Opinion
November 3, 2025 — 11.27am
Nine years ago this month, the Turnbull government secured the parliamentary ratification of the Paris Agreement, reaffirming “Australia’s strong commitment to effective global action on climate change”. Almost five years later to the day, the Morrison government committed the country to reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The Coalition of Nationals and Liberals are now debating whether to ditch their own policies. For the Nationals, they have decided to dr…
Opinion
November 3, 2025 — 11.27am
Nine years ago this month, the Turnbull government secured the parliamentary ratification of the Paris Agreement, reaffirming “Australia’s strong commitment to effective global action on climate change”. Almost five years later to the day, the Morrison government committed the country to reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The Coalition of Nationals and Liberals are now debating whether to ditch their own policies. For the Nationals, they have decided to drop net zero support, a move at odds with Australia’s Paris commitment, and one that would run counter to the goal Labor legislated into law in 2022. The Liberals may well follow suit.
Sussan Ley and David Littleproud are at odds over the Coalition’s climate policy.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
The Climate Change Authority cautions against abandoning 2050 as the target time for reaching carbon neutrality. Having a firm goal that catalyses and co-ordinates action by communities, businesses and governments – at home and abroad – will deliver a lower-cost decarbonisation of our economies than mere “aspirations” to act.
Backing for “decisive action now” to deliver net zero emissions carbon neutrality by mid-century includes all the peak business organsisations – the AiGroup, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the Business Council of Australia.
These groups all understand that kicking net zero to the never-never will raise the cost of transition. When investors see a lack of bipartisanship on a major policy area, they slap on a premium for uncertainty that feeds into the entire supply chain.
They also recognise that a departure from the Paris Agreement on the 2050 goal would open the way for the dilution of other decarbonisation efforts. Proponents of such a move are, after all, unlikely to stop at dismantling the arch of climate action after removing its keystone.
Australian voters have endorsed climate action in the four elections since the Paris signing in 2015, arguably with overwhelming backing at last May’s federal polls.
They understood the national interests are best served by building sustainable industries that can – indeed, must – replace coal and gas exports.
Nationals leader David Littleproud addresses the media after the net zero policy change on Sunday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
With Australia’s abundant renewable energy resources, we will have few rivals when it comes to attracting companies that can make steel, aluminium, ammonia and even silicon without relying on fossil fuels.
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Again, any injection of doubt about the commitment to this shift from one side of federal politics sends strong signals of unreliability to our major trading partners. If we’re not going to stay the course, then they will divert their billions – if not trillions – of dollars in orders and investments to partners they can trust.
Technological trends, thankfully, are largely headed one way. For all the bluster of the return in the US of a Trump “drill, baby, drill” administration, finite fossil fuels aren’t getting easier to find. Indeed, almost 90 per cent of the annual upstream oil and gas investment since 2019 merely offsets production declines rather than serves new demand, the International Energy Agency says.
The IEA has separately noted that two-thirds of the $US3 trillion ($4.6 trillion) global investment into energy last year was poured into clean energy. Such technologies will fall by 22 to 49 per cent in price by 2035.
Given the advances now announced almost weekly – from new solar panel efficiency records being set in Sydney to China launching new sodium-ion batteries – investors and consumers can expect that innovations will only sharpen clean-tech’s competitiveness.
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The rapid take-up of the government’s home battery subsidy – topping 100,000 units and 2000 megawatt-hours of capacity in less than four months – reflects the huge household appetite to marry rooftop solar with storage to push down power bills.
Automakers are pouring money into electric vehicle research and development; electronic firms are offering ever more energy-efficient appliances. Fossil fuel-powered machines tend to be wasteful of energy compared with those powered by electrons.
National interest, of course, is not merely served by trade and investment flows. We all have a visceral stake in ensuring that the relatively stable climate, which has enabled human civilisation to thrive since the last ice age, prevails.
Put bluntly, that civilisation has relied on our atmosphere, land and oceans to dump our waste. This giant experiment – turbocharged by the industrial revolution’s reliance on ancient fossils to power it – is reaching dangerous points that the Paris Agreement is trying to avert.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which pulls together the world’s best climate science, tells us that we must reach net zero emissions by about 2050.
To be clear, we shouldn’t read 2050 and net zero as absolutes in the sense that the world “ends” on January 1 of that year if we haven’t achieved by then – in the words of the agreement – “a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases”.
Rather, we must strive now to eliminate those emissions because every additional concentration of carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping gas we send into the atmosphere does just that. We trap more of the sun’s energy and energise our atmosphere just that little bit more.
It seems we need constant reminders that decarbonisation is more than just a nice-to-have outcome. It’s a must-have if our children and their children are going to have a chance to enjoy semblances of the stable climate we have.
I defy anyone to read the government’s recently published National Climate Risk Assessment without taking away some sobering questions.
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What will it mean for our$2.4 trillion mortgage market if increasing numbers of home owners can’t afford rising insurance premiums because they live in areas of rising risk from floods, storm surges, bushfires and other no-longer-so-natural perils? No insurance, no mortgage.
And who will fund the costs of keeping regional communities functioning when they are exposed to what the assessment report describes as “extreme, concurrent and cascading events”?
Time spent in drought, especially in the winter and spring planting seasons, has been on the rise in recent decades across the country’s east and southwest, a research paper out just last week said.
Where’s our food going to come from in future, and how much more will it cost?
Plus, how can “connections to Country” be maintained by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders when sea-level rises or other increased hazards force people and flora and fauna to relocate?
Of course, when it comes to climate impacts, Australia is not alone. Countries to our north also face a rising threat to human and ecosystem health. Humans, after all, can’t tolerate sustained humidity and heat – as measured by so-called wet-bulb temperatures – greater than 35 degrees.
What will Defence’s role be in future when our neighbours become less stable?
So when you hear politicians opposing “net zero at any cost”, ask yourself what level of cost you’re prepared to bear if we and other nations rip up the Paris pact. Because ultimately, the physics of the atmosphere will ignore the antics and atmospherics of politicians.
Matt Kean is chair of the Climate Change Authority. He previously served as NSW’s Liberal treasurer.