The anger and dismay within the party room cannot be overstated, even among people who are not passionately supportive of the same-sex marriage cause.

The move was seen as further eroding the Prime Minister's standing and authority within the party. The fact that Mr Abbott's candidate for Speaker of the House did not succeed in Monday's ballot was seen as another indication of his weakening authority in the parliamentary party.

One MP said "things are getting much worse" with fractures developing not just with the backbench but repeatedly now with the frontbench too.

"He's digging in, just stubbornly insisting on his positions, despite everything.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt outlines the Coalition's emissions reduction target. Alex Ellinghausen

"There is widespread exasperation with what is now happening".

Climate policy 'purely political'

In this fetid atmosphere, Abbott, along with Julie Bishop and Greg Hunt announced the climate change target it will take to the Paris climate change talks. The focus of this policy is purely political.


Its target is not emissions reduction but the Labor Party. Tony Abbott wants to have cover to argue the government is doing something about emissions reduction. But his focus is on attacking Labor and claiming the opposition's policies will lead to higher electricity prices.

While environmentalists are horrified that the climate targets released by the government are not ambitious enough, there is a more fundamental problem: the policy doesn't add up. As it now stands, it will impose higher costs on Australian business to reduce carbon emissions than faced by competitors everywhere else in the world.

It relies on unspecified technological changes that haven't been invented yet. It will also involve a significant cost to the federal budget, well beyond the $200 million a year suggested by the government on Tuesday.

According to both the Australian Industry Group and the Climate Institute, the figures are truly terrifying: if the proposed reductions were only being delivered by the business subsidies offered through the emissions reduction fund, the cost to taxpayers would be hundreds of millions of dollars a year, possibly hundreds of billions by 2030.

Since this is obviously not viable, everyone assumes that the government will eventually have to fold – that, is, after the election – and allow a trade in international carbon permits in order to bring the price of emissions reduction in Australia down to that faced by companies in the rest of the world. But for now, the government is only saying that it will keep international permits "on the table", purely because it doesn't want to be doing anything that looks like an emissions trading scheme.

Further, most of the forecast reduction is supposed to come about as a result of other policies that are unspecified and undeveloped.

The majority of the emissions reduction, according to the government, comes from a safeguard mechanism (so far unspecified), a "national energy productivity plan" for energy efficiency (unknown) and vehicle efficiency (unknown) and "technology improvements and others sources of abatement".

The government is recklessly trading policy certainty for the business community for a cheap political shot at Labor.

That's after, of course, you get past the whole dodgy process of changing the assumptions and base line on which you set forecasts.

The nicest thing you can say about the Coalition's policy release on Tuesday is that at least it contains the concession that Australia had to increase its emissions reduction target. But the policy does not deliver the sort of certainty investors and business need for such a long-term issue.

It is truly alarming that the government believes that it can get away with such policy rubbish.