In a famous photograph by Alex Ellinghausen from June 2014, delighted Liberals celebrate on the floor of the House of Representatives after abolishing the Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme — a low-cost, low-impact and efficient mechanism that lowered Australia’s emissions. A delighted Greg Hunt is being congratulated by Kelly O’Dwyer and Christopher Pyne. All three, of course, have now exited politics, Hunt at the most recent election.
Hunt’s legacy consists of a reputation for shredding his principles, the discredited “soil magic” Emissions Reduction Fund, wildly overestimating his popularity with his colleagues and presiding over the disasters of the vaccine rollout and aged care crisis.
The other figure in the photo still in politics, standing with a motley group of colleagues — all men — in a photo by Mick Tsikas from yesterday (featured above), is Peter Dutton, standing with his defeated colleagues during the amendments stage of the passage of Labor’s climate bill through the house.
All Hunt, Dutton and his colleagues gave us in 2014 was a more painful, costlier and slower decarbonisation process, removing at a stroke any capacity for Australia to offer international leadership on the biggest long-term economic threat to us. Eight years later, they’re still trying to stop climate action.
Even up until last year, most of the press gallery was convinced climate wasn’t a problem for the Coalition. Indeed, it maintained that Scott Morrison had cleverly neutralised the issue with his 2050 net zero deal with the Nationals. The conventional wisdom in the gallery was that it was Labor that had an unsolvable electoral problem on climate.
The unhappy faces of Dutton and his blokes yesterday — their ranks missing MPs from half a dozen seats lost to the independents backing and amending the bill nearby — shows how wrong that conventional wisdom was.
So what is the Dutton opposition’s climate policy now, apart from opposing all climate action? Apparently it’s developing one, but in the meantime it’s keen on nuclear power.
Nuclear power has to be the single most boring and ossified ritual in Australian public policy. Someone on the right will call for a “debate” on nuclear power. Critics will point out that nuclear power is ludicrously expensive, takes decades to build, and is prone to multi-hundred per cent cost blowouts. The right will then invoke, reflexively, small modular reactors, which aren’t operating anywhere in the world despite having been promised for 30 years. Someone else will then ask which electorate the proponents propose to put a reactor in. Rinse, repeat.
The only variations are that sometimes someone on the left who fancies themselves as a bit of a freethinker will join the call for nuclear power, or that someone will remember back to the Howard years and point out that nuclear power needs a carbon price to be competitive with coal.
While Dutton and his colleagues were demonstrating their irrelevance in Canberra, the only mainland Coalition government, in NSW, was imploding. As with the federal Coalition, there’s a big question over what the NSW Coalition stands for. But unlike their federal colleagues, Dominic Perrottet and his crew don’t have the excuse of just having been cast into opposition. The events of this week reveal a government that, ostensibly under new management, is still plagued by jobs for mates and a disposition to rather amateur cover-ups.
The collective damage to the Liberal brand is significant. The NSW Liberals — more moderate, more competent, more evidence-based than any other Liberal branch — were the hope of the side. The Victorian Liberals are a shitshow (latest disaster: the opposition leader’s chief of staff demanding money) and are barely worthy of opposition, let alone government.
The LNP in Queensland, the political equivalent of a spivvy real estate agent, only recently “embraced” net zero by 2050, but wants nuclear power too. The WA Liberals hold their partyroom meeting in a cupboard. In South Australia, the Liberals seem to function merely as brief interludes between long years in power for Labor. Only in Tasmania are the Liberals functional and competent — helped by Tasmanian Labor being a basketcase.
Some of this is purely cyclical. The wheel will turn. But the teals aren’t cyclical. If centrist independents perform well under the teal label in the coming Victorian and NSW elections, it spells long-term trouble for the Liberals. Nor is climate a cyclical issue — we’re not going to swing back to investing in coal-fired power, or magic away the bad economics of nuclear power.
And after this week, who actually wants to be associated with the Liberal brand?
Morrison’s one great achievement was to give the country a good taste of life in the future of a Neo-Liberal Utopia – where a disengaged and low energy government hands the fate of us hoi polloi over to the not-so-tender mercies of big business and the billionaire class, while splitting its focus between its next election win and fashioning cosy post-political careers for themselves.
The one crucial thing they forgot, as the increasing effects of climate change became impossible to ignore, was that at the end of the day they too are human beings, who need air to breathe, food to eat and a habitable environment to live in so they have a place of work they can go to in the first place.
So long as boneheads like Dutton, Canavan and Joyce refuse to see that they are not magically immune to the effects of the things they espouse, they will have locked themselves out of the room where all the important stuff is being decided.
Big business and the money markets need to grasp this concept too. If Clive Palmer’s coal mine gets the final turn down (fingers crossed) it may well be a watershed moment where the “too-rich-to-be-touched” start to get brought back into the real world.
Great comment
While I agree with your description of Morrison’s gift to the nation, I have to ask. How is the current breed of technocrats supposedly running the nation any different?
Albanese and Bowen are quite content to watch those exporting Australian fossil fuels profiteering from the war in Ukraine, while the populace is taken for a ride. After all, those fossil fuel corporations that have actively promoted doubt around climate science for decades should be rewarded for their support of Australian democracy via their donations to political parties.
These “progressives” are currently softening the populace up for their austerity program while pushing ahead with the phase 3 tax cuts that they voted for, because Albo promised.
Albo also promised that no person would be left behind.
Everywhere one looks in the Australian economy is evidence of the effects of unrestrained capitalism and market failure, yet Albo, Chalmers, and Co maintain their faith in the market.
That sounds like neo-liberalism to me.
It’s up to us to ask our Labor Members and Senators why they are allowing fossil fuel companies to use a war to profiteer.
To me it sounds like ‘let’s win the election’ with the understanding that there will always be room later to improve incrementally.
God works in mysterious ways, just not the way Morrison interpreted, if the coalitions faults were to be fully exposed, Abbott and Morrison were the perfect choice as standard bearers.
Glen we didn’t need to be the crash test dummies….
We weren’t even that. But at least we got off more lightly than the Chileans in the 70’s.
I think the Liberal party has lost the organisational capacity to win. The membership is gone and it doesn’t have the support of the union movement like Labor does. I think the loss of its ‘safe seats’ to independents will be the nail in its coffin.
Abbott and Morrison have absolutely sunk the Liberal party ship.
Howard started the rot and Abbott and the morons that followed completed the job, it says it all when the Libs hail Howard as their political godfather after he not only lost an election by a massive amount but his seat as well
The other big problem for the Liberals is their Coalition partner. Joyce, Canavan, PItt and all the other Qlders have made the LNP and Nationals totally unacceptable to people with higher IQs than them. When the Greens start taking Liberal seats in Brisbane, the writing is on the wall.
It started with Howard
How many destructive acts, attitudes and expectations did that bloke impose upon this country?
The malign effects will linger long after his corpse is worm food – if they aren’t choosy.
The time bombs he had Costello imbed in the tax system alone will condemn future generations to distortions in investment, housing and employment as well as greatly reduced government revenue far into the future.
If only we had a party in federal office that could cleanse this country of his evil decade in government but there is none in prospect.
There appears to be no possibility of ideas growth in the either the Liberal or National party. How do they expect to attract younger members when holding fast to 20th century notions?
It spells ever dwindling support for those parties as they die off through natural attrition.
20th Century?………………
You are too kind.
The Liberals have barely moved on from the Inquisition (or as they still refer to them “The good old days”)
Good point but reckon 19th century more like it.
They attract younger members by enlisting their children, cousins etc
I think that point was made by Ted Bailieu’s son recently. When criticised by Liberals for not being a future Liberal voice, he said there was no value for the future in looking to the past as the Liberals were.
Yes overall a very good article. Good ideas and arguments well put out. I would have to say that in NSW I dispute that the NSW were the hope of the side. They have made so many bad decisions over the years. There are toll roads everywhere in Sydney. They are costly. The State Government have whittled away our rail network. They have instituted this dreadful metro link line from Tallawong to Chatswood. In Tallawong metro link station there are no spaces for commuter cars. Next station please. Bad luck if you live closer to Tallawong, slightly NW of Rouse Hill. The rolling stock is single deck, small seats, uncomfortable facing across from each other and from Kellyville to Chatswood, it is all underground. Great!! And they converted the Epping to Chatswood section from double deck rail line to single deck metro. Just so they could privatise the whole damn thing and eventually run it all the way to Barangaroo and Bankstown. I think they want to privatise the whole of the Sydney Trains network and do so by stealth.
The light rail (let’s call them what they are…trams) is a fiasco. Cost blowouts, construction schedule blowouts, accidents and disrepair and faults – from Circular Quay to Kensington especially. Quicker to take a train from Penrith to Central they say. From Central to Dulwich Hill? Simple. Usurp the old Country Goods Line that served the city and the State from 1916-1988 and move all that action to Enfield/Chullora.
New rolling rail stock is a cause for concern and a source for much industrial action by our transport workers. Ferries? Heads down!! If you are going to Parramatta. Always the cheap option with the NSW Liberals.
Education. underinvestment is the order of the day. I sincerely believe that all conservatives don’t want our school students educated. I really do. Just basic English, Maths, some science for commercial purposes only, economics for commercia purpose only. No history. No music. No languages. No social studies. Jut do a trade or go to uni and do an MBA, that much and justifiably maligned post graduate degree from the 1990s. Last year 10,000 teachers resigned from the NSW Education system.
Health. If only you really knew. Hospitals and mental health wards are just war zones. Nurses are treated like soldiers during the first World War.
NSW Liberals Good??!! Depends what you are smoking or injecting but to me they are typical and no damn good at all.
Taken at face value M.G. all the above reflects a reality of our premier state. If so, what will be impact upon Nation as we begin addressing infrastructure repositioning, length and breadth of East Coast? Climate now an immediate priority.
Too Sydneycentric Metal – there’s a whole world outside in the NSW regions untarnished by the last 11 years of the NSW state government given we have been ignored for all that time…
Great picture Mick Tsikas. Says it all about irrelevance, incompetence and depression. Long may it reign in the coalition.
Some bright spark on Twitter noted the similarity between this photo and Frans Hals’ 1664 painting, The Regents of the Old Men’s Alms House – said to be portraying erstwhile powerful men who no longer have anything to do but stand around ridiculously. Touche!
That was tweeted by “Rockin’ Robin Tweet Tweet”, who is a pretty smart bloke.