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Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg has confirmed he would resign from the Coalition frontbench if the parties walked away from the Paris Agreement, and pushed back against the move within the Liberals to follow the Nationals and ditch net zero altogether.
“You can’t have a fatwa on two words. This is the international standard. I mean, trying to pretend that you’re not going to say two words is absolutely ridiculous,” Bragg said on ABC’s Insiders.
Arguing that increased energy prices were the fault of Labor’s “disastrous” policies, Bragg said any move away from the emissions treaty the Turnbull government signed up to in 2016 would align Australia with “pariah states” such as Syria and Iran.
Opposition housing spokesperson, Senator Andrew Bragg. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Pushed on whether he would quit his role as the opposition’s housing spokesman if the Coalition walked away from the Paris Agreement and net zero – as the US has done twice under President Donald Trump – Bragg said he would, but he doubted that was likely.
“Well, sure,” he said when asked repeatedly what he would do if the Coalition took a hard line, “but I don’t imagine we will ever leave Paris. We are not fringe dwellers. Most Australians want us to play our fair role in terms of reduction, so I just don’t think we are going to be leaving the Paris Agreement.”
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Bragg argued that net zero, “if done properly”, could reduce power prices over time, insisting it was Labor’s own policies that were keeping prices high and would also fail to achieve any of the targets they had set.
“We should do net zero better than Labor. Labor’s net zero has been an absolute disaster for everyone in Australia, and we can do it better than them,” he said.
Bragg is a prominent voice in the Moderates fighting to retain the words “net zero”, even if it becomes an aspiration rather than a legislated target to hit in 25 years, as prominent members of the Right in Ley’s leadership abandon their support for the goal, including former treasurer Angus Taylor and influential Victorian senator James Patterson.
Ley has recalled the federal Liberal caucus to Canberra from Wednesday for a series of meetings to finalise the party’s long-delayed energy and emissions policies, after a week of public division on the debate and even on her own leadership.
Bragg’s Moderate colleague Senator Jane Hume told this masthead’s podcast Inside Politics on Thursday it was “just crazy” that the Coalition was debating the use of the term “net zero”, when there was broad agreement about backing in nuclear power, the use of gas reservations, and condemning Labor’s renewables rollout for blowouts in costs and timelines.
“Net zero itself has turned into this sort of totemic phrase, this sort of binary issue – are you pro net zero or anti-net zero? – which I think is just crazy,” Hume said.
“Everybody wants to reduce emissions. Net zero has somehow become this euphemism for whether you believe in man-made climate change.”
While there is growing support within the Liberals for dumping net zero mandates – either in its entirety or reducing it to an aspiration – exiting the Paris Agreement, an international treaty to cap global temperature rises at two degrees above pre-industrial levels appears less likely.
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Following the passing of a motion at last week’s National Party Federal Council to abandon net zero mandates, a subsequent motion to step back from the Paris Agreement was shelved.
On Sunday morning, opposition energy spokesperson Dan Tehan left the door open for the party to offer subsidies to coal and gas producers, as well as supporting the extension the lives of coal-fired power stations in pursuit of “energy abundance”.
“The best thing that you can do to get energy prices down is pursue energy abundance. You have to make sure that all sources of energy are coming to the system because the more you’ve got coming into the system, the cheaper it’s going to be,” Tehan told Sky News.
“There is no doubt that working with the state governments to make sure that coal-fired generation can continue at the moment is absolutely crucial to bringing prices down, as is the fact that we need much more gas in our system, and we need much more gas in our system right here and now. We can’t wait for that to happen,” he said.
Tehan would not confirm whether he was prepared to dump the term “net zero” in the party’s platform, saying voters would have to “wait and see” the Liberal’s policy.
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