Coalition is struggling to handle the heat of its own bonfire

Extract from The Guardian

Katharine Murphy

The party finds itself caught up in contradictions in its rushed measures to tackle climate change

@murpharoo

Sat 2 Mar 2019 08.00 AEDT Last modified on Sat 2 Mar 2019 17.39 AEDT

Will Scott Morrison’s climate pivot woo back some of the Coalition’s disgruntled heartland? Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

We’ll get to the politics of Scott Morrison’s attempted reposition on climate change this week shortly, but first, let’s look at the substance, because we are in the mess we are currently in because all too often, the substance is a postscript.
I want to begin with meeting the Paris targets “in a canter”. Anyone watching politics will know that’s been Morrison’s most consistent talking point, invoked pretty much every day since he took the prime ministership last August.
“In a canter” has always been a head scratcher, because the government’s own data doesn’t bear out the contention. That data shows emissions have been rising since the repeal of the carbon price in 2013.
This week, the government produced a chart setting out the roadmap, a carbon budget if you like, for meeting the Paris target. It quantified the emissions reduction it was factoring in courtesy of its “Climate Solutions Package”.
What this chart makes clear is this: Morrison did not have concrete measures to meet Paris, at least not ones he was prepared to share with the public, until this past week, when he started rolling them out, one by one. Obviously some of the policies have been in gestation for some time, but they only exist when they exist – when they are announced.

This is a small quibble perhaps, this quantifiable gap in Morrison’s timeline, sort of like the prime ministerial equivalent of Afterpay, but it’s been bugging me all week: how you can say last year and early this year that Australia will meet the Paris targets without any qualifications or caveats, and then serve up the plan to get there like it’s an afterthought. Oh, yeah, we’ll need this stuff I guess. To do the cantering.
Now I’ve got that off my chest, a bit more on the proposed abatement measures. I’ve been pointing out since Monday that a big chunk of the abatement the Morrison government is plugging in to its Paris roadmap is not abatement in the way a normal person would consider it, but nifty accounting.
The government is counting a 367-megatonne contribution from carry-over credits (an accounting system that allows countries to count carbon credits from exceeding their targets under the soon-to-be-obsolete Kyoto protocol periods against their Paris commitment for 2030) to help meet the 2030 target.
Just for the record, there’s a place for permits and carry-over credits in a national emissions reduction plan in my view – this is a big transformation for a carbon intensive economy like Australia’s to make – but only if accounting practices augment an ambitious program, not substitute for ambition as the hefty carry-over chunk clearly does in the Morrison government plan.
As we are on lame, let’s stick with it. Another big chunk of emissions reduction, almost 100 megatonnes, is booked to “technology improvements”, whatever they might be – and I haven’t yet got to the rebadged emissions reduction fund, which is a mechanism Greg Hunt cooked up in 2009 to make it look like the Coalition was interested in emissions reduction.
Sadly, Greg’s fund has been in place for years, and various projects have been funded, but it hasn’t really done the trick.
How do we know this? The first way we know is emissions are not falling but rising, despite the expenditure of a couple of billions in taxpayer funds on abatement, and the second way we know is my colleague Adam Morton has done some forensic digging, and found the evidence of the fund’s effectiveness is less than compelling.
Greg’s fund, just for people who haven’t followed the intricacies, was concocted just after Malcolm Turnbull was dispatched from the Liberal leadership the first time, in 2009, for alleged green-left heresy. Turnbull, never a big fan of Greg’s fund, tried to do it slowly (as Paul Keating once said in another context) by letting its money run out.
But Malcolm’s efforts to move away from the ERF (and implement something else, the national energy guarantee) ultimately resulted in his colleagues killing Turnbull for a second time in 2018, and then, as fate would have it, reviving Greg’s fund. Deirdre Chambers, what a coincidence. Is Greg’s fund a better electoral asset for the Coalition than Turnbull? I guess we’ll all find out towards the end of May.
Let’s move beyond lame, and rash in terms of electoral calculations, to obvious contradictions. The government this week has backed two major hydro projects – Snowy 2.0 and the “battery of the nation” proposal in Tasmania – and an inconnector that would bring renewable energy from Tasmania to the mainland.
The problem with backing the Marinus Link, which the government has now given $56m to, is that the viability of the project depends (according to the people developing it) on coal leaving the system, and relatively quickly. The feasibility study says the “largest single influencing factor in the economic feasibility and timing of Marinus Link is the trajectory of coal-fired generation retirement in the national electricity market”.
So that creates an inherent contradiction. The government that supports the Marinus Link (to the tune of $56m this week) is the same government that keeps signalling it might either help build new coal projects, or extend the life of existing ones, using the same taxpayer underwriting scheme for power generation that it has indicated it will use to support the “battery of the nation” project.
That means we have a situation where taxpayers are supporting a renewables project that relies on coal retirements to be viable, and then, potentially, also supporting more coal projects – as if, somehow, this is a difference that can be split.
The energy minister, Angus Taylor, during an interview with Sky News this week, declined to say how many coal projects the government was currently looking at for the underwriting scheme. His colleague, the minister for resources, Matt Canavan, supplied the number in a separate interview. He said it was “around 10”.
You really don’t have to penetrate this too far to start to feel like you could be in a Monty Python sketch. If only any of it was funny.

Now speaking of funny, we used to hear quite a lot from the Liberal Craig Kelly, stalwart of the right, and chair of the backbencher committee on energy and environment, during the period when Turnbull was trying to move on from Greg’s fund, and create something else, and also back the Snowy 2.0 project.
Kelly was Eddie Everywhere, like a modern day Hanrahan, predicting imminent ruination. Given the government has now ticked Turnbull’s pet project, and has pushed even deeper into hydro, I wondered whether the oft-predicted ruination was still in prospect, so I gave him a call.
Craig, when we spoke, was entirely tranquil. “I have faith and confidence in the business acumen of Angus Taylor,” he told me.
I asked him why he trusted Taylor more than Turnbull, given the former prime minister seemed to have turned a handsome quid in the private sector. “We’ve discussed this over many months,” Kelly said. “I know how [Taylor’s] mind works.”
I asked Kelly how the government’s attempted climate pivot was going down with his local constituents. He said there had been some electoral pushback, and people were concerned the Coalition had now fallen into bad company, cavorting with renewables instead of coal.
This leads us to the politics of the shift.
The climate reboot is clearly suboptimal in substance, and a bit whacko in places, frankly, but the only thing the government will care about is: will it work? Will Morrison’s climate pivot woo back some of the Coalition’s disgruntled heartland?

The measures unfurled this week are targeted at electorates such as Warringah, and Higgins, and Kooyong, with an overlay of Tasmanian electoral politics. That’s the audience.
But while the government clearly fears the centre of gravity in the climate debate has tilted progressive, and that threatens its re-election chances, it continues to feel the need to tiptoe along a faultline.
Progressive Liberal voters need assurance that the government can do more on climate change than wreck, but there is also a need to keep faith with people who believe coal is good for humanity. This is a dilemma that affects both the major parties to some degree.
While senior government players now feel a sense of frustration that they are being buffeted in a mildly unhinged culture war, this is a culture war the Coalition has helped stoke by consistently frustrating sensible policy, and shovelling overhyped binaries into the national debate for short-term electoral advantage.
If this is a bonfire, it is a bonfire of the Coalition’s own making.
Being pulled in different directions, between different constituencies, explains the major contradictions in the policy, and it explains why the substance of the reboot is flawed, and the delivery is strained.
Will it work? Frankly, I doubt it.

• Katharine Murphy is Guardian Australia’s political editor