The innards and outs of Coalition’s energy policy

In her book Plots and Prayers, Niki Savva writes about a Coalition cabinet meeting that took place just before Malcolm Turnbull’s overthrow in 2018. When discussion turned to the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) – Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg’s bid to cut emissions while keeping energy affordable – Christopher Pyne argued: “We can keep dragging our bloodied stump across the political firmament, leaving a trail of gore behind us, or we can cut our losses and move on [from the NEG].”

The Liberal Party’s choice of Scott Morrison to replace Turnbull and his subsequent election victory might have been seen as vindication for Pyne’s view, except that the bleeding and the losses continued.

Voters in urban Liberal heartlands, unconvinced by Morrison’s approach to climate change, turned to teal independents, turfing out Frydenberg and other moderate Liberals.

That Morrison and his deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, had eventually committed the Coalition to a policy of net zero emissions by 2050 was offset by their defeat in the 2022 election.

Having taken a policy emphasising nuclear energy rather than renewables to this year’s even heavier defeat, any hope that time in opposition might have allowed the Liberals and Nationals to “move on” seems to have vanished.

It was almost fitting, then, that on the day Sussan Ley stood up to ask her first question in parliament as opposition leader in July, it was Joyce who threw the first stone at the Coalition’s commitment to net zero.

By September, the insurrection had spread to Liberal ranks.

Cue the ghost of government past, with Morrison himself taking to social media to dismiss “net zero at any cost on any rigid timetable” as “just ideology”. So much for “we take commitments we make very seriously”.

Matters have come to a crunch with the Nationals’ decision to ditch net zero. Now the diminished cohort of Liberals who support net zero by 2050 – many of whom also supported Ley’s narrow leadership victory – are the ones threatening dire consequences.

In the face of an astonishingly broad community of stakeholders warning against inaction, both Coalition parties will point to the fact that their final decisions on policy are a product of their democratic internal processes. But it is the verdict of a much larger democratic process that matters here.

If, as frontbencher Julian Leeser insists, the Liberals are unanimous that “climate change is real” and the party’s policy must reduce emissions, what are voters to make of the proposed abandonment of a timetable and a target, of even the vocabulary of net zero?

Might they conclude that talk of energy prices and energy security is just covering for an anti-science, anti-renewables ideology?

It is possible that Ley could win back her party, only to lose ground with the electorate. Or that in taking the principled stand, she accelerates her own demise at the hands of plotters to her right.

Either way, the Coalition’s trail of gore looks certain to lengthen.

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