‘Do you want to get this bill passed, or do you want to blow up Malcolm’s leadership?’ An interview with Malcolm Turnbull, part 2 – power

Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells recently sat down with former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull for his insights on bipartisanship. His career spans journalism, publishing, the law, business – and the trials and tribulations of the political fight for ‘our nation, our Australian project’ (A Bigger Picture, 2020).

Here in the second part of the interview, Turnbull shares his views and experiences regarding the politics of power, energy and climate change in Australia.

On cooperation in politics; climate change policy 2004-13

There’s a lot more cooperation in politics than people imagine. People generally see parliamentary politics through the prism of question time, which is theatre. But most legislation is passed without contest, most of it sails through – if you tally up all the bills. Of course, they’re the non-controversial ones. But the partisan contest is very real and what is disappointing is when people choose to weaponise policy issues for partisan purposes. An example is the way Abbott weaponised climate.

In a sense, the idea of ‘bipartisanship’ is a false premise. It assumes political parties are homogeneous. The most bitter partisanship in recent times has actually been within the Coalition, not between Labor and Liberal.

‘Your opponents are over there, and your enemies are sitting next to you’

That’s very true. Tony had adopted every possible position on climate change. Literally there wasn’t one position that he hadn’t adopted at one point or another. He accurately described himself as a weather vane.

For a time Tony Abbott was an ally, arguing in a front page story in The Australian on 24 July [2009] that we should just get on with it and pass the Rudd CPRS, but this was just one of the positions he took before finally landing in opposition to putting a price on carbon at all. (Malcolm Turnbull, A Bigger Picture, pg. 163).

How do we get our country to a better place on this?

Well, the reality is that climate has been such a winner for the coalition. When I say ‘its been a winner’, it’s a catastrophe. The right wing of the Liberal party have just enjoyed using this against the Labor party, and the small ‘l’ liberal voters in Liberal electorates have, for the most part, still voted Liberal. Now that’s starting to change with so many Independents popping up and I suspect there will be more in the future.

The truth is that most people in the Liberal party room actually don’t care about the environment. They don’t care about energy. They see it as a political objective. You get Matt Canavan saying we should be burning more coal in the Hunter Valley. I mean, this is barking mad.The flakiness of some members of the government started to be an issue with business. On 22 June 2017, Matt Canavan, the Natural Resources minister, told Catherine Tanna, CEO of EnergyAustralia, that he wanted the government to build four high-efficiency, low emission (HELE) coal-fired power stations. A startled Cath Tanna later told me and Josh [Frydenberg] the meeting with Canavan was ‘terrifying’ and described the HELE proposition as ‘batshit crazy’. (Malcolm Turnbull, A Bigger Picture, pg. 608).

Some concluding observations from us

Australia is lucky the states and territories have continued to do the heavy lifting on climate policy. By the end of 2020, there wasn’t daylight between the Liberal and Labor states on climate policy. The federal government continues to be held hostage to the same political faction that weaponised climate policy then toppled Malcolm and his National Energy Guarantee.

The election of President Biden is the biggest single change in global climate politics this century. In his first days, which included climate day at the White House, Biden re-joined Paris, set in motion a requirement for all federal vehicles to be electric, and suspended fossil fuel development on federal land. He tasked his climate change envoy, John Kerry, to rally every nation in the world to raise ambition on tackling climate change.

Committing to net zero by 2050 might get Australia an invite to global climate change summits, but it won’t get us a seat at the grown-ups table. It is going to take a percentage reduction target for 2030 in at least the high 30s (for total greenhouse emissions) and that is going to require credible climate policy. In 2009, The World Today's Sabra Lane read from Malcolm Turnbull’s blog: ‘Many Liberals are rightly dismayed that on this vital issue of climate change we are not simply without a policy, without any prospect of having a credible policy but we are without integrity.’

Malcolm Turnbull was right then. Let’s hope, however, that in 2021, integrity is the new black.

This is an excerpt from an article first published in The Mandarin (Premium) on 9 March 2021.

Read more: ‘You have to eliminate all human beings if you want to get the politics out of it’: An interview with Malcolm Turnbull, part 1 – water

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Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells are Melbourne-based authors, researchers and policy advisers. They are researching the history of bipartisanship in Australia.