Escape from net-zero

The Liberal Party's road back to relevance begins with extracting itself from the straitjacket of targets

Five years ago, Sussan Ley rejected a wind turbine development in Queensland’s Connors Range, ruling that the damage caused would be “clearly unacceptable”.

In December 2022, Tanya Plibersek reversed the decision. The Palaszczuk Queensland government acquired the Lotus Creek development, and construction proceeded.

Ley is one of the few state or federal ministers who dared to reject a wind turbine development on environmental grounds. She found an unexpected ally in Christine Milne, the former leader of the Greens. "Did anyone in Plibersek's office point out the significance of Connor's Range area as a core habitat for koalas and gliders?" Milne wrote on social media in March. "Work on this project must stop."

The tide is turning. Target mania is giving way to pragmatism. A fortnight ago, David Crisafulli's LNP government blocked the Moonlight Range turbine development 45 km west of Rockhampton. It says it will review of Queensland's wildly ambitious 2030 and 2035 emissions targets, which are driving the headlong rush to industrialise vast areas of farmland and native vegetation.

The federal parliamentary Liberal Party has the opportunity to follow suit under its new leader, who has announced that it will review all policies implemented since the last election.

That must include the unworkable and un-costed commitment to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The party must return to what it does best: rational, evidence-based policy-making that recognises that there must be trade-offs between competing ends.

Sentiment won't be enough. Those in the party room who wish to retain the net-zero target must add substance to their arguments. They must justify the multi-trillion-dollar cost and map out a credible pathway, explaining how they plan to close the technology gap.

They must justify the investment in land and capital, as these are scarce resources that could be used for other purposes.

The Liberal Party's net-zero policy is both electorally ineffective and technically unachievable.

The strategy of adopting the net-zero mantra to make the Liberal Party more politically attractive has comprehensively failed. The privileged voters who’s luxury opinions it was supposed to satisfy voted for the teals in 2022 and were reluctant to return three years later.

The Liberal Party must seize the opportunity to declare that the emperor is naked. It should distance itself from the unspoken fantasy to which it has subscribed for much of this century: that the chief obstacle to abandoning hydrocarbons is a lack of political will.

Adopting a rational energy policy bounded by economic and engineering constraints would hardly put the Liberal Party at a disadvantage. Tony Blair was an enthusiastic adopter of the climate change narrative in the late 1990s. In a keynote 2004 speech, he described it as "a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power that it alters radically human existence."

While Blair has not reneged from that position, he decries the unfulfilled promise of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which has distorted the debate "into a quest for a climate platform that is unrealistic and therefore unworkable".

“Too often, political leaders fear saying what many know to be true: the current approach isn’t working,” he wrote in the foreword to a report by