It is scary that some in the Coalition think that a war on the future will actually work.

Scott Morrison hopes he can make voters as scared of electric cars as he made them of refugees. It’s a tough ask but credit where it’s due: given his party managed to make a swath of voters afraid of wind turbines and fibre optic broadband, you shouldn’t write him off just yet.

Technophobia has become the new protectionism and the right wing of Australian politics has become its strongest adherent. Gone are the days when the free marketeers in the Liberals backed science and innovation as the engine of productivity growth while the Greens fretted about the risks of GM crops. These days even self-described modern Liberals are afraid of the future.

According to the Liberals, if Australians start buying as many electric cars as the Norwegians already do, then we’ll be beset by blackouts and breakdowns. Scott Morrison even warned voters that Bill Shorten’s electric vehicle targets would “end the weekend”. What next, plagues of locusts?

Technological change drives the productivity growth that the Coalition says it is so keen on. The mining industry has invested a fortune inventing driverless trucks and trains it hopes will slash its labour costs. Similarly, industrial farms are hoping to replace their tractor drivers with driving by GPS. And, of course, the demise of traditional pay packets and the rise of mobile banking has been as devastating for clerks and tellers as it has been profitable for the big banks.

The NRMA, Toyota and Hyundai were quick to slap down Morrison’s silly comments about electric vehicles for the simple reason that big business is firmly on the side of technological change. You’d think the Prime Minister’s marketing background would help him realise that the whole business model of the car industry is to use new gadgets to get people to replace perfectly good cars with cool new ones. As The Australia Institute’s polling shows, an overwhelming majority of people are looking forward to driving clean, quiet electric cars.

The role that new technology plays in a modern economy cuts deep into the internal divisions of the Liberal National Coalition. Morrison isn’t allowed to dwell on what makes some voters in Sydney and Melbourne fork out upwards of $60,000 for a new car every few years, when he has Nationals like Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan fighting with One Nation for the votes of low-income constituents living in weatherboard and iron.