Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop have smacked down Tony Abbott’s latest sortie to scuttle the national energy guarantee, with Turnbull noting that it is time to move past “ideology and partisanship and slogans”.



Asked about Abbott’s call on Tuesday night for Australia to quit the Paris climate deal as a precursor to dumping the Neg, the prime minister told reporters the government’s changes to energy policy were already having a positive price effect.

Turnbull also emphasised the Neg enjoyed “almost universal support across the country” from stakeholders who had once campaigned against a carbon price.

“I cannot think of an energy policy that has had broader support from the minerals industry, from the manufacturers, from unions, in fact, from the National Farmers’ Federation,” he said Wednesday. “The reason it has that support is because it will put downward pressure on energy prices.”

In a clear stab at Abbott, who campaigned to “axe Labor’s carbon tax” ahead of winning the 2013 election, Turnbull said “ideology and partisanship and slogans” had been “a poor guide to energy policy”.

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“Engineering and economics are our guides,” he said.

Abbott, who has been campaigning for months against the policy, used a speech to climate sceptics on Tuesday night to try to exploit divisions within the government on the Neg, and rally the Liberal party’s conservative base.

Some Nationals want the government to bankroll coal-fired power during the transition as the price of their support for the Neg, a policy that would start in 2020. Some MPs, including Abbott and the chairman of the backbench energy and environment committee, Craig Kelly, have threatened to cross the floor if they don’t like where the policy lands.

In a significant escalation of his campaign, and in an overt political attack on Turnbull, Abbott claimed he would not have taken the decision to join Australia up to the Paris deal, which he did before he lost the leadership in 2015, had he known the US would withdraw from the treaty.

Despite saying in 2015 that Australia was making a “definite commitment” to a 26% reduction in emissions and “with the circumstances that we think will apply ... we can go up to 28%”, Abbott said on Tuesday he didn’t anticipate, as prime minister, “how the aspirational targets we agreed to at Paris would, in different hands, become binding commitments”.

Abbott said the impact of emissions policy on economic outcomes “wasn’t widely grasped”. “I didn’t anticipate how agreeing to emissions that were 26% lower in 2030 than in 2005 would subsequently become a linear progression of roughly equal cuts every year over the next decade,” he said.

Bishop, who was also Abbott’s foreign minister at the time the decision to sign on to Paris was taken, rejected the version of events the former prime minister outlined on Tuesday.

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Bishop said it was entirely clear at the time what the government agreed before the Paris sign-on, and the decision had gone through the usual party processes.

“When we signed up to the Paris agreement, it was in the full knowledge that it would be an agreement that Australia would be held to account for, and it wasn’t an aspiration – it was a commitment,” the foreign minister told Sky News.

“I signed on behalf of the Australian government with the support of our cabinet and our party room. The targets that we signed up for were agreed by the prime minister [at the time, Abbott], by the cabinet, by the party room.

“We then signed an international agreement and Australia plays by the rules. If we sign an agreement, we stick to that agreement, and the Paris agreement targets are achievable.”

Abbott rejected that in an interview with 2GB on Wednesday, saying his support for Paris was always conditional. He said he was reluctant to campaign against the Neg in public, but Turnbull had curtailed political discussion in the party room and there was pressure on MPs to conform.

Despite suggesting earlier this week it was possible colleagues could draft him to return to the leadership, the former prime minister said he wasn’t interested in trying to take back the job he lost in 2015.

“As I said to Malcolm Turnbull back in 2009, I don’t want to change the leader, I just want to change the policy,” Abbott said.

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“Now, if Turnbull and I talked more, I’d say the same thing to him today. I don’t want to change the leader because I don’t believe in politically assassinating democratically elected prime ministers.”

Abbott said only Turnbull took out democratically elected party leaders. “He does, I don’t.”

The Neg is now in its critical stage. State and territory energy ministers will decide in early August whether to endorse the policy. Any one of them can veto it. The policy would impose emissions reduction and reliability obligations on energy retailers and some large users.

The Labor states will be highly attentive to any side deal the Turnbull government strikes internally to prolong the life of coal-fired power plants, given some of them are already of the view the emissions reduction in the policy is nowhere near ambitious enough for Australia to meet its Paris commitments.

A number of analysts have also raised concerns about the fact the government has a plan to reduce emissions in electricity, where pollution has been falling, but no plan for abatement in other sectors of the economy where emissions have been rising.