14/12/2020

(AU) Silent Treatment: How Scott Morrison Earned Boris Johnson's Climate Summit Snub

The Guardian - 

The PM will get due credit when he does something substantial to change Coalition brinkmanship on climate

Scott Morrison mistakenly believed Australia was invited to speak at a climate summit. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

Author
Katharine Murphy is Guardian Australia’s political editor.
The story is, genuinely, intriguing. Scott Morrison clearly thought Boris Johnson had invited him to speak at a climate ambition summit this weekend, because he told parliament last Thursday that was the plan.

Our prime minister can be fast and loose with what he says in parliament – certainly looser than any of his immediate predecessors. So perhaps this was just a passing declaration minus a fact base, or an ambit claim designed to send a clear diplomatic signal to London (best include me now I’ve said I’m coming – you wouldn’t embarrass a chap would you Boris?)

But it looked simpler. Last Thursday Morrison looked like he believed he was participating.

Consistent with that, there was a messaging plan. Morrison spoke to Johnson on 26 October. Three weeks later the prime minister flagged during a speech to business leaders Australia might not need to deploy carryover credits (a controversial accounting loophole from the Kyoto era) to meet out 2030 target.

This shift was framed by Morrison as a manifestation of the government’s self-evident awesomeness rather than the Coalition bowing to the loud international objections (the word cheating has been used) about Australia substituting accounting for abatement.

Having telegraphed that shift, the next step in the plan was to release new emissions projections showing it was possible for Australia to meet its 2030 target minus the carryover credits.

With the domestic ground duly tilled, Australia’s prime minister would then (probably, assuming no party room implosions) unveil Australia’s (alleged) awesomeness to the rest of the world at Boris’s Zoom soiree.

But hot on the heels of last Thursday’s declaration of attendance came persistent chatter in climate and diplomatic circles. The mail was Australia was not on the list for the summit, and if Australia’s pitch to be on the speakers list was “we’ll do what we said we’d do for 2030 without deploying the loophole that we’ve been roundly blasted for deploying”, that wasn’t going to be good enough.

This really should have been obvious to Morrison and the government, because the organisers of the summit had been clear down to the footnotes: turn up with bold new commitments. There would be no space for general statements.

Johnson (who actually raised a net zero commitment by 2050 during the call in October only to be publicly schooled by Morrison that the Brexit guy should understand a little something about sovereignty) wasn’t the only player on the field. The summit is co-hosted by the UK, France, Chile, Italy and the United Nations.

Now, Marina Hyde (bless her) gives me the distinct impression Johnson isn’t really a detail person, so it’s very plausible the British PM told Morrison he could turn up with a dressed-up status quo commitment for 2030 and a technology roadmap that had been in the public domain for months and land a speaking gig.
The Coalition has spent the critical decade working against the cause of climate action. The record is there for all to see, and the world knows it
If Johnson did that (and it seems likely) Morrison would have some claim to feeling aggrieved.

But only up to a point. Europe and the UN were unlikely to rubber stamp that kind of soft-balling, and officials who have been around this issue for a long time would have known that was a distinct risk.

Assuming Morrison got the right advice, a cautious prime minister would have waited for an official green light before declaring Australia would be speaking at the summit to “correct mistruths”.

In any case, when the summit list was confirmed and circulated on Thursday, Australia wasn’t on it.

There seems to be an undercurrent in some of the reporting that there was something unfair and arbitrary about this ultimate end point: that we’ve been snubbed because of UN chaos, or because China needed to be accommodated. (For the record, China recently complied with the ground rules of the summit by committing to its first long-term emissions reduction target – net zero by 2060).

There’s also a lick of “team Australia” in some of the reaction. How dare these characters snub Morrison when he had a nice announcement all ready to go?

I mean, please. Can we get real for a minute? It’s been a long year, and it’s possible we are all giddy with exhaustion, but could we assess practical actions and desist from the theatre criticism? Please.

Fact: the Coalition has spent the critical decade working against the cause of climate action. The record is there for all to see, and the world knows it.

Fact: to convince the rest of the world we are finally serious about facing up to the existential risks, Australia will have to promise action leading to a specific end point, not just unfurl some caveated hints about crab walking out of pariah corner and wait for the applause track.

Now Morrison is trying to execute a pivot. Since Joe Biden was declared the winner of the American presidential election, Morrison has been working to create some room for the Coalition to move on climate ambition without triggering another bout of internal derangement.

I hope the prime minister succeeds in this enterprise because Australia needs him to succeed. I also make this personal commitment: in the event Morrison shifts the Coalition in Canberra in the way that the New South Wales Liberal energy minister, Matt Kean, has shifted things decisively in his state – if Morrison produces tangible initiatives, specific policies to accelerate the transition to low emissions accompanied by medium-term and mid-century targets consistent with the science – I will be the first to stand and applaud.

Raucously.

But right now, all we have is a prime minister in Canberra trying to calculate, minutely, how far he can move without imperilling seats in Queensland.

Increasingly, while Morrison is trying determine whether he can creep slowly away from the Coalition’s election-winning formula of neutralising climate change in the cities while weaponising it against his opponents in marginal seats in the regions – a formula he deployed as recently as last year’s federal election – the practical transition is happening without him. The change is already on.

Morrison professes frustration with an international climate bureaucracy that favours abstract expressions of ambition over a record of tangible achievement. There’s some truth to the critique and it would be an utterly reasonable point to make if the Coalition had delivered any real action.

A transition is certainly underway in this country, and that transition is resulting in emissions reductions, but the transition is happening in spite of a government that repealed the carbon price, tried to gut the federal renewable energy target and abolish agencies like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation – not because of it.

Morrison likes to get a leave pass. He’s a skilled political operator, so he often gets one. It’s really extraordinary how often he gets one.

But as far as I’m concerned, this prime minister will get due acknowledgement when he earns it – when he does something substantial to change the Coalition’s rancid, partisan, post-truth brinkmanship on climate politics, not when he makes tentative noises about perhaps doing something.

So I can summarise the Ballad of Boris and Scott and The Summit this way: why would the rest of the world reward Australia for signalling tentatively that it might, Coalition party-room derangements willing, be slightly less shit?

Surely the rational thing for the world to do is wait and see whether we are less shit.

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