Article by Ron Boswell, courtesy of The Courier Mail.
04.09.2025
In Canberra, the political smarties just can’t work out why the grassroots of the National and Liberal parties are turning away from net zero.
Last week, Queensland’s LNP was the latest state division to urge the parties to reject net zero. This week, the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the Teals and most of Canberra’s press gallery have been united in their urban condescension, describing Barnaby Joyce’s private member’s bill to kill net zero as a political gift to the government.
For them obedience to net zero is a painless slogan. They label anyone with doubts about net zero as a climate denier. They think the target – 2050 – is sufficiently distant that they’ll be insulated from adverse consequences. And they reckon that the short-term political benefits outweigh the long-term economic costs.
Labor thinks the “vibe” is with them, even if, deep down, they know that net zero by 2050 is complete political fakery. Labor’s position is one of rank political cynicism.
But they are wrong. And they’ve been wrong before. Remember back to December 2009 when the Coalition revolted against Malcolm Turnbull’s plan to support Kevin Rudd’s first carbon tax and the Liberals dumped him for Tony Abbott.
I remember it, because I was there.
The day after, Labor couldn’t believe their luck. Labor political smirking was in overdrive. All the political columnists said the Coalition faced political ruin for turning away from a carbon tax and “action” on climate change. But Rudd was gone within seven months, the Coalition secured a massive swing in the 2010 election and the Gillard government limped into a hapless and doomed minority government.
I know that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And many of the critics of the Nationals’ anti-net-zero push are making the same mistakes they made 16 years ago.
Labor’s Energy and Climate Minister Chris Bowen is convinced that the long queue of grifters and subsidy-chasers waiting outside his office means that his policy is popular. And post-election hubris means that Bowen and his colleagues can’t detect the anger simmering beyond the cafes and vegan restaurants of Marrickville and Newtown.
The punters are working out that energy prices have gone through the roof as a result of Labor’s obsession with a renewables-only approach. The punters also know that our manufacturing and smelting businesses are in deep trouble, in large part because our energy costs are three-and-a-half times those of China, the US and other competitors.
We are now in the farcical position where Bowen’s colleague, Industry Minister Tim Ayres, is putting billion-dollar bailout packages together to save Australian smelters struggling to survive because the government’s approach to net zero has seen their energy costs soar.
Labor and its fellow travellers are arrogantly ignoring the damage that is being done to farming communities across the country by the carpeting of farmland with solar panels, wind turbines and transmission lines. And they care not for regional towns whose vibrancy is being destroyed by financial market types buying up productive farming land to sell as carbon credits.
I guess we should not be surprised, given that the only interactions that most Labor MPs, Teals and the press gallery journalists have with “farmers” is at weekend markets where they buy their exotic lettuce.
And then there is Labor’s secret carbon tax. Since Labor came to power in 2022, Energy and Climate Minister Chris Bowen has turned the so-called Safeguard Mechanism into a carbon tax.
Under Bowen’s current scheme, 220 of our largest greenhouse gas emitters – those with facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes CO2e per annum – are required to reduce their emissions by 4.9 per cent every year.
If they can’t reduce their emissions, they must buy carbon credits that are capped at $79 per tonne (In the last financial year approximately 70 per cent of facilities subject to the Bowen carbon tax were unable to reduce their emissions by the 4.9 per cent target and were forced to buy more than seven million carbon credits at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars).
Now Labor is considering a Productivity Commission recommendation to expose an additional 120 firms – including dozens of businesses located in regional Queensland – to its carbon tax. That includes abattoirs, food producers, sugarcane processors and transport firms from Stanthorpe to Cooktown.
That’s what the push against net zero is about. It’s not about a slogan. It’s about stopping forever energy price rises for consumers and businesses. It’s about halting the destruction of the manufacturing sector, including in regional Queensland. It’s about stopping the stealthy creep of Labor’s carbon tax (currently $36 per tonne and rising) that will impose a crushing burden on Queensland consumers and business that none of their international counterparts will face.
And we wonder why we are in a cost-of-living crisis.
Ron Boswell is a former Nationals senator for Queensland