No country for old men: the Liberal brand is a smoking ruin

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?