As midday approached on Wednesday, more than a dozen Liberal MPs assembled in the Parliament House office of Henry Pike.
Pike and his fellow Queensland LNP backbencher Garth Hamilton had arranged for colleagues opposed to net zero to walk side-by-side into a party-room meeting to debate whether to dump the emissions reduction target.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was there, so too Sarah Henderson, Tony Pasin, Jonathon Duniam and Claire Chandler.
The most prominent of the Liberal MPs were two men likely to compete against each other in any future challenge to Ley’s leadership.
Liberals aligned to Ley have for months been pushing a narrative that the party’s right faction was split between Andrew Hastie and the “Maga” populists, and Angus Taylor and the “pragmatic” conservatives.
Not, it would seem, on this fight.
Taylor, Hastie and the conservative posse spilled out of Pike’s office, walking together toward with the Coalition party room in full view of the pack of television cameras positioned to capture Liberal MPs entering the meeting.
Whether or not it was the stunt’s primary purpose, the united front sent a message to Ley: dump net zero or else.
The optics of Taylor and Hastie standing shoulder-to-shoulder would prove the defining image of a 48-hour period that ended the months-long campaign to kill the Liberal party’s commitment to the mid-century goal.
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In a decisive win for conservatives, moderate Liberal MPs who fought publicly and privately to retain net zero emissions are now clinging to a trivial aspiration that carbon neutrality would be, as Ley put it, a “welcome outcome”.
Liberal MPs and candidates in the cities must now defend a policy laden with inconsistencies: a commitment to remain in the Paris agreement while flagrantly breaching its obligations; a promise to curb carbon pollution while propping up coal-fired power stations and dismantling all of Labor’s emissions reduction policies.
“It makes it really hard for some of our MPs,” one pro-net zero MP said of the outcome.
“It is going to be really hard to show people that we get it.”
An act of ‘treason’
The decision, announced just after 2.15pm on Thursday, was considered a fait accompli after a clear majority of Liberal MPs – including all of the conservatives – voiced support for dumping the target at the marathon party-room meeting on Wednesday.
Of the 49 speakers on Wednesday, 28 wanted to jettison net zero entirely, 17 expressed a desire to retain it in some form, while four were on the fence.
The strength of the sentiment was unsurprising for many Liberal MPs, who have felt the internal mood to abandon the target build and then become irrepressible after the Nationals confirmed their position on 2 November.
Andrew Hastie and James Paterson shake hands for the cameras after leaving the party-room meeting. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP
Moderate Liberals had grown increasingly suspicious that their rightwing colleagues – including Pike, Hamilton and Pasin – were conspiring with the Nationals to undermine their party’s ability to set an independent position.
“It appears some Liberals have been working with the Nationals, which is akin to treason. We are not the Nationals,” one MP said.
Senior Liberals who had hedged on their position, including Taylor, shifted after the Nationals declared their hand, cornering Ley as she fought to retain her waning authority over a deeply divided party room.
Before this week’s meetings, moderate Liberals such as Andrew Bragg and Maria Kovacic offered compromises, including reducing net zero emissions to a vague “aspiration” rather than an target.
The two New South Wales powerbrokers, along with Tim Wilson, Jane Hume and Andrew McLachlan, understood that voters would equate walking away from net zero with walking away from climate action.
The Liberal party’s federal director, Andrew Hirst, issued much the same message when he briefed MPs on voter attitude toward net zero emissions at Wednesday’s meeting.
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But conservatives couldn’t be swayed.
Taylor was energy minister when Scott Morrison signed Australia up to net zero by 2050 in October 2021. Almost four years on, the now shadow defence minister told Wednesday’s closed-door meeting it was time to “move on” from net zero and create a point of political difference with Labor.
Michaelia Cash urged colleagues to fight to defeat net zero like it fought to defeat the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum.
In the end it wasn’t just the conservatives. The deputy Liberal leader, Ted O’Brien, who for months had kept mum on his position, turned against the target, as did Ley’s numbers man, Alex Hawke.
There was no formal vote but the tally of where MPs fell was quickly leaked, including to Guardian Australia, heightening the expectation that net zero was dead.
What does net zero emissions actually mean? And is it different to the Paris agreement? – video
As MPs filed out of the meeting, a smiling Hastie shook hands with fellow conservative James Paterson in view of the camera crews that had been staking out the party room all afternoon.
Just like the image of Hastie and Taylor, the handshake sent a message: we won.
‘You’re wrong’
In an interview on ABC RN Breakfast just after 7.30am on Thursday, McLachlan made one last public appeal to frontbenchers who would meet 90 minutes later to settle a position.
Asked to respond to the view of some colleagues that abandoning the target could be a vote-winner, McLachlan said: “You’re wrong.
“If you’re going to argue that we’re going to abandon net zero, you’re going to be very alone in the community and also the business community. I think all levels of community have moved on.”
Details of the final position emerged as Liberal frontbenchers left the meeting just after midday.
Two hours later, standing at the same lectern where, in her press conference as Liberal leader, she promised to “meet modern Australia where they are”, Ley confirmed the party would abandon any credibility on climate action.
“Make no mistake, we are not pursuing net zero,” she said.
Earlier in the day, Anthony Albanese ridiculed the right faction’s staged march to Wednesday’s meeting as evidence of the “clown show they’ve become”.
Hastie responded via Instagram, re-posting a photo of the group with a warning to the prime minister.
“I sense your fear @albomp – we are coming for you …”