Australia is currently waiting to know whether it will host – jointly with the Pacific Islands – the 2026 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31). Turkiye has made a rival bid, and a decision will need to be made before COP30, to be held in Brazil in November.
Hosting a COP would allow Australia to demonstrate considerable global leadership on climate change. Yet domestically the issue remains politically fraught. Both the Liberal and National parties (the Coalition) continue to house a deep suspicion toward the reality of climate change, with a particular hostility toward Australia’s 2050 net zero emission reductions target.
This week, the former leader of the National Party, Barnaby Joyce, introduced a private members bill to the House of Representatives to scrap Australia’s commitment to net zero. The bill, of course, has no chance of passing given the Labor Party’s huge majority in the House. Instead, it was designed to create friction within the Coalition, and potentially as a tool for Joyce to wrestle his way back to National Party leader – a position he has held and lost twice before.
Due to the unique format of conservative politics in Australia – with the permanent coalition between the Liberal and National parties – there are a number of civil wars taking place, with climate change being the central issue of division. There are internal battles within the Liberal and National parties themselves, and then there is the battle between the two parties.
The National Party was formed in 1920 as the Country Party to represent the interests of the agricultural sector. Yet as farming mechanized and rural populations dwindled, the party has increasingly become beholden to the mining sector instead – in particular Australia’s large coal industry. That has led to their fierce opposition to any action to reduce carbon emissions. Despite being the Coalition’s junior partner, the National Party knows that the Liberals cannot form a government without them, so they have considerable ability to bend the Coalition to their will.
Following May’s election, the National Party briefly withdrew from the Coalition agreement. This offered an opportunity for the Liberal Party to spend the next three years thinking about what kind of party it wished to be, free of the influence of its junior partner. Yet the Liberals quickly worked to sew the alliance back together. This prevented them from doing the serious self-analysis and realignment of policies necessary to appeal to urban Australia.
The Liberal Party’s coalition with the National Party also prevents it from fully embracing its central philosophical pillar as a party of free markets. The National Party’s agrarian roots have given it a significant protectionist bent, and this has evolved from seeking to protect the agricultural sector from international competition to working the shield the energy sector from technological change.
Theoretically, the Liberal Party should be enthusiastic about the process of creative destruction in the energy market – where innovation destroys old, less efficient, technology, and new and better technologies emerge. Yet this isn’t how the party has come to understand the emergence of renewables. Rather than an economic process, conservative politics has attached a political element to these technologies, seeing them instead as part of a conspiratorial plot to deindustrialize the West.
Once this kind of worldview takes hold within partisan politics it becomes incredibly difficult to overcome. It develops deep roots in the emotional game of politics, which tends to be a far stronger force than any rational or pragmatic analysis of an issue. The Liberal Party’s symbiotic relationship with the News Corp media – with its business model of negative hysterics – doesn’t help.
This political environment is a hindrance to Australia’s regional foreign policy, with Pacific Island countries being at the forefront of the effects of climate change and looking toward Australia to demonstrate global leadership on the issue of climate change. Despite the Coalition not being in government, these parties still have the ability to influence the culture of politics in the country. And their behavior doesn’t reassure Australia’s neighbors should there be a change of government in the coming years.
This political culture will also affect Australia’s ability to successfully host COP31, if its bid is successful. The ideal would be to have cross-parliament support for such a major global conference, but unless the Liberal Party finds a way to embrace the emerging market in renewable technology – solely as one of economic change, if need be – and negate the influence of its junior political partner, this seems unlikely.
