Coalition's climate splits echo Labor's dragging divisions over refugee policy

The fast-paced drama of recrimination, estrangement and reconciliation between the National Party and the Liberal Party over the last fortnight has generated two phenomena.

First: a serious degree of brand confusion with the 2025 series of Farmer Wants A Wife.

(A series recap: David has told Sussan he can't be with someone who won't let him keep his collection of fantasy nuclear reactors. Sussan isn't bothered — she needs space to find herself anyway and is suspicious that David won't honour the solemn covenant of shadow cabinet faithfulness. It's OVER! Gasp! Everyone heads to IKEA to buy separate flat-pack shadow cabinets, the Liberals drawn immediately to the fun energy of the KLUSTERFÖK line, while the Nats opt for the more transportable DUMMISPIT, with optional display shelving and beer holders. But wait! Barnaby and Michael — who loathe each other a lot, but not as much as they jointly loathe David — have gone behind David's back and talked to Sussan! Maybe divorce is too expensive? Isn't it stupid to have two cabinets? David says gruffly that of course he'll respect shadow cabinet solidarity. Sussan says maybe the reactors can go in the shed for now. So she's back to making up spare beds for injured egos in the marital home. So many plot twists! Including that for the first time in forever, a Liberal leader is providing a deeply relatable moment for Australian women. Though not, admittedly, for great reasons.)

These are eye-catching personal dramas, to be sure. But they obscure the larger and deeper fissure that yawns unbridgeable-y beneath the bickering parties. Which is all about policy, and not about personality quite as much as would appear.

"There won't be a climate war," declared Sussan Ley at her first press conference as the first woman to lead the Liberal Party.

"There will be sound and sensible consultation and I undertake 100 per cent to do that."

Climate war drags on

But the truth is, there is still a climate war. Not just between the Nationals and the Liberals but within the Liberals, too. This war has been going on for the entire 21st century. It's bubbled along under multiple public protestations to the contrary, and it's never quite been extinguished despite serial ceasefire agreements, some of which were confusing to those watching from home.

A reminder: it was John Howard's first environment minister, Robert Hill, who negotiated an advantageous deal for Australia at the Kyoto climate summit in 1997. It was Howard in his third term who then decided not to ratify Kyoto after all. But it was Howard again — in his final term — who developed an emissions trading scheme and took it to the 2007 election.

Tony Abbott (despite having described climate change as "crap") signed up to significant emissions reductions under the Paris Agreement in 2015, only to repent in 2019.

In late 2021, Scott Morrison — flanked by then energy minister Angus Taylor — announced a plan for Australia to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Liberal leader Peter Dutton embraced a nuclear future so as to achieve net zero, a tactical Venn diagram whose crucial middle zone turned out to host not very many people at all.

Like a colicky cat, the Liberal Party has curled itself into countless different climate change positions over the last 30 years, trying to find a comfortable one. But it hasn't worked.

Why? Because incurring economic pain and harm for Australia — in the attempted resolution of a global problem — is incredibly controversial. For all the other benefits of a decarbonised economy and the opportunities for Australia that are afforded by new green industries and our natural resources beyond fossil fuels, the fact remains that our efforts won't make much of a difference to global temperatures unless the world moves with us. But if we all wait and see, of course, then it'll be too late for everyone.

The National Party's conundrum

For the National Party, representing regional Australia, there are added complexities. Their constituents are on the front line of the changing climate — hotter temperatures, disappearing species, drier summers, more intense weather events. But they also experience greater disruption from a supercharged renewable energy rollout, which for Sydneysiders might involve installing rooftop solar or buying an EV, but for regional Australians is more likely to mean even more changes to their physical environment — the efflorescence of wind farms across the landscape, banks of solar panels, the ugly truss of transmission lines across tracts of land that once felt open. These are not trifling matters.

How does the Liberal Party — the senior Coalition partner in a collaboration that has lasted 102 years — cogently and ably represent these diametrically opposed constituencies?

It's too late to be speculating on whether the Liberal Party will split.

It already has. The shape of the Liberal Party is still clearly traceable across the House of Representatives benches. It's just that a clutch of those seats are now held by climate independents, whose campaigns in 2022 derived additional power from the Morrison government's high-handedness to women.

Labor, having long ago picked a lane on both climate policy and representation of women, might take this opportunity for smugness.

But it's not all that long since Labor had its own dragging, painful, exhausting split over an issue on which its opponents were jubilantly united.

Similar structural tensions

For the first decade of this century, Labor ripped itself apart over immigration and refugee policy, specifically the question of how it should respond to the Howard government's hardline commitment to mandatory detention and offshore processing of refugees.

There are similarities between this issue — an existential one for Labor in both opposition and government — and the Liberal Party's ongoing climate dilemma, even though they land in different portfolio areas.

Mandatory detention was Labor's invention originally (the Keating government introduced it in 1992, per immigration minister Gerry Hand), just as it was Howard who first agreed in principle to commit Australia to the task of carbon reduction at Kyoto.

Just as the Liberal Party has tossed and turned on climate, Labor undertook multiple reversals as it grappled with refugee policy after the "Tampa election" of 2001.

Kevin Rudd wound back the Howard government's border regime in his first stint as prime minister, only to be removed by Julia Gillard, who moved to reintroduce offshore processing and was then herself replaced by Rudd Mk II, who cemented the reversal amid a confronting flotilla of boat arrivals.

Labor's rank and file harboured a commitment to the humane treatment of refugees every bit as passionate as the belief among the Liberal base that renewables are folly and that phasing out fossil fuels is an act of national economic self-harm.

The blunt force of electoral experience suggested both sets of believers were out of step with mainstream Australian opinion: Australians have voted as firmly in favour of border protection as they have for action on climate change.

And both issues are reducible to the same essential human conundrum, the same pulsing kernel. What do those of us who live a lucky life on this great island owe to those who don't? How much should we inconvenience ourselves, to what extent should we disadvantage ourselves, to fix a problem that is not of our own making?

The Labor Party's internal division on refugee policy was more or less quelled by its experience in government. Drownings at sea — and the horror of desperate humans embarking upon unreliable vessels captained by mercenaries — drove Labor back towards the Coalition's position, bilaterally hardening the nation's heart.

Labor voters who couldn't stomach it, one assumes, defected to the Greens, whose primary vote more than doubled from 5 per cent to nearly 12 per cent as Labor wrestled with its moral dilemma between the 2001 and 2010 federal elections.

But Greens voters — notwithstanding their history of disappointment or annoyance with Labor — overwhelmingly put Labor above the Coalition when they allocate their preferences in the privacy of the voting booth. That's how Labor managed, this month, a truly mind-bending feat: nearly two-thirds of the House of Representatives, off just one-third of the primary vote. The left flank of Australian politics is holding together.

The same can't be said, at present, for the right flank.

This can be confirmed with a casual glance at the spreading riot of colours overwhelming the previous blue of opposition benches in the Australian Electoral Commission's near-complete portrait of the 48th Parliament: Liberals, Nationals, LNP, the CLP, Katter's Australia Party, Teals, Centre Alliance and so on. In this election, for the first time, the Coalition didn't come first or second in the primary vote count. It came third, after "Anybody else".

The Coalition: another victim of climate change.