Like it or not, and despite the considerable array of difficulties with the transition to a system of renewable energy, including the cost, a solid majority of the Australian public wants to keep going with it. For many younger Australians, it is a threshold issue. As the Baby Boomers die off, that is going to be a big problem for the Coalition.
The chilling thing in observing the Coalition in this second term of opposition is to see how resistant it is to the conclusions most voters reach just by watching the world around them. Just because the Coalition is the opposition, it doesn’t mean it must devote itself to opposing; its task is to present an alternative based on a clear-eyed, honest reading of our society, economy, polity and the world beyond our shores. So many of its positions and tactics reek of the past. Politically, that’s not conservatism or liberalism – it’s a slow form of suicide.
Why do Ley and her colleagues behave as though Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu haven’t fundamentally changed their countries, necessitating an adjustment in our approach to the US and Israel? In no universe did it make sense for Ley to give Michaelia Cash the foreign affairs portfolio. Cash is a legacy product from the days when the Coalition was the voters’ default choice for government, a frontbencher who can be given a ministry but is utterly useless in a shadow role. To her, subtlety is that funny word with a silent “b” in it. And she’s the opposition leader in the Senate.
On Tuesday, the Coalition tried out a scare campaign on taxes after last week’s economic reform roundtable, which Ley insists on calling a “talkfest”. Before it was held, she dismissed it as a “stitch-up”. Why then did she allow her deputy Ted O’Brien to attend?
On Wednesday, the Coalition poked around for an opening on the government’s response to the discovery that Iran has been ordering antisemitic attacks in Melbourne and Sydney. To what end? None of this creates a path to recovery; it’s a way of getting pats on the back from people in the media and the community who already support it.
This is far from the first diminished opposition to drift into self-indulgence, but it can’t go on. It’s like finding out you’ve got a spot on a lung and hitting the smokes even harder.
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The Coalition’s previous model for getting into power and staying there, of tearing down its opponents through rhetoric rather than policy, and relying on relentless support from its media friends, is no longer viable, as this year’s election showed. Rather than agitating about net zero and seeking kudos from the rusted-ons, the Coalition MPs who are left in the parliament would do well to start to look for new leadership prospects who will eventually inherit the mantle from the current set of placeholders, try to understand contemporary Australian society and think of the future, not the past.
Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.
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