18-05-2025
Sussan Ley's choice: an electable climate policy or abandoning the Nationals
The Liberal Party's fate was sealed on July 17, 2014, when it repealed the Gillard government's Clean Energy Act and then danced on its grave with a group hug on the floor of parliament, so iconically captured by photographer Alex Ellinghausen.
It was the culmination of the party's decision five years earlier to reject — by one caucus vote — the science of climate change, and with it, Malcolm Turnbull, and instead go with the Abbott/Murdoch/Fox/Sky anti-science right-wing crankery that has since made the Murdochs so much money but done the opposite for their political adherents.
As every member of the party and every Murdoch editor knows before going to hospital, making up your own science when you're not a scientist can only make you sick or dead, and so it has turned out.
When Greg Hunt, Kelly O'Dwyer, Christopher Pyne and Peter Dutton were celebrating the repeal of the carbon tax that day in July 2014, the Liberal Party had 58 seats in the lower house, and the Coalition had a total of 90.
Today, the party has 18 seats and the Coalition 43. Labor has 93.
The Liberal Party didn't lose 40 seats in a decade only because of climate change, but it's the main reason.
And now the new leader, Sussan Ley, must choose between two ways to cement the party's doom: either keep the Coalition together without an electable climate policy, or have one and go it alone, without the Nationals.
Either way, they're done for. Ley can't have an electable climate policy and be in a coalition with the Nationals.
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It may not even be possible to keep the Liberal Party itself together; after all, there were no Nationals in that parliamentary hug on July 17, 2014, and it was the two leaders of the Liberal Party, Nick Minchin in the Senate and Tony Abbott in the lower house, who took them all up the garden path and into the Murdoch blackberries in 2009.
Peter Dutton's nuclear energy wheeze seemed a clever way of keeping the Coalition together while having a policy that at least had the words "net zero by 2050" in it, and Sussan Ley might think she can do that can do that again.
But that's a proven failure.
That's partly because Dutton had to say the government would itself build and pay for seven nuclear power stations at vast unfunded cost in seven electorates rather than simply saying he would repeal the legislation that bans nuclear energy, because he knew the policy would look hollow when it became clear that no nuclear power stations would get built if it was left to the market.
But it will always be impossible for the National Party to go along with net zero by 2050 unless it does involve nuclear power, because they can't abide renewable energy and agriculture accounts for 15.6 per cent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions.
Agricultural emissions can't be offset unless there is less livestock and a lot of grazing land is replaced by new trees, as well as solar panels and wind turbines.
Livestock agriculture is not just a problem for the National Party, but for humanity.
In their book Abundance (currently causing a riot of debate among American progressives), Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson write: "Industrial animal agriculture is more than a climate problem. It is a moral stain on humanity."
"There is probably no single change that would do more for interlinked environmental problems than for the world to cease using cows and goats and sheep for food," they write.
"But to suggest such a thing is to court political ruin. People want to eat meat, and they want the meat to be cheap and plentiful."
They go on to posit that there is "no near-term politics" that would actually ban meat consumption.
People also want electricity to cheap, plentiful and reliable, which is why conservatives who deny climate change keep getting puzzled when they don't win elections.
Just last week, the conservative think tank the Institute of Public Affairs published a poll showing that 79 per cent of Australians want energy policy to be directed to it being affordable and reliable rather than meeting net zero by 2050.
It was a poll of 1,027 people between April 25 and 28, so not many, and the IPA has run campaigns against renewables, but both major parties are at least superficially committed to net zero by 2050 so there was no anti-climate change choice.
Then again, the only party with abolishing the net zero commitment in its platform — Trumpet of Patriots — didn't get a single seat and managed just 1.87 per cent of the primary vote. If the IPA poll was right, they should have the balance of power.
The Coalition also had "net zero by 2050" in its platform when it lost in 2022, but that was even less credible than this year, when they at least had nuclear power. In 2022 it was just about vague possible technology in the future.
The point is that it does not look feasible for a political party to succeed in Australia without a credible commitment to reducing carbon emissions, and that is only likely to become more so as the planet warms, and life becomes less tolerable and more expensive through higher insurance premiums.
But it also looks impossible for the National Party to do that, not just because it's further to the right but because it's based in the bush, where the biggest adjustments will be demanded: vast solar and wind farms, lots of power lines, less grazing and more trees.
The irony for them is that true conservatism now requires radicalism, by which I mean the well-used quote from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel, The Leopard, in which the character Tancredi Falconeri says: "If everything is going to stay the same, everything has to change".
Or as Klein and Thompson put it in Abundance: "To maintain the climate we have had, or anything close to it, requires us to remake the world we have built."
That includes remaking food production as well as energy and transport, changes which are well underway, and moving rapidly towards lab-grown meat and proteins.
It also means giving over grazing land to trees that are sequestering carbon from industries that can't easily be decarbonised, like cement, steel and aviation and … meat.
That probably means the Nationals are out of the game.
For the Liberals it's a long, long way back from 18 seats to the 75 they won in 2004, and a majority of their own.
Alan Kohler is finance presenter and columnist on ABC News and he also writes for Intelligent Investor.
