Does Zali Steggall have a solution to Labor’s twin dilemmas on climate?

Despite Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s confident assertion that Labor’s climate policy is minor party-proof, and can be implemented without input from the Greens, the Albanese government has a policy and a political problem over the next three years on climate.

The policy problem is that its 43% reduction target by 2030 — while massively better than the Coalition’s ridiculous Abbott-era target — is still insufficient, and well short of the targets of countries such as the US and the UK. The end of Labor’s first term will be in 2025 — leaving just five years in what has been described as the most crucial decade for preventing 2-degree warming and keeping the goal of 1.5-degree warming in sight.

As part of the Glasgow agreement, Australia and other countries have been requested to revisit their targets by the end of 2022 — which may become a permanent “ratchet” mechanism to keep pushing countries to lift their goals regularly. The government will be able to respond positively to this request with its higher targets.

The political problem is that Labor will face relentless pressure to pursue more ambitious policy from both the Greens and independents, whose meal ticket is promising urban electorates faster progress on climate — but the government has different agendas for both.

Labor wants to marginalise the Greens, render them irrelevant, and demonstrate to voters of lost electorates like Griffith that they can have climate action without locking yourself out of government. But they want to boost the teals, to ensure that at the next election, the Liberals face an almighty struggle to get back any of the seats they lost.

There is a way to address both problems.

One of the few pieces of worthwhile legislation put up for consideration in the last Parliament was independent Zali Steggall’s private member’s bill to establish an independent climate commission that would, free of direction from government, establish the five-year carbon “budgets” necessary to achieve net zero by 2050, and recommend implementation plans for different sectors.

Steggall’s bill would have left politicians in charge of making emissions reduction and adaptation decisions, but created an alternative centre of emissions reduction policymaking in the heart of Canberra, regardless of who was in government.

If the government backed a revised version of Steggall’s bill — perhaps by changing its guiding target from net zero by 2050 to reductions required to meet the Paris ambition of 1.5 degrees, it would accomplish several things. It would enable Australia to attend this year’s Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting in Egypt not just with more ambitious 2030 reduction targets, but with a commitment to an independent process for identifying a path to 1.5 degrees — without sacrificing Labor’s election commitment.

It would also be a demonstration of the effectiveness of teal independents and their capacity to deliver meaningful climate action — a signal to voters in their seats that they are making a greater difference than a Liberal MP.

With majority government, Labor risks sidelining the teals and making the case for the Liberal Party to take back their seats, by pointing to the lack of any effective action delivered by the independents. It is thus in Labor’s interests to portray the teals as delivering.

It can also lock the Greens out of the process altogether, presenting a teal-backed climate commission bill to the Senate on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The Greens can defeat it at their peril, and explain to their new supporters in Brisbane why they blocked a big step forward in independent climate policy. Indeed, one of the government’s goals should be to use the Greens’ power in the Senate to start accumulating double dissolution triggers that could give Albanese more options for calling the next election.

It would also divide the Coalition, with the remaining moderates tempted to back the bill, while hardline denialists rail against it.

The only downside is that a new body, properly established, would indeed create pressure on Labor to increase its emissions reduction targets, but it could take a commitment to implement an independently derived target to the next election. The Liberals and the Nationals are going to campaign on a climate denialist stance regardless of what Labor does.

There hasn’t been much needed for the cliché “good policy is good politics” in the past few years in Canberra, but it could still be true on climate.