On net zero, there’s a very inconvenient truth for the Coalition: Voters have stopped listening

Great advertising slogans bypass the rational brain and create emotional resonance. They don’t need to make sense or withstand rational scrutiny. Nike told us to “Just Do It” – what, with whom, and to what end is immaterial. Apple told us to “Think Different” and proceeded to become the choice of conformist creatives everywhere.

My all-time favourite piece of (very Germanic) marketing sloganry belongs to confectionery brand Ritter: “Square. Practical. Good.” I really love the chocolate and the slogan gives my lizard brain a little tingle.

“Net Zero by 2050” is also a slogan, though it’s not owned by a team of advertising creatives who burnish their CVs with it. An explainer from the Australian National University attributes its origins to environmental lawyer and climate negotiator, Farhana Yamin. “In our lifetime, emissions have to go to zero,” the activist is quoted as saying. “That’s a message people understand.”

When the slogan was coined, “in our lifetime” seemed a lifetime away. Given the average “life sentence” imposed in the Australian court system is about 13 years, it would have been several lifetimes away when first uttered. Now it’s just a couple of lifetimes away, questions are becoming more urgent about how net zero can be achieved. Importantly, the goal was based on what scientists said needed to happen to minimise climate change caused by humans, not on the practicalities of getting emissions down to that level.

In 2025, the petroleum-based synthetic rubber tyres are hitting the road to 2050 climate armageddon. Governments around the world are trying to work out how to make more with less as energy demand surges. Internationally, leaders are backing away from the aspiration. Noted climate change correspondent David Wallace-Wells recently wrote in The New York Times that “the whole world has soured on climate politics”.

Not so the Australian Labor Party, which has divined a greater truth: for most voters the formulation “net zero by 2050” has ascended to a higher plane and become an expression of a genuine and deeply held feeling that we all have a responsibility to do our very best to protect the environment. Voters are emotionally connected to the idea, whether or not we are on track, irrespective of ultimate feasibility.

It might be cynical to suggest that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is exploiting our better angels. It is, however, observable that he uses every opportunity to reinforce the link between belief, climate change anxiety, and the aspirational 2050 target.

It’s working; or really, it has worked. The Liberal-leaning, renewable-energy-supporting Blueprint Institute released a YouGov survey of 5000 people at the beginning of September, which found that “more voters feel that the Liberal-National Coalition should keep the emissions reduction target”: 49 per cent believed they should keep it, 21 per cent were unsure and only 30 per cent were in favour of dropping it.

If a voter accepts that climate change is caused by humans – and surveys find that somewhere between 60 and 80 per cent of Australians do – then they are likely to back the 2050 emissions reduction target. This, despite the fact that a 2023 Essential poll found that only 31 per cent believe that target is achievable.

The Coalition is self-destructing because it does not understand this very simple point. There is no use trying to have a rational discussion about the logistics of achieving the stated emissions reductions when the logistics – even the logic – are irrelevant. It’s the classic Orwellian predicament: the Coalition knows two plus two doesn’t equal five to the very core of its being. It can’t help trying to point that out. Yet, every time it does, Albanese gets a boost.

The problem is largely of the Coalition’s own making. As one Liberal observed to me this week, “people don’t hear us when we talk about net zero because we lost all our credibility as a result of the climate wars”. After the civil war between Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, the Liberals and the Nationals, those who accept human-influenced climate change and those who don’t, the moderates and the right, voters disregard Coalition arguments over emissions as just another internal skirmish.

When the government announced its 2035 target band for emissions reduction on Thursday, a similar dynamic was at play. The target relies on the communications technique of anchoring, in which anything can be made to sound sensible with appropriately chosen context. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has created the illusion of moderation. The 62-70 per cent target band developed by the government’s Climate Change Authority is, conveniently, somewhere between the low end which businesses had hoped for and the high end which the Greens wanted. It’s also neatly in the middle of New Zealand’s 51-55 per cent target band and the UK’s 81 per cent on 1990 levels. As a result, it annoys critics on both sides enough that the target ends up framed as moderate and middle-ground. Voters will like that.

The reality that to meet the target, emissions will have to fall three times faster over the next 10 years than they have in the last few, is hidden behind a veneer of “ambitious yet achievable” comfortable centrism. And the government doesn’t even fully back the Climate Change Authority’s report, distancing itself from the claim that household energy prices will come down by $1000 over the decade. If that figure is questionable, a less-hamstrung opposition might ask, what else in the report does the government doubt?

Instead, the Coalition is flailing because of its poor reputation – in advertising parlance, “brand trust”. A slogan won’t fix what ails it, but neither will rational arguments bring voters around. It’s shouting Square. Practical. Good. But the electorate wants to Just Feel It.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.

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