Grattan on Friday: Libs should reflect on proverb ‘As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly’

Twice in recent times the Liberals have faced an existential crisis over climate and energy policy: in 2009 over Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and in 2018 over the National Energy Guarantee, a plan to reduce emissions while maintaining reliability at lowest cost.

In each case the party was led by Malcolm Turnbull, first as opposition leader and then as prime minister. Both times, Turnbull suffered a mortal blow to his leadership.

Looking back to the 2018 crisis, the now leader Sussan Ley told the ABC’s Nemesis program after the 2022 election, “unfortunately Malcolm couldn’t unite the joint party room on energy policy and we had a breakaway group in the Nationals who made a strategic decision to blow this up and that was very unfortunate”.

It wasn’t only the Nationals. Andrew Hastie, now again railing over climate policy, told the program he’d threatened to cross the floor over Turnbull’s policy.

The damage done by these battles must live in the memory of today’s Liberal parliamentarians. At least you’d think so. Perhaps not. Descriptions of their current shambles come to mind. Lemmings over the cliff. Dogs returning to their vomit. Some in the Coalition might reflect on the full biblical quote of the latter: “as a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly”.

Lukas Coch/AAP The Liberals and the Coalition as a whole are now in a full-blown crisis over climate policy. This time it’s about the net zero by 2050 target which, given the long timeline, in theory should be an easier challenge than they faced in 2009 or 2018. Those Liberals trying to work towards what they hope might be a viable compromise – that acknowledges net zero while loosening the constraint it imposes – are finding it increasingly difficult by the day, as the party at large becomes more feral. Among the Liberal rank and file, the demonisation of net zero has spread like a contagion. So virulent is it, that some MPs are nervous when they have to front branch meetings. Yet the Liberals are paralysed until they resolve their position, whatever the consequences. At best, those consequences would be an uneasy internal truce. At worst? A massive blow-up. Ley’s leadership, safe for the moment, could be undermined, possibly fatally. Angus Taylor, the alternative leader, is a hardliner on net zero who, however, would accept a compromise and hope to stand ready to pick up the pieces if Ley’s leadership later fell apart. As net zero tears Liberals apart, it sits like a great weight on the chest of the Nationals. Barnaby Joyce, set to jump out of the Nationals party room, has named it among other reasons for doing so. Anti net zero proselytiser Matt Canavan is running the Nationals’ review, which is heading in one direction. The conveners of the backbench Coalition policy committee for the Australian economy, Jane Hume and Simon Kennedy, have called a meeting for Friday of next week to allow Liberal and Nationals parliamentarians to say their bit. Hume is previously on record declaring she has “absolutely no doubt” the technology will be there to deliver net zero by 2050, and “this is something we should be embracing”. Opposition energy spokesman Dan Tehan is running a taskforce, including representatives from both parties, charged with developing an energy policy. Tehan (who told a conference this week he supported net zero in the Morrison government and “I haven’t changed the view that I had at at the time”) initially gave the impression this would be a relatively leisurely operation. But now the foot needs to be on the accelerator. In the coming sitting fortnight, its policy crisis will be a distraction for the opposition. On the other side of the aisle, Environment Minister Murray Watt will be under the pump as he prepares to introduce his legislation to reform the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. Anthony Albanese looks to Watt as a fixer (as he does to Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke). Watt’s job over coming weeks or months is to wrangle a deal for these changes that are aimed at producing a more workable interface between development (from housing to energy projects) and environmental protection.