In an attempt to hold on to her leadership for a few more months, Sussan Ley has “clarified” that the Coalition does not “believe in setting [climate] targets at all, from opposition or government”.
Good-oh.

The official reasoning is the Coalition, which has held up climate action in Australia for the better part of 15 years, doesn’t think that energy policy is about a target “that is never going to be reached”.

The unofficial reason is that Ley has no authority over her party in any room – not the party room, branch rooms, or state and national executive rooms – and so is desperately attempting to hang on to her “leadership” for every minute she has left.

Climate targets are not about “energy policy”. They are about our future. Our chance for some semblance of a future that resembles the climate of our past. Because this is as good as it gets. When it gets too hot for the mountains to keep storing water for our supplies over coming winters or when 1.5 million people find their homes uninhabitable because of floods twice a month, no one will be thinking of their energy bills.

But the Coalition’s refusal to get its head out of its own arse and see the burning forest for the trees means the politics doesn’t move on from the immediate gotcha moments.

In terms of impact on policy, the national direction or even the zeitgeist, the Coalition is completely irrelevant. It has gone backwards for two elections and is on track to lose even more seats in 2028. History would say will self-immolate as a party before the decade is out.

There are two institutions giving the Coalition power here; the media and the government. Legacy media continues to pretend the Coalition matters in terms of our national debate, and that its internal tantrums have some bearing on outside reality.

Labor continues to use the nonsensical mutterings of Coalition bobbleheads desperate for relevancy as proof its hands are tied on doing anything that would actually matter.

Labor is doing the very least it can do on almost every measure, but particularly climate, and it uses the Coalition’s absolute ineptitude to do it. It looks good in comparison to the sloppy, incomprehensible drivel the Coalition has offered up for the past six years, because the bar is subterranean.

At the same time, Labor also relies on the faux-rage the Coalition sets off among the noisiest minorities so it can pretend there are boundaries to how far it can actually go on an issue. Particularly climate.

Why do you think Anthony Albanese fronts up to the obvious set-ups of the News Corp bush summits? Why is there no outrage at the Prime Minister having been run out of Ballarat by “angry farmers in tractors”? Because it works for Labor. Because Labor can then point to these steam clouds of angry puff as “proof” that it just can’t do anymore than what it is offering.

Labor can pretend it is “following the science” (it’s not – if it were, it would stop new coal and gas projects) and that the least it can do is at the vanguard of progressivism, because the Coalition is stuck somewhere in 2012 pretending beta-Tony Abbott politics is all it needs to get back into the main game.

Legacy media is so far taking this position, of vibes rather than targets, completely seriously.

Never mind that vibes, not targets, is what Peter Dutton offered while he was opposition leader, before coming up with the most expensive option for energy possible as the answer.

Never mind that we spent the majority of the years between 2016 and 2022 screaming at Labor oppositions for a target and then tearing its election campaigns apart based on pie-in-the-sky “what ifs”.

Never mind that the Coalition, which doesn’t have a single energy or climate policy, has labelled the hundreds of pages of modelling that have been released for this very-least-2035-emissions-reduction-target range “a cruel hoax”.

It’s the same overblown term Ted O’Brien used in 2022 to describe the market intervention that stopped power prices from blowing out, as well as lowering inflation faster, and what Dutton used to describe the latest round of tax cuts that Labor pushed through at the last budget.

Past “cruel hoaxes”, according to the Coalition, include infrastructure spending, Melbourne’s suburban rail loop, the response to the Gonski review into school funding, the 1994 federal jobs white paper, and renewable energy.

Does it matter that none of these things are cruel, or hoaxes? No. The media will run it, the phrase will appear in multiple headlines, and Labor will seem like it is pushing back against criticism and being brave, when in reality, it remains the least it could do.

Does it matter that it was the Coalition that signed Australia up to the international agreements that required climate targets in the first place? Or that the Coalition spent years criticising Labor for not stating every target it would have until 2050? Of course not! Pesky details!

Pretending the Coalition matters, or that its criticisms are worth anything, only allows the government to get away with doing the very least. That’s the cruel hoax we should actually be focusing on.

Amy Remeikis is a contributing editor for The New Daily and chief political analyst for The Australia Institute