Ley needs Coalition climate war to end, and fast, to focus on Labor

2 hours ago 1

Opinion

September 18, 2025 — 7.30pm

For the past week, as the federal government prepared to release its 2035 emissions reduction target, the Coalition has been at war with itself again over the 2050 net zero target for which the Morrison government signed up Australia.

But on Thursday, for once, Coalition MPs found themselves on the same page.

For political reasons as much as any other, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley had next to no choice but to oppose the interim targets after shadow ministerial colleague – and potential future leadership challenger – Andrew Hastie rekindled the climate fight and threatened to quit the frontbench if the Coalition maintained its support for net zero.

Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie and Opposition Leader Sussan Ley.

Ley doesn’t need to have a fight over 2035 – she has enough on her hands with the fight over 2050 and what was supposed to be a year-long internal review of climate policy by the opposition energy and emissions reductions spokesman, Dan Tehan.

The Coalition leader was quick to oppose the proposed 62 to 70 per cent emissions reduction plan, labelling the hundreds of pages of detailed work by Treasury, the Climate Change Authority, the CSIRO and more as a “glossy piece of modelling” and a fantasy, arguing Australia would miss the 43 per cent reduction by 2030 target and that Australians had already missed out on a $275 power bill cut promised by Anthony Albanese.

“I can assure you there was absolutely no division in opposing Labor’s latest piece of train-wreck energy policy,” Ley said.

Her plan for a year-long review that would buy time and keep the Coalition together has not survived contact with reality. Hastie, colleague Tony Pasin, Nationals colleagues such as Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan and others don’t want a bar of net zero, and they are already publicly positioning.

But a growing number of MPs, many of whom are younger and more pragmatic Liberals, are working quietly behind the scenes to try to hammer out a compromise on climate for Ley to head off a bigger fight over the policy that could ultimately cost the leader her job (though the majority view in the party room is still that she needs and deserves more time).

Some Nationals MPs, including Barnaby Joyce, Michael McCormack and Matt Canavan (rear), are calling for the net zero target to be dumped entirely.

Those MPs working behind the scenes and talking climate compromise include Ley’s right-hand man Alex Hawke, leading moderates such as Tim Wilson and Andrew Bragg, and conservative-leaning MPs such as James Paterson, Claire Chandler and Simon Kennedy (as my colleague Paul Sakkal first reported earlier this month).

There is even some hope that the bare bones of a policy compromise can be worked out by the time parliament returns in October and a divided party room meets again.

The compromises, which could include removing the net zero goal from law, exempting parts of agriculture from the target, getting more gas online and pushing back the net zero date from 2050, would be controversial.

As one MP familiar with the pragmatists’ discussions, who asked not to be named, put it, “there has to be a showdown when we get back to parliament. We need a position by the time parliament returns. I’m confident we will actually be able to land it [a compromise on climate policy]. It’s not 2013 [when Tony Abbott won the election by campaigning against the carbon price]; we can’t just be against something. That was a simple deliverable outcome, ‘axe the tax’. But just arguing ‘vote for us to end net zero’ is not going to win us the next election.”

Hastie sounded almost messianic on ABC Radio Perth as he explained why he would quit shadow cabinet if the Coalition kept its support for net zero. He outlined an alternative policy he believed should be pursued – making Australia an energy superpower, with cheaper electricity to boot.

A more nuanced argument is now being put publicly by MPs such as Wilson and Kennedy too. Wilson argues, for example, that he supports net zero prices, net zero power outages and then “people are quite relaxed about net zero emissions if you get the first two”.

In other words, Wilson wants the party to figure out how to come up with an energy policy the party room actually wants and then work back from there towards emissions reduction.

Compromise carries risks for Ley, though, not the least of which is that it may not go far enough for MPs such as Hastie and Canavan, and could trigger a split in the opposition parties again.

Conversely, there is an electoral risk for the opposition that voters will be turned off by a party that could be seen to be walking away from addressing greenhouse gas emissions.

The opposition leader tried to drag the focus back to Labor’s plan and away from her own problems on Thursday, and there is plenty to be concerned about in the policy documents. It will cost hundreds of billions to achieve a 62 per cent to 70 per cent cut by 2035. (Of course, advocates will argue that the cost of inaction would be far higher.)

Consider some of the headline points from the Climate Change Authority’s work. Half of all cars sold between now and 2035 will need to be EVs; industry and resources sector emissions will have to come down by about a third; a sixfold increase in energy storage, doubling of rooftop solar, tripling of utility-scale solar and a quadrupling of wind capacity will be needed.

Australia’s emissions reduction targets need to accelerate from seven megatonnes in 2024-25 to 19 to 24 megatonnes per year to meet the 2035 target. The Labor catch cry is “ambitious but achievable”, and Treasury modelling suggests under a so-called baseline emissions reduction scenario, Australia’s economy will be $2.2 trillion larger by 2050, GDP per capita will be $36,000 higher and more. It all sounds a bit utopian.

Delivering the emissions cuts required will pose huge challenges for Labor, with questions about what kind of baseload power is best, whether Australians will accept wind and solar power being scaled up to the level required, will that many people buy an EV, and has the age of affordable battery storage actually arrived yet?

The 2035 target is designed to claim the political middle ground for Labor, disappoint some environment and business groups – but not too much – and push a divided Coalition to the political fringes while it begins the hard work of keeping the public onside as the cost of the economic transition rises.

Ley just needs her allies and her enemies within to end the interminable climate wars, so she can apply the blowtorch to Labor.

James Massola is chief political commentator for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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