Will Climate Change Split The Liberal Party?

AFR - Andrew Clark

Divided for a decade over climat change ... Protestors dressed in costumes of Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull at Bondi Surf Bathers SLSC polling booth for the Wentworth byelection. James Brickwood

Cross-dressing is not a top-of-mind Liberal Party metaphor but, politically speaking, that's what it's doing. Robert Menzies' party of government, where a former Liberal prime minister, John Howard, once warned that "disunity is death", is threatening to fragment over climate change.
It is even taking on some of the historic characteristics of the Labor Party, which spent decades in the political wilderness as a result of dividing over issues like communism. "For many years when we talked splits and factions it was Labor, and the Liberals were much less subject to that," says John Warhurst, Emeritus Professor of Politics at the ANU. "Now the boot is on the other foot."
Divisions over climate change have twice contributed to Malcolm Turnbull's loss of the Liberal Party leadership and the prime ministership. Five weeks after he jetted off to New York, the issue continued to fester and played a significant role in the Liberal Party losing Turnbull's formerly blue-ribbon seat of Wentworth.
To be fair, climate change as an issue has dogged both sides of Australian politics for more than a decade. A global failure to come up with firm emissions targets at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit flummoxed the Kevin Rudd-led Labor government, which had framed climate change as the "great moral challenge" of the modern era.

Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Frank Little with Bob Santamaria with painting of former Archbishop of Melbourne Daniel Mannix in the background. Santamaria's formation of the DLP led to a Labor party split that kept the power out of government for years.

Further, an about face on introducing a carbon tax by Rudd's successor and victor in an internal party leadership coup, Julia Gillard, made her an easy target for then opposition leader, Tony Abbott, over what he called a "great big new tax".
But over the past couple of months climate change has morphed into something much bigger and politically destabilising. A centrist like Turnbull, with a past record of supporting an emissions trading scheme (ETS), being forced out of the PM's job by, among others, climate change sceptics like Abbott and Craig Kelly, lent an ideological tinge to a week of brutal blood-letting.
Turnbull and Abbott were bitter rivals with a near decade-old history of supplanting each other as party leader. But the contentious policy issue was Turnbull's carrot-and-stick National Energy Guarantee program. The abandonment of Turnbull's NEG, the role climate change played in the victory of an independent, Dr Kerryn Phelps, in the subsequent Wentworth byelection; and the demonstration effect the Wentworth result, including its climate change element, is having on other, similar, safe Liberal seats, has been stunning.
The metaphor may not be appropriate for climate change, but it's as if an accelerant has been poured on a long-burning fire in Coalition ranks.
This accelerant effect was obvious two weeks before the Wentworth byelection vote at a forum in the iconic Bondi Beach Pavilion. There 14 of the 16 candidates discussed issues ranging from tax policy to the position of refugees on Nauru, population growth and immigration. But the debate kept reverting back to climate change, with many candidates citing the explosive contents of the new IPCC report, released the day before in Incheon, South Korea.

Tony Abbott made Julia Gillard a target over what he called a "great big new tax". David Rowe

'There's always exceptions to the rule'
According to this latest IPCC document, the impacts and costs of a 1.5-degree forecast increase in global warming will be far greater than earlier expected. This follows a decade of record-breaking storms, forest fires, droughts, coral bleaching, heat waves and floods around the world as average mean temperatures increase. The IPCC report, which was based on more than 6000 studies, said the 1.5-degree increase in average temperatures could be reached in as little as 11 years – and almost certainly within 20 years – without major cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
It is these sorts of warnings, combined with what the great American jazz singer Billie Holliday referred to as "stormy weather", that have sharpened differences between Liberal Party moderates like Turnbull, and conservatives like Abbott, over the climate change issue.
It has not split the Liberal Party – so far. But there are reports that independent candidates – many are female, and some, possibly, may even emanate from the Liberal Party – will promote a climate change-related suite of policies, alongside a conservative approach to economic management, in the coming federal election in what had been regarded as safe Liberal seats.
Interestingly, this policy mix does contain elements of earlier peelings away from the Liberal fold. These include the 1966 formation of the Australian Reform Movement – led by the head of the IPEC transport group, Gordon Barton. It sharply differed from the Liberal Party over Australia's military involvement in the Vietnam War while espousing mainstream conservative economic policies. Eleven years later in 1977 former Liberal minister Don Chipp formed the Australian Democrats, a party with centrist characteristics that was later dismissed by then Labor finance minister Peter Walsh as "fairies at the bottom of the garden".
Indeed, "there's little aspects of the story that don't fit", Professor Warhurst acknowledges. "There's always exceptions to the rule. We are yet to see this issue play out and keep the Liberals out of office. But this highly charged situation in the Liberals does remind me of what Labor was like. "
There are echoes going back to the of the great Labor split. The record 23 years Labor spent in opposition from 1949 to 1972 were partly due to the long post-war boom, Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies' political dominance, Dr. H.V. Evatt's erratic leadership of the ALP, and Labor clinging to its nationalisation platform. But the principal factor was the communist bogey.
Soon after Menzies won the December 1949, election, "Doc" Evatt proposed banning the communist party. Not long after the first proxy conflict of the Cold War began in the form of the Korean War, inflaming domestic Australian tensions over the communist issue.

Labor divided
From the start, the ALP was sharply divided. "Doc" Evatt campaigned successfully against a later Menzies-sponsored referendum to ban the Australian Communist Party (CPA), warning against the rise of a police state. However, other labor figures were in favour of the ban.
The referendum was lost but the issue was never far from the headlines. There were persistent claims that Labor was "soft on communism", that left-wing members of the ALP such as Jim Cairns were "lover boys of the communist press", that Labor was suspect on issues such as the US Alliance, opposition to the claimed "downward thrust" of Communist China etc.
The issue was central to Labor's great split in 1954, when a largely Catholic, right-wing, virulently anti-communist faction directed by Bob Santamaria, head of the secretive Catholic Social Studies Movement, peeled away from the ALP to form the Democratic Labour Party, or DLP.
With Labor split, and the DLP distributing its preferences to the Coalition, the ALP remained out of office for another 18 years. The incessant, virulent guilt-by-association rhetoric of Santamaria helped to frame Labor during this long period as untrustworthy. It was a political fault line that lasted until the DLP was extinguished as an effective force by the results of the May 1974, double dissolution election.
Now the Liberal Party is threatening to fragment over climate change. Of course, the parallels are inexact and the Liberals have been in office for five years. But as Professor Warhurst points out, "the same apocalyptic language" is being used now on the climate change issue on the Liberal side "as the language which characterised the debate in the 50s and 60s on the Labor side".
Events in coming months will tell us if the parallels will come closer.

Links

• Wentworth byelection: Scott Morrison holds ground on policy despite swing
• Australia's new energy mess explained
• States goes their own way on renewable energy
• Coalition Urged To Revive 'Necessary And Inevitable' Emissions Reduction
• Wentworth Wipe-Out Won’t Shift Coalition Idiocy On Climate And Energy
• Wentworth Byelection Backlash Reignites Tensions Inside The Morrison Government Over Climate Policy
• The Morrison Government’s Biggest Economic Problem? Climate Change Denial
• 'No More Hiding': Morrison Government Set Emissions Data Deadlines
• To Tackle Climate Change, A New U.N. Climate Report Says Put A High Price On Carbon
• Mining Sector, Morrison Government On The Defensive Over IPCC Report
• Major Climate Report Describes A Strong Risk Of Crisis As Early As 2040
• The Political Will To Prevent Climate Change Is Lacking, Even As The Cost Climbs