Changing the climate in the Liberal Party

Now, at least and at last, the line is drawn on climate change and the environment.

With the Liberals’ decision to drop net zero and the capture of their Leader, with her hapless faction of “wets”, by the National Party lobby, Australians now have two clear alternatives for moulding their future way of life.

Problem solving — will reason prevail?

Option one: Labor Government (pressured by Greens wanting more).

Face the threat to the survival of the Earth and human species by taking timely and rational action on climate change, which unfortunately may cost everybody something. Keep the goal of reducing greenhouse gases to net zero by 2050. As the coal-fired power stations break down, replace them with renewables as the cheapest and environmentally safe alternative, to meet expanding demand for electric power, including for cars and data centres.

Predicate all economic activity on the need for sustainability, meaning no unregulated, highly extractive or polluting industries; compensatory measures like carbon trading, recycling and the like. Apply relief measures like electricity rebates and subsidies on solar panels plus batteries. Hold out for the Lone Ranger to save the Earth; maybe “good” AI helping to generate undreamt-of solutions, or a scientific breakthrough to allow controlled use of nuclear fusion.

Make it all be driven by appraisal of facts, as necessary, deploying expertise of professionals, for example, on climate science and managing communication, cultural complexity and ethics. In a few words, appeal to that part of being human that involves thought, conscience and emotional balance.

Sussan Ley says Coalition has always been committed to Net Zero renewables

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has laid to rest growing concerns that her party has abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement.

Ditch the environment; be Trump-in-the-south

Option two: Liberal and National Parties (integrated with fossil energy industry lobby).

This is the environmental side of the proposition, which says to voters: if you couldn’t care less about the environment and detest coloured people or migrants, then the Coalition is for you. The advice on the environment is that, you go for broke, just continue as if there were no crisis.

As a life strategy for consumers, borrow to buy big vehicles and houses; deploy large-scale engineering solutions for buildings and infrastructure, ignoring environmental problems now with concrete or steel; demand still more government subsidies on household power consumption, vehicle depreciation, fuel for the “truck”, whatever you don’t like paying for; turn a blind eye to extermination of wildlife species; likewise genocidal warfare caused by conflicts over land and water overseas; laugh at Black people’s villages getting inundated by the ocean.

Indulge the great anxiety about change in your conservative heart by denying that change is happening in nature, so no need for net zero. Deploy insult and kick up distorted polemics via cynical mass media (“sceptics” in News Corp press, Sky News) to discredit knowledge and thinking, and even distribute some blame for things going wrong: the Black children stealing SUVs and BMWs, migrants wearing “unwelcome” costumes, unions out to cause trouble, “greenies” being ratbags and spoilsports, teachers and intellectuals who are up themselves.

You won't know your great-grandchildren

More solutions to fit the new Liberal menu: Adopt strategies for your future survival on the principle that there is no society, only individuals and families; the anthem of Thatcherite “dries” against social responsibility ideas of “wets” inside their party.

It will mean getting money as life’s first priority; spending it to live in walled compounds with armed guards; pump in as much water as you want, for the pool, garden, cars, computers, whatever, whenever drinking supplies start running out for everybody; ramp up the air-conditioning against the advancing summers; provide backing for fascist echelons to suppress public dissent with lawless violence.

Will there be consequences for fighting this rearguard action as the Earth perishes? Not if you keep a hard head about you. You will be able to find, admittedly artificial space and a sweet life for your children and, if they insist on procreating, for their children, too. Then the next generation? Well, you won’t know your great-grandchildren, will you? So who cares about them?

The Liberal guide to net zero: How to do nothing and call it policy

Independent Australia has obtained what purports to be a briefing paper on net zero to be presented to Liberal Party Parliamentarians this week.

Hard choices

These can be a hard two choices. In the early days of science fiction, if the Earth was endangered, all would come together to try and save it. There has been bipartisan agreement on climate change twice in Australia, but both times dumped by the right-wing parties who went U-turn.

Just to jog the memory: Malcolm Turnbull cooperating with a Labor government on emissions trading was displaced as Liberal Leader in 2009 by Tony Abbott, who said climate change was “crap” (same as his opposite number in America, Donald Trump, telling the United Nations it was a “con job”).

Likewise, Abbott’s successor, Scott Morrison, backed away from climate change, most famously disregarding the mega-bushfires as normal. Both times, there were votes in it. Everybody likes to be reassured, facts or not. Back to gay abandon? Plenty will sign up for that.

This third time looks like a terminal break. The Liberals’ abandonment of the practical, also highly symbolic and aspirational target of achieving zero net emissions, was egregious, in-your-face and wanton. There has been no end of blah-blah: talk, spin and rationalisation. But it says, plainly enough: if climate change should be true, we are not going to be all in this together, to combat it; on our side, we will just pretend to people it is not happening.

The case of Sussan Ley

To rub that in, the nominal Liberal Leader, Sussan Ley, began asserting that deployment of renewable energy was the cause of rising energy bills. More can be expected, none of it geared to surviving fact checks.

We should say a “nominal” Leader, because within the Opposition Coalition, the National Party, a bush reactionary formation linked to resources industries, and the ideological radical-right within Ley's own party, have together got the numbers. The woman’s own faction, loosely called “moderate”, is the rump taken from the “Menzies majority”. Sir Robert Menzies, as Prime Minister, was able to coast along during post-war economic expansion, making sure he did not do anything too extreme.

It was a pragmatic approach, but not adaptable to changes in the economy and society, with developments like the growth of service industries and professionalisation, and mass engagement of women in the workforce.

Nationals’ net zero backflip a disaster for the regions

The National Party’s decision to abandon its net zero target is a betrayal of regional Australia, leaving flood-ravaged communities like Lismore to face the escalating impacts of climate change alone.

“Moderates”, in any event, were never really moderate, “small-l liberals” who might talk ideology, about reason, truth, “good government” and rights. They always stayed in the party tent, backing opportunistic election schemes, like the anti-communist cast of the “Petrov affair”, or the anti-refugee “Tampa” campaign. The rump party went to election in 2025 with no statement on values, and no coherent policies; it would dabble in racism with the anti-refugee campaigns — and now promises economic plenty under a billionaires’ regime, trashing the natural environment.

From 1970, on the back of advancing digitisation, a financial ideology called neoliberalism was brought in from the United States and taken up by zealots getting into the Liberal Party rank and file — a takeover operation against a “moderate” party, like what happened to the American Republicans.

Most widely understood now as a disastrous prescription for extreme inequality, glory-holing overproduction, destruction of nature and exhaustion of natural resources, it had them talking “small government”, abandoning business regulation to the point of criminal free-for-alls and running fire sales of public property. That is where most of the extreme right flank of the party would hail from — and if the internal numbers keep going the way they have, the change from a moderate, if mediocre conservative Opposition to a reactionary one will be completed.

Australians to choose — maybe grow up

The use of Sussan Ley has been accompanied by the selection of two female yuppies — State Liberal Leaders Kellie Sloane in New South Wales and Jess Wilson in Victoria. (Both needing to win in big cities, they have vowed to keep net zero state legislation, against their federal party; hard to sustain where climate doesn’t recognise State boundaries.)

The party today might be hoping to offset the influence of the Teal Independents, intelligent middle-class women interested in government for the common good, who might have gone to the Liberal Party, but could not be bothered dealing with misogyny in its ranks, or apologising for racism and social injustice.

What Australian citizens will make of all this going into the coming decades may have nothing to do with politics or ideology. The uptake of solar panels and batteries, and electric vehicles, plus other mass actions, like the 25 per cent reduction of water use in Brisbane during a drought crisis in 2007, demonstrate the power of common sense. But the main choice now being forced by the Opposition parties will be a problem for many.

One option is to get thoughtful, accept the ecological imperative and face up to changes. People in their shrewdest moments will realise that it is a historical point of survival, where changes will mean adaptation, risk and some inevitable costs, the rise in energy bills being a foretaste.

The second option, as said, is to get angry, pretend nothing is happening to the Earth, hope to go back to simpler days and indulge some nasty impulses about social change, and supposed causes of things going wrong, like migrants, “LGBTQI”, anybody not like yourself.

Facing up to realities can be tough, where you might have to adjust, help with solutions, and realise that complaining and agitating won’t make it all go away. Maybe it calls for just growing up.

Amongst Dr Lee Duffield’s vast journalistic experience, he has served as ABC's European correspondent. He is also an esteemed academic and member of the editorial advisory board of Pacific Journalism Review, and an elected member of the University of Queensland Senate.