Tony Abbott seems mired in the first stages of grief: denial and anger.



This week we were treated to a former prime minister making a political comeback pitch that went like this: I had no idea what I was doing when I took the decision to sign Australia up to the Paris climate agreement in 2015, I have a lot of feelings and I don’t mind sharing them, be the wind beneath my wings.

Sadly for Abbott, this compelling pitch to the world at large did not stoke a revolution, just a couple of public smackdowns. The same sortie fell similarly flat during the last couple of sitting weeks in the parliament when the former prime minister tried and failed to blow up the national energy guarantee.

Politics can be a singularly cruel business, so when Tuesday night’s treatise of denial to a group of climate sceptics in Melbourne didn’t quite land in the way Abbott might have hoped, the anger kicked in.

Popping up on his favourite radio station 2GB the next day, Abbott was a-n-g-r-y. Angry with Malcolm Turnbull, who had “politically assassinated” a democratically elected prime minister (apparently overlooking the inconvenience of his own political assassination of a democratically elected opposition leader in 2009).

Abbott told his interlocutor he didn’t really want to be out on this denial tour – playing these one-night-only ukulele gigs on Sky News at night and 2GB and the Australian – he wanted to be sorting out this fight internally, but he couldn’t because Turnbull had changed the dynamics in the Coalition party room in a way that limited internal political discussion.

Incredibly moving, this oppression. Pass the tissues.

Before Tuesday night and its aftermath, Abbott had performed his own forward sizzle by granting an exclusive interview with Simon Benson at the Australian. He wanted to know whether his Liberal party colleagues realised they had now washed up at the very same juncture they’d reached in 2009 “with Malcolm Turnbull trying to do a deal with the Labor party on emissions reduction”.

Hint, hint, guys.

Then he shared an insight that more than any other insight exemplifies the politics of Tony Abbott. Climate change, he contended, was not “a circle you can square with the Labor party … it is a fight that has to be won. There can be no consensus on climate change … you either win or lose … and at the moment we are losing”.

This really is the most extraordinary thing to say.

Just let it settle on you for a moment. There can be no middle ground, no pragmatic and sensible compromise in the national interest, no consensus, there is just total victory or total defeat.

Apart from the small problem of the default disposition trapping the country in some medieval jousting session, as if the joust has some intrinsic value in and of itself, that it is some sort of heroic conquest – there’s the fact that Tony’s victory is Australia’s defeat.

Let’s be clear. We are in the mess we are at the moment – higher power prices, rising emissions, a more unreliable electricity grid – largely because Abbott in 2013 prioritised a political jousting session with Labor on climate change over the national interest. A massive misjudgment was made. It was clear at the time, and it has only become clearer with the passage of time.

But in Abbott’s head this cage fight – one dogged Forestville resident versus evidence-based policy (the former prime minister showed in technicolour how little he cares about policy detail on Tuesday night when he indicated he didn’t understand the Paris commitments he signed up to in 2015) – is more important than the practical consequences that flow from it.

The mythic, the totemic, the symbolic, trumps the practical. Just let that settle on you for a moment or two, and think about how you might feel about your politics being a game of toy soldiers.

Fortunately for Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg, the signs point to the Abbott sortie being contained: Don Quixote tilting at imagined wild-eyed, carbon-constraining leftists like the Business Council of Australia and the National Farmers Federation.

What isn’t contained is an internal push on coal that could easily blow up the national energy guarantee. At this stage of proceedings, we need to train our eyes on the Nationals.

The national energy guarantee as a policy mechanism is supposed to be technology neutral. It will impose a reliability guarantee and an emissions reduction target on energy retailers, and that framework is then supposed to let the market determine the optimal energy mix to deliver reliable power with emissions trending downwards.

Turnbull has made much in recent months of the virtues of technology neutrality (engineering and economics) as opposed to ideology determining what the various power sources should be.

If this seemed all too good to be true, turns out it was. Some Nationals want a new taxpayer funded boondoggle for coal as the price for supporting the Neg. The ambit claim is either new power stations or retrofitting or both.

This week I asked the Nationals leader, Michael McCormack, what his party’s position on the Neg was, and whether the coal boondoggle was an official Nationals position or a position being championed by some Nationals, and by this I meant Nationals in Queensland.

This was his answer: “I support a sound energy policy that can help to achieve reliable supply and affordable energy prices for all Australians, especially those in rural and regional Australia who the Nationals represent”.

“Like other Nationals, I support the Neg and its purpose in bringing about consistency in the energy supply arrangements through a Coag process. All governments in Australia have a role to play in this process.

“In relation to current issues being reported by the media on negotiations in the Liberal and Nationals federal government, these matters are still in consideration.”

So, drum roll please, the official Nationals position articulated by the party leader is we support the Neg at a price still to be determined.

This would be fine if settling the Neg was only up to the commonwealth. The fact of the matter is any state or territory can veto the policy, and some of the Labor states are already concerned that the emissions reduction target in the scheme is too low.

What you do not want to say to those fretful states, if you are Frydenberg, is please sign off on this policy even though you think the emissions reduction target is too low ... and by the way, here’s my new coal boondoggle. Surprise!

The other moving part that some of the states will have in the back of their mind when they meet Frydenberg in early August will be the results of the 28 July super Saturday byelections.

If the Coalition performs well, taking either Braddon or Longman from Labor, then there will be a rush of collective blood about an early election, notwithstanding the fact Turnbull keeps insisting the government will not go to the polls until 2019.

It’s possible that some states might be tempted to sit tight rather than be herded into a quickie agreement on a policy they have reservations about if they think we are five minutes away from going to the polls.

Even if one of the states doesn’t kill the policy on the basis that technology neutrality and a Queensland inspired coal boondoggle are inherently contradictory propositions, then Labor federally might.

The working assumption has been Labor is more likely than not to support the policy once it returns to the federal arena, with some caveats such as increasing the level of ambition with emissions reduction, in the event it wins the next federal election.

I suspect this is still more likely than not, but I certainly don’t think it should be assumed that Labor will sign up on any terms.

I’ve been saying for months Frydenberg settling this policy is a lot like scaling Everest without oxygen.

So far, the energy minister has managed to haul himself to the south base camp at Nepal. He will back himself to get to the summit, but the toughest climb still looms.