Even before Sussan Ley and Dan Tehan confirmed the Liberal party was dumping its support for net zero policies in a packed press conference on Thursday afternoon, Coalition rightwingers were sizing up for their next fight.
After weeks of messy posturing on climate and energy policy – slowly eroding Ley’s authority in the party room and credibility with voters – the Liberal-National MP Garth Hamilton put colleagues on notice that immigration was the next policy battle line for conservatives.
Hamilton, a Queenslander who previously backed Andrew Hastie for the leadership, warned that thrashing out an immigration policy for the next election needed to be handled “a lot better”.
The statement hinted at the danger facing Ley, both immediate and existential.
Events of the past few days demonstrate she has to accede to the demands of conservative Liberals and Nationals MPs to keep the Coalition together and hold on to her fledgling leadership.
But longer term, Ley risks compromising on everything, standing for nothing and becoming leader in name only. Both paths almost certainly end in rejection by voters.
Just six months on from the 3 May election, Liberal supporters might be wondering just how things got so bad.
Elected as a moderate who promised to reflect and respect voters who had abandoned the Coalition under Peter Dutton, Ley’s efforts to establish herself as opposition leader have been consistently undermined by her colleagues’ ill discipline and political hot-headedness.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
Conservatives including Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Hastie have gone to the backbench, dumped shadow minister Sarah Henderson has openly criticised the party’s direction, and Nationals including Matt Canavan and Barnaby Joyce have gone out of their way to shine a spotlight on the most awkward policy area for the opposition, raging against net zero in interview after interview.
Egged on by Sky News, the Coalition parties split for the first time in decades back in May, eventually reuniting after just 48 hours.
Still more than two years out from the next election, the focus should be Labor’s significant challenges in bringing down the cost of electricity and meeting their own tough emissions reduction targets for 2030 and 2035.
Instead, time and again, the opposition has thrown itself back into the spotlight. Anyone who thought nearly 20 years of civil war over climate policy might be over was mistaken.
Opposition leader Sussan Ley with Coalition colleagues in the House of Representatives. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
Ley deserves some of the blame for the Coalition’s spotty political performance. Already her critics point to backflips on her once strong support for Palestine and ending live animal exports, while her attacks on Anthony Albanese for wearing a Joy Division T-shirt and calls for Kevin Rudd to be recalled from Washington have raised questions about her political judgment.
The Albanese government can hardly believe its luck.
After suburban Liberals complained that voters punished them for Joyce’s political baggage, his private member’s bill to tear up the legal framework for reducing carbon emissions has been a gift to Labor. Equally, the idea that Canavan’s net zero policy review for the Nationals would result in anything other than a reversion to 20th-century coal was laughable.
Ley realised her plan for a lengthy policy process led by the shadow energy minister, Dan Tehan, was unsustainable and brought forward the Liberals’ own debate on net zero, convening a nearly five-hour party room meeting on Wednesday.
It was clear opponents of net zero had the numbers going into the meeting, and some savvy organisation by Hamilton and fellow Queenslander Henry Pike meant the group arrived for the cameras as a united force. Hastie’s and Ley’s other main leadership rival, Angus Taylor, entered with smiling colleagues, after Ley walked the halls of parliament on her own.
By Thursday, Liberal shadow ministers had locked in the decision, and Ley had tasked Tehan and frontbenchers Anne Ruston and Jonathon Duniam with crafting a joint policy with the Nationals.
The documents released by Ley and Tehan are light on details, but prioritise cheaper electricity for homes and businesses and confirm the Coalition is opposed to any formal targets for emissions reduction. A scant promise to stay in the Paris climate agreement is not credible, and the document says achieving net zero, the widely accepted international benchmark to stop global temperature increases of 1.5C or more, would be “a welcome outcome” – if technology and the private sector can achieve it.
Having stabilised things, at least in the short term, Ley appeared to gently push back on conservatives on migration at an event hosted by John Howard on Thursday night. She said the number of overseas arrivals needed to be lower, and stressed individual migrant communities should not be blamed for the failings of governments on infrastructure such as schools, roads, hospitals and public transport.
Ley has tasked the moderate Paul Scarr with crafting a new immigration policy, a decision that prompted her blow up with Hastie. If Scarr can thread the needle with conservative colleagues and rebuild support in multicultural communities, it will benefit Ley and the Liberals. Any move to echo Pauline Hanson’s race baiting and politics of grievance will only compound the damage done by the Liberals’ campaign missteps in 2022 and 2025.
Right now polls show voters equate net zero ambition with serious action to stop the worst of climate change, a message reinforced by the Liberal director Andrew Hirst in the party room this week. It would be foolhardy for journalists and Labor to assume public sentiment can’t change before the next election, especially as cost of living issues continue to bite around the country.
Malcolm Turnbull lashed the party on Thursday night, suggesting abandoning net zero showed the Coalition “does not take climate change seriously”. Turnbull himself accommodated rightwingers like Dutton too readily as prime minister, leaving office having never met the expectations of his supporters.
After the battle was won on Thursday night, a banner at the bottom of Peta Credlin’s show on Sky News screens crowed: “Moderate Liberals lose net zero fight”.
For Sussan Ley, it might be only the first battle in a long and bitter war.