The priority for whoever emerges from the Liberal partyroom meeting as winner tomorrow should be to start what will likely be a colossal brawl over energy policy and climate, both within Liberal ranks and with the Nationals, who remain stubbornly climate denialist even without high-vis cosplayer Matt Canavan tilting for the leadership on a “no net zero” platform.
The recovery of urban and suburban seats necessary for the Liberals to become competitive again will require fixing a number of problems: finding ways to stop alienating women and young voters, stopping the apparent involuntary questioning of the loyalty of Chinese-Australians — the last acceptable bigotry in Liberal ranks — and appearing relevant to an Australia where half the population is either from overseas or has a parent born overseas (and would thus, under Peter Dutton’s ill-fated citizenship revocation referendum, be eligible for deportation).
But having a sellable energy policy and appearing to take climate change seriously are both crucial — especially if the Liberals are to have any hope of retrieving teal seats. This doesn’t necessarily require taking climate seriously: Labor under Anthony Albanese has mastered the art of looking like it believes in the need to address the climate crisis while significantly worsening it with colossal, and mostly untaxed, fossil fuel exports. But the Coalition at least needs to look like it believes in the basics of science.
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Peter Dutton’s energy and climate policy was an impressive achievement: a figleaf for climate denialism that also managed to trash core Liberal values and upset the party’s fossil fuel friends. Nuclear energy requires a monumental expansion in the role of the federal government, with costs running into the hundreds of billions, making it both a massive political target and a repudiation of the Liberals’ smaller government/free markets/fiscal discipline ethos. The gas reservation policy, hastily cobbled together as Dutton was walking into the House of Representatives to deliver his budget reply — intended to replace nuclear, given the latter had landed so badly with voters — only upset gas companies while contradicting the Liberals’ commitment to free markets. Voters didn’t even understand it.
But nuclear was only the latest in a string of fake climate policies adopted by the Coalition to assure the Nationals and the old-man-yells-at-cloud base of the Liberal party that no-one really believes all that nonsense.
Remember, the Coalition started with the policy gold standard on climate: after years of denialism, John Howard committed to a comprehensive carbon pricing scheme before the 2007 election. After Malcolm Turnbull was rolled by denialists for attempting to fulfil the Howard commitment, Tony Abbott adopted the risible “direct action” — handouts to Nationals voters for fake emissions abatement using scams like Human-Induced Regeneration — and a so-called “safeguard mechanism” you could drive a diesel-huffing truck through. After another interval in which a restored Turnbull tried to inject some rationality and evidence into Coalition climate policy, Scott Morrison embraced “net zero”, with a significant chunk of the path to said zero to be achieved by magical “new technology”. The transparency of this fake policy was a key driver in the seizure by centrist independents of heartland Liberal seats. Dutton’s nuclear policy suffered a similar fate.
Still, in contrast to Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, Abbott, Morrison and Dutton kept their party and the Coalition unified. For a time.
What’s left for the Liberals in the “fake climate policies” cupboard? They could take nuclear to the 2028 election, as urged by the likes of Tim Wilson (the Adam Bandt of the Liberals, with the same irksome sanctimony and divisiveness that marked the now-former Greens leader). But the coal-fired power stations that policy is really designed to keep open will be three years older by then, and the transition to renewables, which nuclear was designed to shut down investment in, will be three years further advanced. It would also put the failure of the Liberals to learn the lessons of 2022 and 2025 up in lights.
Or it could try to make a virtue of denialism by adopting a policy wholly focused on resilience: the world is getting hotter, we can’t stop it, so let’s invest in resilience. The benefit of that policy would be the appeal to the Nationals, since it would allow tens of billions of dollars for regional infrastructure boondoggles administered by a Nationals ministers.
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Once again, not likely to be a policy that would appeal to affluent urban voters, especially those living on the coast. But big on party unity.
Alternatively, the new leadership could see that, given the dire state of the party inside and outside Parliament, a public display of disunity over energy policy wouldn’t make things any worse. In fact, it might make the moderates of the party look slightly less like the supine speedhumps to the right that they’ve been for fifteen years on this issue. Finally, they could show voters they had stood up and fought for a policy that recognised the reality of the climate crisis, rather than the reality of News Corp’s toxic stranglehold on much of the party and the Liberals’ reliance on the denialist Nationals to govern.
There’ll never be a better time: the next election is three years away. Voters won’t be paying any attention to politics for a long time. The pieces can be picked up, the furniture put right, the toys returned to the cot next year. But business as usual will just deliver the same results for a party wholly resistant to change.
Is it time for the Coalition to finally accept renewable energy?
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