Twice in recent times the Liberals have faced an existential crisis over climate and energy policy: in 2009 over Kevin Rudd's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and in 2018 over the National Energy Guarantee, a plan to reduce emissions while maintaining reliability at lowest cost.
Author
- Michelle Grattan
Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
In each case the party was led by Malcolm Turnbull, first as opposition leader and then as prime minister. Both times, Turnbull suffered a mortal blow to his leadership.
Looking back to the 2018 crisis, the now leader Sussan Ley told the ABC's Nemesis program after the 2022 election, "unfortunately Malcolm couldn't unite the joint party room on energy policy and we had a breakaway group in the Nationals who made a strategic decision to blow this up and that was very unfortunate".
It wasn't only the Nationals. Andrew Hastie, now again railing over climate policy, told the program he'd threatened to cross the floor over Turnbull's policy.
The damage done by these battles must live in the memory of today's Liberal parliamentarians. At least you'd think so. Perhaps not. Descriptions of their current shambles come to mind. Lemmings over the cliff. Dogs returning to their vomit. Some in the Coalition might reflect on the full biblical quote of the latter: "as a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly".
The Liberals and the Coalition as a whole are now in a full-blown crisis over climate policy. This time it's about the net zero by 2050 target which, given the long timeline, in theory should be an easier challenge than they faced in 2009 or 2018.
Those Liberals trying to work towards what they hope might be a viable compromise - that acknowledges net zero while loosening the constraint it imposes - are finding it increasingly difficult by the day, as the party at large becomes more feral.
Among the Liberal rank and file, the demonisation of net zero has spread like a contagion. So virulent is it, that some MPs are nervous when they have to front branch meetings.
Yet the Liberals are paralysed until they resolve their position, whatever the consequences. At best, those consequences would be an uneasy internal truce. At worst? A massive blow-up. Ley's leadership, safe for the moment, could be undermined, possibly fatally.
Angus Taylor, the alternative leader, is a hardliner on net zero who, however, would accept a compromise and hope to stand ready to pick up the pieces if Ley's leadership later fell apart.
As net zero tears Liberals apart, it sits like a great weight on the chest of the Nationals. Barnaby Joyce, set to jump out of the Nationals party room, has named it among other reasons for doing so. Anti net zero proselytiser Matt Canavan is running the Nationals' review, which is heading on one direction.
The conveners of the backbench Coalition policy committee for the Australian economy, Jane Hume and Simon Kennedy, have called a meeting for Friday of next week to allow Liberal and Nationals parliamentarians to say their bit.
Hume is previously on record declaring she has "absolutely no doubt" the technology will be there to deliver net zero by 2050, and "this is something we should be embracing".
Opposition energy spokesman Dan Tehan is running a taskforce, including representatives from both parties, charged with developing an energy policy. Tehan (who told a conference this week he supported net zero in the Morrison government and "I haven't changed the view that I had at at the time") initially gave the impression this would be a relatively leisurely operation. But now the foot needs to be on the accelerator.
In the coming sitting fortnight, its policy crisis will be a distraction for the opposition.
On the other side of the aisle, Environment Minister Murray Watt will be under the pump as he prepares to introduce his legislation to reform the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. Anthony Albanese looks to Watt as a fixer (as he does to Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke). Watt's job over coming weeks or months is to wrangle a deal for these changes that are aimed at producing a more workable interface between development (from housing to energy projects) and environmental protection.
Last term, when Tanya Plibersek was environment minister, this effort, through the Nature Positive bill, collapsed spectacularly.
Watt is juggling stakeholders - developers and environmentalists - with opposing interests. One sticking point for the environmentalists is that Watt proposes the minister would retain the final approval powers for projects, able to override the new environment protection agency.
The long-overdue overhaul of the EPBC act follows the report by Graeme Samuel, former head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, to the Coalition government in 2020. That said both the environment and business had suffered from "2 decades of failing to continuously improve the law and its implementation".
Former treasury secretary Ken Henry earlier this year told the National Press Club:
the EPBC act has patently failed to halt the degradation of Australia's natural environment. […] Report after report tells the same story of failure.
Landing the reform of the EPBC is one important test for the government's commitment, at its economic reform roundtable, to removing red and green tape.
But Labor will need the support of either the opposition or the Greens in the Senate. Watt has been talking to both.
Watt gave parts of the planned legislation to the opposition and Greens this week.
Ley, a former environment minister, on Thursday attacked the bill as "a handbrake on investment". "There's nothing in what has been said today that gives investors or the Coalition confidence that this government actually understands what the problem is and has a plan to address it," she said.
Greens spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young also condemned the measures. "We've got carve outs for industry and business, fast tracking for big projects, fast tracking for companies so that they can effectively get their approvals faster, easier and cheaper."
The Greens want a climate trigger, which the government flatly rejects.
The Greens believe the opposition is the government's preferred dance partner. That's probably true. Opposition environment spokesperson Angie Bell sounded encouraging in September, telling the ABC, "I think it would be in the best interest of the nation for the two major parties to come to the table and to make sure that these reforms to the EPBC Act are sensible and serve our country into the future, because these reforms are too important to get wrong". Bell has had four meetings with Watt.
The government will be flexible in negotiations, and business wants action. But Labor is worried the opposition, with a heap of its own problems, is unpredictable and the Liberals could be held hostage by the Nationals, who have declared major reservations, labelling the legislation and "environmental ideology".
Given the general state of turmoil the opposition, it's not an unreasonable fear. report
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
