‘I didn’t agree to that’: The proposal that triggered uproar in the Coalition party room

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The prospect of the Coalition subsidising coal plants sparked vigorous argument among MPs in a joint party room meeting on Sunday afternoon, just as warring factions arrived at a fragile truce on climate change and energy with an agenda to elevate power prices above climate targets.

Pointing to the still-open wounds of the Liberals who argued to keep net zero, a group of MPs including Anne Ruston, Dave Sharma, Zoe McKenzie, Tim Wilson and Maria Kovacic peppered energy spokesman Dan Tehan with questions on coal power.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, Nationals leader David Littleproud and opposition spokesman for energy and emissions reduction Dan Tehan releasing the Coalition’s energy policy on Sunday.

The fossil fuel quarrel emerged as the final straw for Moderates in their losing campaign to prevent the opposition from abandoning its net zero emissions targets.

Though energy companies and investors are not petitioning to start new coal-powered plants, Liberals pushed for answers on the largely academic, but symbolically important, question of whether to replace a renewables-only subsidy scheme with one that could fund coal, as some state governments are doing.

“Dan [Tehan] just refused to answer. It went round and round with the Nationals sitting there on a Sunday afternoon just getting frustrated,” one MP said on background, a statement supported by more than half a dozen others on the call who detailed the confidential virtual talks.

Right-wing leadership aspirant Andrew Hastie interjected to back the case for coal plant subsidies in the mix, prompting Ruston, one of four Liberals who negotiated with the Nationals, to protest.

“This isn’t what I agreed to,” she said.

In response, Tehan said words to the effect of: “It was in the press release last week.”

Another Liberal MP said the meeting had not been nasty but they said Moderates had expressed frustrations “because they were trying to understand …the policy, so we know what to say tomorrow”.

“People need to know what to say when asked on coal,” one right-wing MP said, noting conservative Garth Hamilton’s warning last week against vague answers.

Another part of the policy – to maintain that net zero would be a “welcome outcome” but not a goal – also caused confusion.

“I don’t think it will survive Labor’s cross-examination of it,” one Moderate MP said. “My instinct is that we have conceded just about everything to the Nats.“

As the Coalition’s energy policy was rolled out at a Sunday press conference, the under-pressure opposition leader moved to take control of a brewing internal debate over migration.

This masthead reported on Friday that the Nationals and conservative Liberals, fresh from victory on climate, wanted to move on to immigration, one of the issues that had prompted Hastie to resign from the frontbench so he could speak out.

Ley allowed the net zero debate to run for months but before taking questions from reporters on Sunday, she said Labor’s handling of the migration program was next on her agenda, as “this country’s migration numbers are far too high, and this needs to be addressed as a priority”.

Standing alongside Nationals leader David Littleproud, Ley committed to stripping climate from the objectives of the nation’s energy operator, and to instruct the clean energy fund and the market regulator to focus on lowering bills, not meeting targets.

Littleproud only once mentioned net zero and neither party leader discussed the Paris Agreement, a global framework for emissions reduction that the Coalition might breach if it lowered the ambition of Labor’s 2030 and 2035 climate goals.

Their focus instead was on rising energy bills and their pledge to make energy more affordable.

Littleproud described the new policy as a shift from talking about climate to talking about economics.

“This debate is not one predicated on science. It is one predicated on economics. The Albanese government wanted to hold this country back and continue to throw sledges at the Coalition about a 2015 debate about the science of climate change,” Littleproud said. “We’ve moved on to the economics of it.”

At an earlier Nationals-only meeting of MPs on Sunday, senior MPs had expressed concern that the Liberal policy document released last week did not include any new scheme to bring down emissions. The Nationals are proposing a Tony Abbott-style fund to pay polluters who reduce or offset emissions, but the Liberals are not on board with this plan yet.

Ley also told her colleagues in the meeting that the party would vote against Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce’s private members bill against net zero.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong accused the Coalition of trying to outflank One Nation on the right, while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the Coalition’s policies when in power had set the country back.

“Australians shouldn’t pay the price of Coalition chaos because that is what we are dealing with now; their failure to put in place any energy policy,” Albanese told reporters in Melbourne.

“They’ve been in office for most of this century, and during that time, there haven’t been coal-fired power stations opening. They have been closing, and on their watch … it wasn’t replaced by any new energy because they couldn’t get their act together to have a policy.”

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