Energy can be a winning policy for the Coalition, but not like this

When Parliament resumes next month, the House of Representatives will continue its debate on Barnaby Joyce’s private member’s bill to abolish the net zero emissions target.

The government has taken the highly unusual step of giving the bill a priority almost always denied to such private member’s business, to showcase divisions within the Coalition. Labor’s decision to do so is political mischief-making of the highest order, but who can blame them? In the Senate, meanwhile, Joyce’s consigliere Matt Canavan will be introducing his own private senator’s bill to the same effect. (The fact that Canavan is currently supposed to be conducting a review of National Party policy on the issue shows how seriously that process can be taken.)

It is likely the issue will be agitated in the Liberal party room, as members of the party’s right seek to circumvent the more authentic process of policy review being undertaken by the shadow minister Dan Tehan.

These events come as yet another state branch of the Liberal Party, the Queensland division, voted at its annual conference a fortnight ago to abandon the net zero target. (The hybrid Liberal National Party is the Queensland division of the Liberal Party as well as an affiliate of the federal National Party.) The terms of the motion were carefully worded to refer to a net zero “mandate” rather than “target”, but the nuance was lost on almost everyone. Queensland joins other Liberal Party divisions in South Australia and Western Australia, the NSW branch of the National Party, and the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory, in rejecting net zero. The intensity of feeling among party members may vary somewhat from state to state, but overall, it is very strong.

Unlike Labor, decisions of the party organisation do not bind parliamentarians on policy. Nevertheless, the drumbeat of rank and file opinion, amplified by MPs and senators from the Liberal Right, and fanned by the National Party, make Dan Tehan’s (and Sussan Ley’s) task even harder than it would otherwise be.

Energy policy should not be as difficult for the Coalition as its rank and file members, and some of Ley and Tehan’s political colleagues, are determined to make it. In fact, it can be a winning issue for the opposition when the debate is about electricity prices, reliability of supply, and Labor’s failure to meet its own targets. But the Coalition will lose an argument that it should be able to win if it disappears into the ideological echo-chamber of a debate about net zero.

Unfortunately for Ley and Tehan, however, there are many on the right wing of the Coalition parties who, just like Labor’s hard left, like nothing more than indulging in ideological crusades: culture wars, history wars, climate wars – all the things the public doesn’t give a toss about.

“Net zero by 2050” is a target, not a policy. It is a target that is meaningless to most people because it describes what the state of the world might be in 25 years’ time. In the eyes of the general public, the debate about net zero is the ultimate political insiders’ obsession about something that bears no relationship to their everyday lives.

The danger for the Coalition is, however, that “net zero” is a rhetorical proxy for something that the public does care very much about. It has become shorthand for whether you take the long-term threat of climate change seriously. Anthony Albanese put it very simply when he told Sally Sara on ABC’s RN Breakfast a fortnight ago: “If you don’t support net zero, you don’t support action on climate change. It’s as simple as that.”

That is simplistic, reductive and absurd. But political messaging is always reductive, usually simplistic and often absurd. The point is that the public buys it. Younger Australians, in particular, accept it absolutely.

The politics of climate change reflect a deep divide between city and country. People who live on the land, in provincial cities and regional towns, feel very differently about the issue than capital city dwellers. They see their interests ignored, their landscapes blighted, and their way of life treated with cosmopolitan indifference, even contempt. For many of them “net zero” is code for something else: the degradation of regional Australia. No wonder they are angry.

This has always been the electoral base of the National Party. Now, it is the only remaining Liberal electoral base too, the party having been reduced to little more than a token presence in the capital cities, where it holds just nine of the 88 seats the Electoral Commission classifies as metropolitan.

The Coalition cannot form government unless it re-establishes itself in the big cities, where perceptions of the issue of climate change are significantly different. In many of the city electorates that used to be Liberal heartland, opposition to the net zero target is electoral poison.

That means moving the debate on from a debate about net zero, to the issues city people care about just as much as country people – power prices and the reliability of supply. That is where Labor is vulnerable.

Obsessing about the net zero target – whose real political importance is as a signifier of whether a party takes climate change seriously – only gets in the way, diverting the Coalition from an argument it can win, into political territory where, as the recent election so clearly showed, it will only lose.

George Brandis is a former Liberal Party senator and attorney-general. He also served as Australia’s high commissioner to the UK.

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