Ley’s in a no-win situation as warring Liberal tribes battle over net zero

As Liberals prepare for Wednesday’s party meeting to discuss climate policy, one wouldn’t blame Sussan Ley if she were starting to wonder why she stood for leader in the first place.

Barring miracles, she finds herself in a no-win situation. The gulf in her party is encapsulated in the war over net zero, but that stands for a much wider divide – probably as wide as the party has faced since it was formed in the mid-1940s.

As they battle over whether to ditch their net-zero commitment, the Liberals have lost all discipline. They’re fighting like alley cats, taking their views and sniping into any public forum (especially Sky News) they get. Many have little respect for Ley and none for her authority.

Take Phil Thompson, the member for the Queensland seat of Herbert. A veteran, he complained that on Remembrance Day he had to “get on a bloody plane to fly back to Canberra to talk about something that we should have resolved months ago”.

Months ago? It’s just half a year since the election.

Thompson went on to attack colleagues who’ve hinted they might leave the frontbench if the policy debate ends badly for their view.

“We’ve seen now people threaten to quit positions and throw all their toys out of the cot. […] And to those people who want to threaten to quit – then quit. You’re not that important anyway,” Thompson said, in a personal display of toy-throwing.

Angus Taylor, Ley’s main leadership rival, was asked on Nine whether he would categorically rule out a challenge to Ley.

Of course he didn’t. Instead, he said, “It’s not something we’re planning, it’s not something I’m focused on”.

Taylor, incidentally, was energy minister in the Morrison government that in 2021 embraced net zero by 2050.

Current energy spokesman Dan Tehan will present various propositions to Wednesday’s meeting and get the feel of the room.

A meeting of Liberal shadow ministers on Thursday will then settle the Liberal policy. After that will come the negotiations with the Nationals, who announced their intention to dump the commitment earlier this month.

As of late Tuesday, Liberal Party sources predicted the outcome was likely to be that net zero would be ditched altogther, with emissions reductions to be at the rate of other developed countries.

If that becomes the policy, it would ignore the plea of former Liberal MP Keith Wolahan, defeated in May in his Victorian seat of Menzies, who on Tuesday appealed to the party to turn “their minds to seats like mine”.

“The Liberal Party lost 33 seats and 26 of those were in urban areas,” he said. Net zero had become a “proxy” for climate change and it was the Liberals that had introduced it, he said.

But with a no net-zero position, the Liberals would be at or close to the Nationals’ policy and the Coalition would be safe. The Nationals have said Australia’s emissions reductions should be at the rate of the OECD average.

Victorian Liberal Tim Wilson, a moderate, has no time for that approach. “One of the things I am going to be very clear about is that we should be setting sovereign targets that work for Australia,” he said.

“One of the most bizarre things that has happened in the past week is that people seem comfortable with the idea that we should abandon sovereign targets for Australia and choose globalist targets, like saying we should prioritise international treaties or OECD averages over targets that Australians decide for our country.”

Wilson, who actually won back an urban seat in the May’s election rout, had a timely warning for his party.

“If we’re just going to break into tribal parts […] we are going to find ourselves boxed into a very difficult position.”

In another take, fellow frontbencher Andrew Wallace told the ABC, “I think we have moved on from the period of absolute unity to the point where no one is able to challenge the views of a colleague. Remembering that the leader of the party is the first among equals.”

Ley can expect that whatever the outcome on climate policy, members of her team will continue to feel free to have noisy political food fights on contentious issues that come up in the months ahead. This will only add to her woes.