CAMERON MILNER: Unless net zero remains Coalition policy, no urban seats will return to the Liberals

Just when we thought the climate wars of decades past were dead, buried and cremated, both Labor and the Liberals are opening old wounds.

The fraught Rudd/Gillard/Rudd years were wrecked by the climate wars. There was Kevin Rudd’s carbon pollution reduction scheme and his “climate emergency” and Julia Gillard’s admission of a carbon tax before Tony Abbott read Labor its last rites through his “axe the tax” campaign.

Australia’ past climate clashes are like the Battle of the Somme — so many have been left dead and many more wounded for little ground actually gained.

The Turnbull period and Morrison’s term being taken over by the COVID pandemic took a lot of heat out of the fight. The 2030 targets were several elections away — too far in the future to be too bothered by.

Albanese could be under real pressure on the cost of transition

Albanese’s small target strategy meant he promised very little in 2022. Dutton going nuclear allowed Labor to run a scare campaign in 2025.

Now Labor must announce the nation’s new 2035 carbon reduction target having certainly having missed 2030’s 43 per cent target.

Why does missing the target by a modest amount matter? Because Labor is considering saying that just five years later Australia will hit at least a 65 per cent reduction.

Many activists from the NGO sector and the Greens will demand an even higher rate — up to 75 per cent.

This is all in the context of the Government no longer providing cost-of-living relief on people’s domestic power bills. After all, the money off your power bill was a plan to win an election, not actually a plan to reduce bills longer term. Voters are again feeling the pain.

Albanese should be under immense political pressure, not only for falling short but for the cost to voters’ hip pockets the change to our climate target will bring.

But just as Sussan Ley should be making hay, her Coalition seems determined to shoot themselves in not one but both feet by having an internal war in full public gaze over the 2050 net zero target.

It’s an act of electoral self harm that will not only let Albanese completely off the hook, but may well condemn the party to electoral irrelevance even beyond the next Federal election.

The leadership team such as it is under Ley should have squashed this rebellion outright, but instead they’ve let the horse bolt.

David Littleproud has a mutiny of disaffected backbenchers and malcontents in Nationals Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan, Michael McCormack and Colin Boyce. They seem determined to run by the rule “if you can’t run a meeting, then wreck it”.

This cabal, joined by some of the Liberals own ideological outliers including Alex Antic from South Australia, seems determined to help sign the longest electoral suicide note in history by making the party look like the party of climate deniers.

Like a bunch of latter day flat earthers, they all seem convinced of their righteous cause. Except it’s just not anywhere near where the voting public has been or will be in the years to come.

There are some very simple electoral maths at play for the conservatives in Australia. More than half of all voters are under 40. This group of millennials and gen Zs has pushed the Coalition’s vote third behind Labor and the Greens.

The only reliable voting cohort left for the Coalition has been baby boomers, but even this bloc is impacted, with post-materialists concerned by climate change turning to the teals.

And the silent generation is falling off the perch and likewise the electoral roll.

The Liberals only hold two urban seats.

Labor, Greens and teals are now the parties of urbanites and this structurally is an numerically unassailable challenge for the Liberal Party.

The Nationals, for all their backslapping, are a stalled party and will never make gains in the regions by becoming more like One Nation on climate.

The fact that key seats like Indi remained independent and former National Andrew Gee was re-elected shows the Nats are actually losing territory.

The simple politics is unless net zero remains Coalition policy, none of the urban seats will return to the Liberals.

For goodness sake, even Dutton agreed to net zero by 2050 and the David Crisafulli LNP Government only last week recommitted to net zero by 2050 in Queensland.

But by letting the debate fester, the Federal Coalition is doing untold damage to itself.

It’s also giving Albanese a massive free pass.

He should be under huge pressure to explain just how much the new 2035 target will cost taxpayers — not only in tax dollars being spent by the Government, but also to voters’ hip pockets.

Instead, Ley’s dithering at best makes her look as weak as Albanese or at worst makes her look like a climate denier.

She should simply lock in the target and leave the debate as to how we get there for later, while turning up the pressure on Albanese on delivery and cost.

The Liberals can’t contemplate government again without winning back city seats from both Labor and teals, but the price of entry to get to the starter’s gate is to have a credible climate position.

It can’t be led by a bunch of blokes from the Nationals backbench who have come off a B&S bender looking to punch on.

Albanese could be under real pressure on the cost of transition, having missed a modest target and announcing a whole new stretch goal.

To achieve, that Ley and her leadership team need rule out any change to the long term target and instead debate the practical pathway to getting there.

The climate wars last decade finished off a first term prime minister in Rudd and the last Labor government. This time around that very same war might well now see the Coalition locked out of government for the rest of this decade if not longer.