analysis

The Nationals dumping net zero is dangerous territory for the Coalition

54 minutes agoSun 2 Nov 2025 at 6:43pm

There are echoes of the past here that should be a cautionary tale for the Coalition. (ABC News: Callum Flinn)

To borrow the words of former prime minister Tony Abbott, the net zero emissions by 2050 policy for the Coalition is now dead, buried and cremated.

The Nationals have now officially euthanised the policy and the consequences electorally could be seismic in the cities. The teals, who built their political identity on climate activism against the Liberals, have been handed an electoral gift — and the political landscape will alter as a result once again.

The Nationals’ grassroots members voted over the weekend to ditch net zero, which set the scene for the party to formally scrap the target at a meeting yesterday.

A motion at the meeting for the party to “abandon its support for a net zero mandate” was passed and has torpedoed a move away from what has been a bipartisan policy position since Scott Morrison formally signed Australia up to the Paris agreement.

There are echoes of the past here that should be a cautionary tale for the Coalition.

Net zero strategy has similarities to how the Nationals led the stampede towards a no vote in the Voice referendum. (ABC News: Brendan Esposito)

Dumping net zero a long-term booby trap

The Nationals led the stampede towards a policy and dictated a direction on the referendum. This has similarities. When David Littleproud stood up as the Nationals leader and announced his party would campaign against the referendum for an Indigenous Voice, it all but sealed the direction of where Peter Dutton would go.

The Nationals have since argued their strategy was brilliant because their side was victorious, but the victory was pyrrhic. They won the battle, but they lost the subsequent war — the election earlier this year.

A win to dump net zero may be fast and hard politics and play out well in some sections of Australia, but it is a long-term booby trap in the cities the Liberals need to win back. A majority government will never be achieved by bolstering the votes of the Nationals alone.

The Coalition is now embarking on a political adventure fraught with danger.

The Liberals will try to lean into their pledge to reduce emissions and claim this departure from net zero has nothing to do with climate denial. But a formal move, which is all but inevitable, away from net zero by 2050 risks sending the electorate a message that the party has not overcome its allergy to climate change science.

The Nationals are now proposing pegging Australia’s emissions reduction efforts to the OECD average, which Littleproud said was about half the pace of the nation’s current trajectory.

Jason Falinski, the former member for Mackellar and NSW Liberal president, told me the Nationals’ decision was “lazy”.

All Australians, including a majority of those in seats held by the National Party, accept human activity is causing climate change, he says.

“The Labor Party is failing; it is right to point this out, but it is not right to walk away from the challenge of addressing the issue.”

History repeats

Politics is about impressions: this tortured debate and the dumping of the time frame — and for some, the language too — will be weaponised by Labor and the teals.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, whose leadership was destroyed by the climate debate, says the direction is being driven by a membership that is out of touch with where Australians are at.

“The fundamental problem facing the Coalition today is that their membership base has atrophied and is increasingly composed of older Australians living in a right-wing media bubble dominated by Sky News and similar content on social media,” Turnbull says.

“This thrives on culture wars and leads the parliamentarians down bizarre rabbit holes such as Albanese’s T-shirt. Net zero is another culture war issue. Energy policy, as I used to say, should be determined by economics and engineering, not ideology and idiocy.”

Labor found itself in a similar situation during the Adani period when it was trying to sandbag the Greens threat to its inner-city seats, particularly in Melbourne. At the time, opposition leader Bill Shorten was sending one message to the inner city, that he was opposed to the Adani coal project, and another to the electorates of Queensland and beyond, that he was pro-jobs.

Dumping net zero may play well in seats that are bleeding votes to One Nation. But it will solidify an existing view in the cities that the opposition lacks commitment on this issue. Whether the Coalition likes it or not, the growing ranks of Gen Z voters on the electoral roll are not having academic debates about climate change. Their entire upbringing has been immersed in understanding it as real.

Labor learnt that you can never strip votes off the left when they can always go harder because they don’t have to worry about being in government and managing the politics of governing from the centre. The same goes for One Nation. They can always go further than the Coalition, and chasing their votes by going hard line is a zero-sum game (pardon the pun).

A Labor ‘stuff up’ the Coalition’s only hope

Legendary ABC election analyst Antony Green spoke to me this week on the Politics Now podcast about the Coalition and One Nation. He declared that for the opposition to get back into office, it must win seats in metropolitan areas, which cannot be helped by leaning further into One Nation policy territory.

Green says One Nation polls twice, sometimes three times as much in rural areas as it does in the cities. When you look at their record, when One Nation contests in urban seats, it may do well in some outer suburban Labor seats, but usually by pillaging the Liberal Party vote.

“They’ve got a party to the right, which is polling, there’s a push to move to the right, but the opposition lost the last election with what happened in the centre, in the cities. So, if it wants to win the next election, it has to win city seats,” Green says.

“The Liberal Party is being squeezed in the centre by [teal] strategies in the city, and the National Party is concerned about its right flank in the country, and so the Coalition is now trying to deal with this, and at some point, perhaps Labor will completely stuff up in government, and that will solve the problem for the Coalition,” Green says.

The Hunter, which is the last of Labor’s mining strongholds, is the only real seat where One Nation continues to be a threat to Labor. Green says that unless One Nation can break into urban areas, and they haven’t shown much evidence of that in the past 25 years, history suggests moving to the right is not the answer.

The Coalition is now hurtling towards a strategy of mirroring the Abbott campaign that saw him win a landslide against the carbon tax. But the world has changed. It’s not 2013. The public knows that while the current situation on energy costs and the transition is sometimes hard and bleak, going backwards is equally fraught.

And there is a contradiction between the rhetoric Sussan Ley used when she took the position of leader to what she says now. Is dumping net zero a “sensible centre” position?

The important COP climate summit is occurring in Brazil this coming week, but the PM won’t be there. Assistant Minister Josh Wilson is representing the government and Chris Bowen is attending later.

The PM will instead be on his feet in Question Time using every chance he gets to smash the opposition on its climate debate and paint himself as the centrist pragmatist. The problem for liberals is that Australians have so far made it clear that they are comfortable in this territory.

It will be a long time in opposition, waiting for the backlash to sweep them to power.

Patricia Karvelas is host of ABC News Afternoon Briefing at 4pm weekdays on ABC News Channel, co-host of the weekly Party Room podcast with Fran Kelly and host of politics and news podcast Politics Now.