ABC News - Annabel Crabb
Ten years ago today, Andrew Robb arrived at Parliament House intent upon an act of treachery.
No-one was expecting him. Robb was formally on leave from the Parliament undergoing treatment for his severe depression.
But
the plan the Liberal MP nursed to himself that morning would not only
bring about the political demise of his leader, Malcolm Turnbull, but
blow apart Australia's two great parties irrevocably just as they
teetered toward consensus on climate change, the most divisive issue of
the Australian political century.
They have never again been so close.
A decade later, according to the ABC's
Australia Talks National Survey,
climate change is a matter of urgent community concern. Eighty-four per
cent of respondents said that climate change was real and that action
was warranted. When offered a range of 19 issues and asked which were of
gravest personal concern, climate change ranked at number one.
As
bushfires ravage the landscape and drought once again strangles vast
tracts of the continent, the inability of the Australian Parliament to
reach agreement on how to answer the threat of climate change — or even
discuss it rationally — may well be one of the drivers of another
shrieking headline from the
Australia Talks
research: 84 per cent of respondents also feel that Australian
politicians are out of touch with the views of the people they
represent.
This is the story — told on its 10th birthday — of a political event that changed the course of a nation's history.
How bipartisan policy fell apart
Robb
was on sick leave from his job as shadow minister for climate, managing
the notoriously difficult transition from one anti-depressant
medication to another.
In his absence, acting shadow minister for climate Ian Macfarlane had successfully negotiated, with the authority of
Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull, a deal with the Rudd government to land the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, or CPRS.
The concept of an emissions trading scheme was — nominally at least — bipartisan policy at the time.
John Howard campaigned promising an ETS in 2007, and so did Kevin Rudd. The Greens were ferociously in favour.
But the detail of Rudd's plan created difficulties. The
Greens wouldn't have a bar of what the Rudd government bowled up.
Even 10 years later, Rudd can still remember the tick-tock of the CPRS in pellucid detail.
I
reach him by telephone in a nameless Chinese airport. He is about to be
served something billed as a Japanese burger, he reports.
"They wanted 40 per cent, which would have
put us far and away above any other country in the developed world,"
Rudd says of the Greens.
"There was no scientific justification
for a 40 per cent cut. They just knew it was 15-20 per cent higher than
anyone else was prepared to offer. They designed it in a manner to cause
the negotiations to fail. The negotiations with them were a bullshit
exercise.
"And so we had to go to Plan B which was to negotiate with the Liberals."
Turnbull
was of the view that a market mechanism was inevitable. He had Howard's
advocacy of an emissions trading scheme as authority within the party.
And
so it came to pass that on Monday, November 23, a deal was concluded
between the government and the opposition that Turnbull resolved to put
to his shadow cabinet and party room the following day.
Enter the quiet assassin
Robb obtained a confidential copy on the Monday afternoon. He says it horrified him.
"It
was a total sell-out, but it was so cleverly crafted that it would
look, to the less informed, like we'd won the lottery in the
negotiations," Robb would later write in his memoir, Black Dog Daze.
He
sat up until late that night in his Canberra flat, studying the detail
of the deal, rereading Turnbull's public speeches, and composing an
ambush.
As Robb arrived at Parliament House on November 24, shadow
cabinet was already meeting to approve the CPRS agreement. Shadow
ministers Nick Minchin, Eric Abetz and Tony Abbott were staunch
opponents, but were in the minority. All that remained was for the party
room to rubber-stamp the deal.
"Malcolm really played it pretty
cleverly," says Robb now. "He got them all in a position where they
didn't have enough information to contradict it so it was all going to
go through in a morning. It was all set up, because he'd been
negotiating with Labor for months."
Robb knew that he could not possibly telegraph to Turnbull that he was an opponent.
"I think his biggest regret, and subsequent verbal attacks, were because I didn't tell him," Robb says.
"I didn't want to do it like that. But you fight fire with fire."
What
happened was this. Robb seated himself in a row near the front of the
room, expressed his interest in speaking and waited for the call. Hours
passed, as speakers selected by Turnbull spoke in support of the deal,
interspersed with opponents who — unfamiliar with the detail — simply
restated their generic reservations about outpacing comparable nations
in addressing climate change. Robb couldn't catch Turnbull's eye.
He
became anxious that Turnbull and his lieutenants — manager of
opposition business Christopher Pyne and shadow cabinet secretary
Michael Ronaldson — had twigged to his scepticism.
An extraordinary tactic
And
so it was that Andrew Robb made one of the most extraordinary and — by
most conventional measures — indefensible tactical decisions in the
history of political chicanery.
Parliament House is no stranger
to mental illness. Historically, its sufferers have covered their
tracks, loath to be seen as vulnerable.
But this must be the only recorded occasion on which mental illness has been used as a tactic.
Robb ripped himself a scrap of paper and scrawled a note to Turnbull.
"The
side effects of the medication I am on now make me very tired. I'd be
really grateful if you could get me to my feet soon," he wrote.
Turnbull
called Robb to speak soon after. He rose, and denounced the proposed
scheme in forensic detail, his words carrying significant weight as the
erstwhile bearer of the relevant portfolio.
The deal never
recovered. The meeting went on for six more hours. Turnbull — a
streetfighter when cornered — added the numbers of shadow Cabinet votes
to the "yes" votes in the party room and declared that he had a
majority.
The party room wasn't buying it. Turnbull was cooked.
One week and one day later — December 1, 2009 — a ballot was held for the leadership of the Liberal Party.
Tony Abbott — who nominated against both Turnbull and shadow treasurer Joe Hockey — won by a single vote.
The Abbott opposition was born, with its strident campaign against Labor's "great big new tax on everything".
The next day, the emissions trading scheme legislation went to a vote in the Parliament and was defeated soundly.
Both the Coalition and the Greens voted against.
The
Rudd government relinquished its attempts to put a price on carbon.
Rudd himself was overthrown mid-2010. Julia Gillard staked her political
life on installing a carbon price, but lost it at the 2013 election in
the face of Abbott's muscular anti-carbon-tax campaign.
Abbott
installed his "Direct Action" model which survives to this day, despite
Turnbull's subsequent prime ministership, during which he tried and
failed to introduce the National Energy Guarantee, a legislative device
aimed at establishing reliable supply and reduced emissions from the
energy sector.
'There were divided views'
Julie
Bishop, who was deputy leader to Turnbull at the time of the 2009
meeting, says the turn history took that day "was about more than just
climate change".
"It came down to a judgment about the political fortunes of the Liberal party," she says.
In
the previous months, with Turnbull's knowledge, Bishop had canvassed
the views of a great many Liberal MPs about which way the party should
jump. It was a party room depleted by the 2007 defeat, intimidated by
Rudd's vaulting popularity, and damaged by the consequences of the
Howard government's overreach on Work Choices, its controversial
industrial relations reforms.
What she discovered was a new wave of defiance gathering among the party's ranks.
"A minority believed that humanity hasn't had the claimed effect on the climate," she says.
"There
were divided views. But the majority simply wanted to draw a line in
the sand on the issue and they wanted to fight Rudd."
'You can still see the scars'
For Kane Thornton, chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, the past 10 years are a tale of intense frustration.
"What
happened back then has just so fundamentally shaped the direction and
the context for climate and energy policy ever since," he says.
"Even now, in discussion and debate you can
still see those scars. Every political leader — across both major
parties — has been very substantially impacted by this issue. Going
right back to John Howard in 2007.
"What that means is that what
is otherwise a very sensible and accepted approach — putting a price on
carbon — is now so difficult that governments either aren't prepared to
go there or it's done in such a way that there's such a narrow field of
politically palatable options that it's almost pointless."
Rudd despairs of the contemporary impasse on climate policy.
"Where
has the complacent country got to, where in the case of the major
geostrategic risks washing over our shores — the climate change debate
and the China debate — we seem to have reduced these issues to a
juvenile slanging match rather than a mature debate?"
Visiting
Sydney this week, the founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance,
British-born Michael Liebreich, was brutal in his assessment of
Australia's contemporary energy situation."It's
unbelievable how you can have a country with such cheap solar power,
such cheap wind power, frankly such cheap natural gas and yet you still
have expensive power and an unreliable grid," he told ABC's AM.
"I mean, how do you do that? It's a government failure."
Turnbull,
in an interview published yesterday by The Guardian, said the climate
debate in Parliament was hostage to "insurgents" inside the Coalition.
"There
are plenty of odd beliefs out there and conspiracy theories but what I
have always struggled to understand is why climate denialism still has
the currency that it has, particularly given the evidence of the impact
of climate change is now so apparent, and it is particularly apparent to
people living in regional and rural Australia," he said.
"Precisely what has been forecast is happening."
Dashed chances
Rudd believes that the CPRS — if legislated — would have stuck.
"Had
the Greens and the others acted responsibly, we'd be 10 years into an
adjustable carbon price which would have brought about the transition
away from coal," he says.
Turnbull, too, has assured associates
that if legislated, the CPRS would have become "part of the fiscal
furniture, like the GST".
The Greens, incidentally, are so
accustomed to being accused of blowing Australia's chances at an
emissions trading scheme that they've taken out
space on their website to address the charge.
The response reads:
"Here's the short answer: we voted against the CPRS because it was bad policy that would have locked in failure to take action on climate change.
"According to Treasury modelling, under the CPRS there would have been no reduction in emissions for 25 years. The CPRS was incredibly generous to polluters, allowed unlimited access to dodgy international permits and would have resulted in a carbon price of around $1 over the past decade.
"It simply would not it have led to any change in behaviour by big polluters, while any attempt to strengthen the scheme would have resulted in billion dollar compensation payouts to big polluters."
How did the UK do it?
In
the UK, notwithstanding the compelling train wreck of Brexit,
Westminster has somehow found time this year for bipartisan agreement to
the target of a zero-emissions economy by 2050.
So why, in Australia, is climate still such a lancingly divisive issue?
"I
think there's got to be something about how the issue was first dealt
with," Kane Thornton says. "There was a tipping point where in this
country this issue became highly contentious."
It was Margaret
Thatcher who first brought the greenhouse effect to the broad attention
of the British voting public; this was in the 1980s, when her temporary
"green phase" coincided neatly with her forced closure of British coal
pits amid an industrial war on militant miners' unions.
Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron,
who governed in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, pushed an
ambitious climate agenda in his party and suffered minimal internal
damage compared to the Turnbull experience.
"I do reflect on where
we would be right now if John Howard won the 2007 election with an ETS
and a commitment to a higher but still modest [Renewable Energy
Target]," Thornton says.
"My guess is we'd be in a very different position right now."
According
to Julie Bishop, the strength of feeling on the issue within the modern
Coalition is both economic and political in origin.
"Australia's economy has been built on the back of abundant supplies of low cost coal," she says.
"We've had the competitive advantage of being a coal-based economy.
"For some people, it's about that. That we're turning our backs on our own competitive advantage.
"For others, it's seen as symbolic of the divide between the economic wets and dries."
The one sliver of common ground
One
shred of bipartisanship has survived the 10-year political impasse —
the Renewable Energy Target (RET), introduced by John Howard in 2001 and
expanded by the Rudd government with support from the Turnbull
opposition to a mandatory 20 per cent of generation by 2020.
Back
then, the RET was intended to work with the ETS; an industry policy for
the emerging renewables sector, while the price on carbon set a
longer-term investment signal.
But for 10 years now, the RET has batted on unaided,
surviving a fairly serious attempt on its life by the Abbott government
in 2015. The target for high energy users was met in September this
year.
"The regrettable truth is that right now, the only policy
mechanism that is effectively working on Australian carbon emissions
reduction is the policy brought into effect by my government 10 years
ago, and that's the mandatory Renewable Energy Target," Rudd says.
"It's the only instrument doing the heavy lifting."
Kane Thornton says the RET has provided a measure of certainty.
On
this continent, renewables are growing at the fastest rate in the
world, on a per capita basis — 10 times faster than the global average.
Australia has seen $25 billion of investment in big wind and solar farms
in the past two years.
"That's been driven fundamentally by the
economics — that the cost of renewables just keeps coming down — it
beats coal, gas and nuclear," Thornton says.
"Despite the policy
wars, despite the brawling between the Commonwealth and the states, the
fundamental economics have just kept trucking on."
Households, too, have made a startling investment in renewables.
"Look
at rooftop solar, which is up there as a world leader in terms of the
numbers of households and small businesses that have taken it up,"
Thornton says.
"There are now over 2 million homes where the
owners have said, 'well, energy prices keep going up and it seems really
messy. I want to take some kind of control. I want to push on despite
the chaotic politics around energy'."
The RET has delivered
support for the growth of renewables. And the conventional resources
sector is in a state of transition: BHP is reported to be moving ahead
with plans to exit thermal coal, while coal giant Glencore has announced
plans to limit production and Rio Tinto has removed its exposure to
thermal coal entirely.
A sliding-doors moment
Andrew Robb
conquered the black dog and subsequently served as trade minister in the
Abbott government. When the prime ministership fell to Turnbull in
September 2015, he was retained for several months as a cabinet minister
by the man whose downfall he had hastened back in 2009.
Robb says while he is not proud of the method he employed, he has never entertained second thoughts about what he did that day.
"I've got absolutely no regrets because we've still got a lot of industries that we wouldn't have had otherwise," he says.
"We've
got cleaner coal, cleaner everything. If you're going to wind down
coal, we should be the last place to go, not the first. But there we
were, opening the door to Africa and lots of places with no
restrictions."
Robb admits that his was an extraordinary intervention in a sliding-doors juncture of Australian political history.
"I've
seen so often in my career where something monumental gets down to one
vote. Then when the vote's taken, it sticks, and the world adjusts. It
was the beginning of Tony — who won by one vote. Democracy's an amazing
thing, really. And it does show you that if you've got half of the votes
or just over half or just under, that can reflect community attitudes
too," he says.
"This is not a fault of democracy, it's a fact."
He
mentions that when he was a much younger man, he was "a great student"
of the Club of Rome, an association of scientists, bureaucrats,
politicians and public thinkers who in 1972 published the book Limits To
Growth, warning that the world's resources could not withstand the
depredations of ceaseless economic growth indefinitely.
Limits To
Growth is still the highest-selling environmental book in the history of
the world, having sold 30 million copies in more than 30 languages.
But Robb's early fascination with the work gave way to
distrust of its conclusions and primitive computer modelling; he says
its warnings of resource exhaustion and economic collapse towards the
end of the 20th century were overstated.
"The thing they didn't
talk about was technology. That you could find gas 300 kilometres
offshore, for example, and find a way to bring it onshore. Because of
this, the Club of Rome — which was quite a reputable group of people —
looked more and more ridiculous as the years rolled on."
The Club
of Rome has its critics and its defenders; Limits To Growth was commonly
derided by the 1990s as a misguided Doomsday scenario, but has enjoyed
something of a renaissance lately. The CSIRO published a paper in 2008
finding that the book's 30-year modelling of consequences from a
"business as usual" approach to economic growth was essentially sound.
But
what's not deniable is that this work influenced one young man who grew
up to be one member of a parliamentary party with a singular role to
play in one vote on a policy that would either change or not change the
course of a country.
Democracy, he says, is an amazing thing.
Or an infuriating thing. Or mysterious. Or random.
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