the G20, noting “a lack of policy, reliance on fossil fuels and rising emissions”. The Brown to Green Report stated Australia wasn’t on track to meet even its “insufficient” 2030 targets.

This was during “unprecedented” bushfires ravaging NSW, something that could only be linked to climate change by “raving inner-city lunatics” according to McCormack, by then deputy prime minister. The dynamic continued through months of catastrophic bushfires.

July 1st, 2020 marked the end of Australia’s commitments under the Kyoto climate deal and the implementation of its successor, the Paris Agreement. Then emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor hailed Australia’s success in “smashing” the Kyoto emissions targets. But of course, that was only due to tricky bookkeeping and rules skewed towards us.

Incidentally, around this time, Australian news consumers were found to be far more likely to believe climate change was “not at all” serious compared to other countries.

Perhaps this was down to the Australian media’s insistence — when it wasn’t outright denying that climate change existed — on greeting every vague Morrison allusion to climate action as though it were a policy. Morrison obliged them with a net-zero announcement in October 2021, which had gained the Nationals’ showily reluctant sign-off, presumably by being a content-free slideshow.

The nuclear option

The Coalition was swept from office in 2022 — every bit as much by climate-focused independent candidates and the Greens as it was by Labor — and new leader Peter Dutton took some interesting learnings from the experience. A true conservative on this front, Dutton attempted to preserve what Crikey politics editor Bernard Keane has described as “the single most boring and ossified ritual in Australian public policy”: the debate around nuclear energy.

Opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien told the world climate summit COP28 in 2023 that a reelected Coalition government would triple nuclear energy output and overturn Australia’s nuclear energy moratorium — a process which, coincidentally, would take ages and require the extension of fossil fuel production for many decades.

It got worse — the Coalition announced in mid-2024 that it would abandon 2030 targets altogether, meaning Dutton had dived beneath the 26-28% target that even Tony sodding Abbott was ok with. During the pure confusion of Dutton’s election year, the Coalition reaffirmed its commitment to the Paris Agreement, sort of, maybe, probably.

We all know what happened — the Coalition managed to fare even worse than in 2022, Dutton lost his seat, and pretty much all of the teal independents held their seats. And yet the right wing of the Coalition has once again concluded that the problem people have with their climate policy is that they are doing too much.