The rightwing lobby group Advance has launched a last-minute lobbying campaign to pressure Liberal MPs to dump a net zero emissions target at a special meeting in Canberra on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The campaign group emailed supporters on Tuesday afternoon urging them to flood the inboxes of Liberal MPs with a generic anti-net zero message in the hours leading up to the crunch talks.<\/p>\n
Supporters were instructed to fill out their personal details on an online form, which automatically sends a pre-written email to all federal Liberal MPs.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery factory closure, every mine shutdown, every job lost under net zero is a choice \u2013 a bad one,\u201d the email reads.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Liberal Party must put Australian workers first. Dump net zero before it wipes out what\u2019s left of our industries.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\n The eleventh-hour email blitz is the culmination of Advance\u2019s long-running campaign to pressure Sussan Ley to abandon the 2050 net zero emissions target agreed under Scott Morrison and retained by Peter Dutton.<\/p>\n Liberal MPs will gather at midday in Parliament House to debate a position as Ley attempts to end a bitter internal political war that has divided the party and turned into a proxy battle for her leadership.<\/p>\n The Liberal shadow ministry will meet at 9am on Thursday to rubber-stamp a position before negotiations start on a joint policy with the Nationals, whose decision to jettison the target earlier this month piled pressure on Ley to follow suit.<\/p>\n A joint party-room meeting is scheduled for Sunday to endorse the new Coalition position.<\/p>\n After a week of intense jockeying between conservatives, who want all references to net zero dropped, and moderates who wanted the target to remain in some description, senior Liberals were confident a consensus position could be reached at Wednesday\u2019s meeting.<\/p>\n Guardian Australia has surveyed Liberal MPs from across the factional divide, who believe there is now majority support for abandoning a net zero emissions target while publicly remaining committed to the Paris agreement.<\/p>\n Even if a future Coalition government did not withdraw from the Paris agreement \u2013 as Donald Trump has twice done with the US \u2013 such a position would amount to a breach of Australia\u2019s obligations under the pact, which requires that countries do not backslide on their existing commitments.<\/p>\n The Albanese government has committed Australia to net zero emissions by 2050, with the interim goals of 43% by 2030 and 62-70% by 2035, compared with 2005 levels. Anything below that would be in breach of the Paris agreement.<\/p>\n The major point of contention among Liberal MPs is the use of the words \u201cnet zero\u201d and whether it should be retained as a vague goal or junked entirely.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Breaking News Australia<\/p>\n Get the most important news as it breaks<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n One senior Liberal disputed the suggestion that it was even a matter of contention, insisting the majority of MPs were in favour of ditching it.<\/p>\n A promise to retain a net zero \u201caspiration\u201d and a commitment to the Paris agreement could be enough to appease moderate Liberals such as Andrew Bragg and Maria Kovacic, who haven\u2019t ruled out quitting the frontbench if the party completely abandons its commitments.<\/p>\n The Queensland Liberal MP Phillip Thompson accused his frontbench colleagues of \u201cthrow[ing] all their toys out of the cot\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd those people who want to threaten to quit \u2013 then quit. You\u2019re not that important anyway,\u201d Thompson, who is from the rival right faction, told Sky News.<\/p>\n The federal Liberal party director, Andrew Hirst, will brief Wednesday\u2019s meeting on voter attitudes towards net zero emissions and energy policy to help inform the debate.<\/p>\n There is support among some Liberal MPs to adopt the Nationals\u2019 proposal to peg Australia\u2019s rate of emissions reduction to the OECD average.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, the Liberal frontbencher Tim Wilson, who supports net zero, said such an approach was \u201cfrankly bizarre\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt makes more sense to me that we set sovereign targets like net zero that we control, we define, and then we go on and develop a plan on how to implement on Liberal principles,\u201d Wilson told Sky News.<\/p>\n \u201cI find the idea that we would outsource to a globalist standard like the average of OECD emissions, frankly, bizarre. And I don\u2019t really see that that\u2019s a tolerable policy.\u201d<\/p>\n The shadow energy minister, Dan Tehan, compared landing a position on net zero emissions to \u201cthreading a needle\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a challenge and when Sussan Ley asked me to take up the challenge, I knew it would be difficult,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The rightwing lobby group Advance has launched a last-minute lobbying campaign to pressure Liberal MPs to dump a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284894,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,450,451,3,452,453],"class_list":{"0":"post-284893","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-headlines","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-top-stories","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}