Credit to Scott Morrison. He’s spent the past week busily feeding the most profound yearning of Australia’s traditional media: that the Liberal Party is (finally) making some profound climate change paradigm shift.
But it’s a weak gruel: cooked up out of nothing more than a couple of speeches, an insult crafted for what he understands as his base and the working class semiotics of a high-vis dance routine alongside one of the country’s billionaires.
More like a gas-lit political recovery, by reprising his performative forward-and-back caper towards a “not a target” commitment of net zero emissions by 2050, maybe this year, maybe at some point before next year’s election.
Too much of the reporting misses what Morrison is actually up to. He’s adopted the language of the global right’s latest talking point to manage the politics of the transition: Prometheanism — the magic of technology will save us from the need for political action. It’s the language used by US Republicans in their push back against the Biden plan, and by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Here in Australia, it’s playing out with this government’s preferred tool — tossing a lazy few hundred million to his billionaire oligarch allies for carbon capture and storage, and liquid hydrogen.
Pretty convincing
So far, briefings on and off background seem to have convinced the opinion-makers in the press gallery that Morrison’s sincere about the 2050 goal. “That’s where he wants to land,” concluded Guardian Australia’s Katherine Murphy in her otherwise critical Saturday column.
Conscious of the Coalition’s climate divides, journalists have wanted to give the PM space to move even, as Peter Hartcher wrote in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald, “excruciatingly slowly”. The result: Morrison’s deeply political speech to the Business Council of Australia annual dinner was applauded for the inches it seemed to shuffle him along the road.
However, his Friday pirouette away from targets seemed a leap back to where he was at the beginning. By the weekend, the non-News Corp media had travelled the same two-step: “Out of sync with rest of the world on climate policy” editorialised Nine’s SMH. “How straight was he really talking?” its news pages asked in a fact-check of Morrison’s speech to the Biden summit.
By Sunday, on Insiders, News Corp’s James Campbell was frustrated by the reluctance to celebrate policy by crabwalk with a “can’t we just stop and smell the roses?”. Campbell’s co-panellists weren’t having it: “a rhetorical shift” waived off Mark Kenny.
Morrison can’t shake the perception that electoral calculus trumps policy: “retaining crucial seats in Queensland and Western Australia is incompatible with boasting about climate ambitions” (per the ABC’s Laura Tingle); “he thinks the next election will be a rerun of the last” (per George Megalogenis in the Nine mastheads).
After marinating for a couple of days, his regional pandering swipe at “cafes, dinner parties and wine bars” — made in a flash inner-city hotel — has come to be seen as a fumble.
Back where we started
Now, despite Morrison’s week of work, we’re back where we started — despite the oft-reported certainty of a 2050 commitment, there’s as much public evidence of movement one way as the other.
The Coalition are wedged by their own denialist arguments. Once the “climate change is crap” challenge to the science became untenable (due to, well, facts), denialists shifted the discourse to the challenge of transition. For Abbott in 2013, it was tax. For Morrison in 2019, it was jobs. Like the right around the world, Morrison is positioning the 2022 discourse around “technology”.
The “jobs” positioning has been seized by progressives initially in the US with the Green New Deal, now embraced by President Biden in his $2 trillion American Jobs Plan.
Morrison’s caution confirms denialists continue to dictate the Coalition’s approach. The Biden climate summit demonstrated just how far the world has moved on, despite the best efforts at dismissal in News Corp media (the summit “confirmed the global divide under which developed countries pledge action and pay for others to watch from the sidelines” sniffed Graham Lloyd on the front page of The Weekend Australian).
Luckily, Australia is never important enough at global meetings for Morrison’s missteps to do the country much damage. However, his continued forward and back risks opinion-makers shifting questions from “are we there yet?” to “how long are we stuck here?”
Scottie from marketing had his hard sell ready for Biden and started as he should have remained, on mute.
Biden is a very polite politician and I don’t think he believed what he was hearing, pure Australian BS.
The shiny toy of Carbon Capture is now a battered dirty and thoroughly discredited technology and the warmed up BS of a technology god appearing to save us in the next 9 years has less credence than the Cargo Cult.
Eight and a half. And counting.
I think you’ll find Biden had ‘left the building’, by the time Morrison got to open his trap, and was later ‘briefed’ – very briefly – on what had fallen out of Morrison’s trap
Clap trap?
Best Morrison speech ever- the one on mute.
Morrison is straddling a barbed wire fence and either his legs are getting shorter or the fence is getting higher. His agonised twerking on emission reduction targets is ample evidence of the increasing discomfort. He has no good choices left – whichever way he jumps the arse is out of his pants.
He believes God does climate stuff, not people, so his conscience is clear. The agonised twerking is his response to we apparent idiots who know he’s wrong. He just doesn’t get it, simply because it’s against his religion. Or so it seems. I wish he was in a Home for the Aged with a food allowance of $6 a day and no teeth. Also, a bit of electricity through that barbed wire would be a welcome addition.
As far as “his” religion is concerned, I don’t buy it. I think like Trump he’s using it to get votes, at least in his area, plus it gives him a chance to be the showman, he thinks he is, and to get up on centre stage where he can pretend some people like him. Of course, being a narcissist he thinks his s#₩t doesn’t stink, from a state away I can tell you it sure does, just like everything he touches.
Hillsing is a business. Given the amount of government money he’s shovelled their way Morrison has assured himdelf of a post defeat job as one of the head Honchos in that corrupt organisation.
He’s assured himself of a ticket to fly in the same fashion with Qantas and the latest gadgets from Harvey Norman.
Frankly, if he loses, it’ll be a close thing, he’s set for life do he couldn’t care less. Morrison is about Morrison. He’s not liked even by his own party or its supporters as a person but he’ll deliver what they want to retain their support.
Religious right to discriminate might be a tough one though. However another grant to Hillsong prior to the Caretaker period might ease their pain.
That him and his lot are still in the race is down to sections of the media amplifying the LNPs fear tactics to be sure but it is mostly down to Labor adopting a softly – softly approach where a baseball bat with protruding nails is required.
The coalition’s preferred pork-barreling approach has always been less effective than the outcomes-based approach (targets). Now they’re picking technologies, and just like the last time (NBN) they’re picking the lame ones.
Whenever i hear Morrison try out a new line, and watch the Murdoch machine try to hammer the square peg into a round hole in their big world view, I like to imagine how the same announcement from Albo would be treated.
“It’s not the when, it’s the how” : Photoshopped Albo face on Abbott and Costello (the comedians not the pollies) doing the “Who’s on First” routine – definite front page material for the Courier and the Telegraph, without a doubt.
“Technologies not tax” – where’s this magic technology coming from, Albo? Labor’s plan is to wish really really hard that someone will save us. And where’s the money coming from to finance all this, the same magic land where the technology lives?
When Morrison says it though, it’s seen as visionary – finally, a grown-up and level headed way to deal with climate change that requires no one in the land to change anything they’re doing whatsoever – you won’t even notice we’re solving the climate problem, what with this new technology and such!
It’s such a desperate hail mary, I don’t know how many of his supporters will be able to digest it. It wasn’t that long ago that they were cheering his coal-wielding antics in parliament. What happened to the coal we weren’t meant to be scared of??
I reckon that image of Scotty and his lump of coal is one that should be on frequent rotation from now til the election, along with him not holding a hose in hawaii while that charred roo hangs crucified from a barbed wire fence.
That would be the clear Estapol coated lump of coal.
Well put.
CCS plan is smoke and mirrors. How about spending some money on known technology, like wind, solar, transmission, and electric vehicles? Our emissions would drop like a stone….
put I suppose we have to look after the LNP donors and cheerleaders. Sigh…….