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Extract
Extract from High & Dry
TODAY'S LIBERAL PARTY:
AMNESIA AND QUARRY VISION
Amnesia
'The Liberal Party commits to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by the year 2000.
Although it's long forgotten, the Coalition – led by John Howard's arch-rival Andrew Peacock – took this policy to the 1990 federal election. As early as 1988, the Coalition was moving ahead of the Labor Party in their commitment to absolute cuts in Australia's greenhouse emissions. The environment was fast becoming an important political battleground, and responding to climate change was one area in which my party acted early, decisively and in the national interest.
Andrew Peacock personally signed the commitment to cut emissions by 20 per cent as part of a document called A Fair Go for the Environment. The document cited Peacock's Millennium Address in August 1989 in which he said, 'The choice available to future generations depends entirely on the decisions we make today. If we foul up, our children pay the price.' In an Alfred Deakin lecture around the same time, then shadow environment minister Chris Puplick repeated the greenhouse target and committed the Liberal Party to taking a lead on environment policy. The Coalition was backing bigger cuts by Australia sooner than Labor, but both sides acknowledged that climate change was a bipartisan issue. In early 1989 the Montreal Protocol came into force, phasing out the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) responsible for ozone layer depletion. On both sides of politics, there was a sense of optimism about Australia's role in combating global environmental threats. After 1990, the federal Coalition under John Hewson still backed a deeper emissions reduction target than the Hawke government. Then shadow environment minister Fred Chaney was proud that the Coalition had 'led the charge' on emissions reduction targets. As recently as 1994, John Hewson was asking Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating why, after eleven years in government, Australia remained the world's highest per capita greenhouse polluter. The same question still begs asking in 2007.
Today the bipartisanship on greenhouse policy is gone and 99 per cent of Liberal MPs, members and supporters have no knowledge that it ever existed. Indeed, most Howard government MPs, even cabinet ministers, would be horrified to hear of it. But this history always stuck in my mind. I still have the election brochure and the news clippings from all those years ago. At an impressionable age they helped to justify my faith in the Liberal Party's environment policy credentials.
I was prompted to dig them out of my files years later by a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald which read 'Greenhouse: no worries, says Parer'. The March 1997 article reported a speech by Warwick Parer, John Howard's first minister for resources and energy. Parer had publicly compared the push to reduce greenhouse emissions with the by now infamous Club of Rome predictions that the world would run out of resources by the end of last century. I had a brief internship in Senator Parer's office, and when I was Country Vice President of the Queensland Young Liberals I knocked around with his son Justin. I've always thought Warwick was a pretty decent bloke and still do. However, I was worried about his view on climate change, particularly in light of a few other things I knew about him.
First, I knew Parer had previously run a company servicing the oil industry and then worked as a coal mining executive and advocate. In 1997 he was almost forced to resign when it was revealed that he retained over $2 million in coal-mining shares in breach of Howard's ministerial code of conduct. In the face of repeated calls for his sacking, John Howard stuck by him. Parer and Howard were very close. Parer was reportedly Howard's numbers man, and they shared an apartment in Canberra before the 1996 election (after which Howard had somewhere else to live, of course).
At the time I was working for Robert Hill, the environment minister, who not only thought climate change was real but who had big plans for Australia to do something about it – something in keeping with the start made by Peacock, Puplick, Chaney and Hewson. Parer's comments were 'friendly fire' of a sort I hadn't really expected. As far as I knew, given the government was preparing for a binding emissions target following the Kyoto Conference, we were on the same page as a government. Granted, the eventual Kyoto commitment might not be as ambitious as Peacock's statement of 1990, and greenhouse policy was a lower-order priority in the party's 1996 election platform. There were inevitably different views on how fast we could constrain emissions, but as far as I knew the party did not dispute the seriousness of climate change.
Parer's remarks were my first inkling otherwise. He was not the first minister to express less than enthusiastic views on climate change, but arguably he was Howard's right-hand man. I cut out the headline and kept it on my wall. For almost a decade it has provided valuable motivation for my PhD research and now this book.
I was right to be concerned about Parer's comments. Well before Kyoto, a calculated, behind-the-scenes retreat from tackling climate change had begun. Hill was progressively undermined on greenhouse policy by his colleagues, chiefly John Howard, Nick Minchin, John Anderson, Alexander Downer and Wilson Tuckey. Hill's chief of staff once showed me a list recording each time the boss was rolled in cabinet. He said they had eventually lost count. The 2000 emissions trading decision was probably the worst. It was all downhill from there (no pun intended). Howard edged Hill out of the environment portfolio at the end of 2001, having already decided to retreat from Kyoto, from emissions trading in Australia, and from any policy that restricted growth in this country's emissions. According to various senior Coalition MPs I spoke to, Hill's departure from parliament in 2005 was also Howard's work.
Had a Peacock government delivered on its 1990 election promise, Australia's greenhouse emissions would have started falling (not just growing less rapidly) more than six years ago. According to ABARE and others, the Howard government's current policies will result in Australia's emissions rising by 70 per cent by 2050. This takes into account all the grand and distant plans for carbon storage. Even if Australia built a dozen nuclear power stations, according to the 2006 Switkowski report, it would still leave Australia's emissions 90 per cent higher than they were in 1990.
The contrast between what the party once said and their current policies could not be starker. Of course, some say that the difference is that the party is now in power and has to deal with The Real World. They claim that Peacock's greenhouse policy and others adopted by Labor during the Hawke/Keating era were simply unachievable, that no one had done the homework on what meeting such targets actually involved. There may be some truth to the latter claim, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the early bipartisan emissions reduction commitments could have been achieved, certainly by 2010, without significantly harming Australia's economy. And the party's elder statesmen agree. It has given me great comfort over the years to hear people like Malcolm Fraser and John Hewson criticising the Howard government's greenhouse policy.
So, how did this happen? How did a party that once seemed ready to tackle the greatest environmental challenge facing Australia and the world so radically abandon its position? How did amnesia about this proud beginning take hold?
To understand how the party became captured by some of Australia's biggest polluters, we need to look inside the Liberal Party.
Dry
For two decades the right wing of the Liberal Party has been on the rise, a trend that has been documented by academics like Dean Jaensch and liberals within the party, from Chris Puplick to Greg Barns to John Hyde Page to Ian Kourtlang. As the right wing has grown, the party has changed dramatically. The conservative establishment of old has been replaced by radical fundamentalists. Much of the public focus has been on the dominance of conservative religious elements, but by far the greatest influence on the party has been radical 'neoliberalism', which could hardly be less 'conservative'.Many people may have heard of 'economic rationalism' and the term 'dry' as a political label, but might not have heard of the neoliberalism to which these terms loosely refer. (This includes most Liberal MPs, even though they espouse its doctrines.)
At the core of neoliberalism is a belief in the sanctity of free market capitalism, a faith that markets best serve society when they are unencumbered by government interference. Neoliberalism's guiding light was Austrian economist and philosopher Frederick Von Hayek who helped found the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) in 1947. Since then, the movement he started has spawned think-tanks around the globe. With great success since the 1970s, neoliberals have mounted a radical and extremely effective assault on 'conservative' establishments. Here in Australia, we have them to thank or blame for everything from privatisation of public assets to financial deregulation to reduced protectionism to enterprise bargaining agreements. As Robert Manne has observed, Hayekians like Howard are ideologically programmed to deny, wherever possible, the reality of market failure. Extremely radical only a generation ago, neoliberalism has become mainstream thought on both sides of the political divide in Australia, and in large sections of the bureaucracy.
Unlike most of his colleagues, John Howard has heard of neoliberalism. He and others like former Fraser government MPs and Howard backers John Hyde and Jim Carlton, played central roles in its ascendancy from the late 1970s. When Kevin Rudd recently characterised Howard's government as obsessed with neoliberalism some pointed to the Howard government's high taxing and spending record as anything but neoliberal. But Rudd had picked up an important nuance – even if they don't always practise what they preach, and tailor their view to get re-elected, governments can still have a core ethos and believe in it obsessively. The reality is that neoliberal fundamentalism is gospel in today's Liberal Party, thanks in part to Howard's career-long support for it. Howard once bragged that he was the most conservative leader the Liberal Party had ever seen. Neoliberal purity is at the heart of Howard's brand of conservatism.
There is nothing like an economic or religious ideology to motivate people to endure the party political process. Adherents of both types of faith have been determined to purge the unbelievers from the Liberal Party. Even though much of the neoliberal agenda has been accepted by small 'l' liberals, anything short of absolute faith in the market is seen as suspect, especially if you also prefer your church and state separate. The purges have happened in the Liberal Party at all levels: in local branches, on state and federal electoral councils, on preselection committees, on state and national executives, and in the parliamentary party. As a result, the party increasingly resembles a monoculture. Sometimes there are divisions based around particular people rather than ideology – in Queensland you are either with Bob Carroll's faction or Bob Tucker's faction (two former state party presidents) – but by and large the creative tension envisaged by Menzies between liberals and conservatives has been replaced by an unholy alliance between religious extremists and neoliberal radicals. Pragmatism and tolerance have been replaced by dogmatism and intolerance. The small 'l' liberals who survive today have done so more by accident than as a consequence of any commitment to diversity. With some rare exceptions (like their backing for the International Criminal Court and belated public concern over the treatment of refugees) the so-called moderates generally keep their heads down. Some, for example, expressed deep concerns privately about Australia's complicity in the Iraq invasion, about the lack of evidence for weapons of mass destruction used to justify it, about the government's resurrection of archaic sedition law, and about some of the more egregious provisions adopted in the name of the so-called war on terror. Ultimately, however, the moderates ultimately rolled into line and went along with these and many other measures at odds with what they believe.
The treatment dished out to the most promising small 'l' liberal for a long time – former New South Wales opposition leader John Brogden (an old friend) – is a perfect illustration. While I have no doubt that John would take back some of the things he said and did that contributed to his (hopefully temporary) political demise, his departure was engineered by the right wing of his own party. Another measure of today's Liberal Party is that Peter Costello, the most prominent MP from the Victorian right wing in recent memory, is hailed by the few remaining moderates as 'the sun king' and LOM (Leader of the Moderates) – perhaps until Malcolm Turnbull wins them over.
So naturally a neoliberal approach has come to dominate party thinking about environmental issues too. Calls for government intervention to protect the environment are reflexively viewed with suspicion: government intervention should be kept to the bare minimum. Scepticism and denial of the scientific justification for such intervention is almost automatic. From protecting endangered species to controlling greenhouse emissions, anything that might be detrimental to the cost of doing business is viewed as an illegitimate affront to economic freedom. Neoliberals do not believe in market failure, so calls to capture the environmental costs of greenhouse pollution are anathema, even if they involve the creation of new markets. Emissions trading, therefore, comes to be seen as an ideological issue, a left-wing agenda to constrain economic freedom in the name of a suspect cause.
Some Christian conservatives in the party take a complementary view. They, like Australia's Cardinal George Pell, view environmental issues like climate change as a pagan substitute for people who lack God in their lives. As Pell said in 2006, 'Some of the hysteric and extreme claims about global warming are also a symptom of pagan emptiness, of Western fear when confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature . . . In the past pagans sacrificed animals and even humans in vain attempts to placate capricious and cruel gods. Today they demand a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.' Within the Liberal Party, this type of interpretation has cemented a consensus between the neoliberals and some of the religious right
This leaves the party very poorly equipped to handle genuine threats to the environment. It invariably plays into the hands of those with an interest in denying the environmental problem, usually large business interests. Once upon a time moderate Liberal MPs were rightly much more suspicious of special pleading by big business. In the centrist tradition of America's Teddy Roosevelt, liberal MPs once worried about the concentration of economic power and hesitated to equate the interests of big business with the national interest. Today those with the inclination to question such interests have either been purged or are fighting for survival, and not asking questions about climate change.
Contemporaneous with the purges and the emergence of a dry mono-culture has been a decline in the party's grassroots. I couldn't help but roll my eyes at the feverish point-scoring following the release of the Latham Diaries. The irony, of course, is that while the media blowtorch was on the ALP, almost every aspect of the Latham critique also applied to the Liberal Party. Grassroots have been replaced by a kind of astroturf which is both more comfortable and predictable: comfortable in the sense that there is little internal debate; predictable in that ballots can be easily managed (in other words, stacked). The membership has aged and dwindled. The few young Australians joining the party are motivated chiefly by religious and/ or neoliberal fervour. Party conferences are effectively large choreographed press conferences – rank and file party members have no real influence on policy whatsoever. The party will not confirm any of this publicly, and guards membership numbers, ages and any evidence of internal dissent very jealously. Some will say I am in no position to judge having not spent much time recently at party meetings. But ask anyone closely involved in the party's operation and they will privately confirm the parlous state of the grassroots. The reality is that the Liberal Party is out of office in every state and territory – having lost twenty-one elections in a row at that level – and is one federal election away from political oblivion.
As I have already said, some liberals survive and not all conservatives in the party are on a religious or neoliberal crusade. There are some battleweary souls whose primary motivation is serving the interests of Australia, and there are branches where genuine efforts are made to foster debate and pass policy ideas up the chain. There are also open-minded members not closely involved in the machinations of the party hierarchy who are oblivious to the crusades and purges. However, the last vestiges of diversity in Liberal Party thought are among the millions of Australians who still vote for us.
Mute
The problem is just as bad – if not worse – in the parliamentary party where the Prime Minister is happy to have cheerleaders, but far less enthusiastic about dissent and debate. When they are not cheerleading, Howard's dry MPs are almost always mute, especially on climate change.
There are 108 Liberal members and senators, about a quarter of whom are in the ministry. The fifteen most senior Liberal ministers are members of John Howard's cabinet, which meets early in the weeks when parliament sits. This is followed by a party room meeting involving all Liberal members and senators and then a joint party room meeting that includes the National Party MPs. In the cabinet, ministers discuss submissions previously circulated to colleagues. There is no vote to determine the cabinet's combined view; instead, the Prime Minister decides what the government will do on each issue having assessed the opinions expressed. That is, the Prime Minister is currently the ultimate arbiter of all federal policy implemented in the Liberal Party's name.
When the party room meets MPs are not told what transpired in that morning's cabinet meeting. There is no discussion of the government's legislative agenda. A Howard government MP could attend every party room meeting for a year and never hear more than a smattering about which ministers planned to introduce what legislation, or what policy changes might be planned until they occurred. Needless to say, under these circumstances, the party room meetings almost never deliberately debate the government's policy or its legislative agenda. The rare debates that do occur are usually a result of a media leak prior to the meeting.
Here's what actually happens in the party room, according to participants I speak to: the PM gives a five-minute speech on the political lie of the land for the government; the treasurer gives his five minutes on the state of the economy; next is general business, theoretically the MPs' chance to raise any issue. In reality, perhaps in deference to Howard's perceived electoral antennae over many years, most of the comments are shameless grovelling to the PM, the treasurer and other ministers about what a good job they are doing. Where a point of contention is raised, in the vast majority of cases it's too late because John Howard has already made decisions on the cabinet's behalf. Most of the government and cabinet's agenda is not known to its backbench until after the decisions have been made (by the PM). There is no show of hands.
Don't get me wrong: MPs have various other ways to communicate with ministers and contribute to policy if they are determined to do so, but party room meetings are the only time they are together in one room. The Liberal Party's backbench magazine is called The Party Room and boasts that it is an engine of ideas. Unfortunately, the real party room is anything but.
The party room is especially mute on the issue of climate change. I am reliably told by still serving Howard government ministers and backbenchers that even as recently as late 2006, climate change had not been raised in the party room – not this century, and quite possibly not for the whole period of the Howard government. Not one person stood up and sought to query, question or challenge the Howard government's policy in these meetings. There have been some tangential references to water and biofuel policies, usually from Nationals focussed on looking after farmers rather than out of concern for climate change. The only voices heard in the parliamentary party have been echoes of Howard's own (as we'll see below).
Most MPs have no appreciation of the party's greenhouse policies prior to 1996. Most were then fresh recruits, thrust into parliament with the support of the party's far right. They owe their preselections to the neolibs and religious right, and their electoral lives to John Howard. To them, John Howard is the Liberal Party. He is all they know. They are not about to back their political judgement over the Prime Minister's.
Thus, climate change as an issue has been ceded by the party room to the relevant cabinet ministers. And as I detail elsewhere in the book, these ministers have ultimately handed over control of this issue to the Prime Minister. The party hasn't decided the government's greenhouse policy. John Howard has decided it himself.
Quarry vision
The final and possibly most important change has been the seemingly unstoppable spread of what can be best described as 'quarry vision'. The greenhouse policy advice John Howard has taken seriously depends on the idea that the minerals, metals and energy sectors are the basis of Australia's economic future. All his statements implicitly or explicitly show that he believes the competitive advantage of the entire Australian economy is cheap energy derived from fossil fuels, and that Australia's future is as an 'energy superpower'. It has been an article of faith across his government since 1996.
This quarry vision is shared by many of the country's decision-makers and opinion-formers – from state premiers to media commentators to company directors. It has spread throughout much of the political establishment. Later in the book I will look at how this conventional wisdom was carefully cultivated over twenty-five years by those with a vested interest in its acceptance. I'll also talk about why it is both badly flawed and dated. The main point at this stage of our discussion, however, is that it is uncritically accepted in the Liberal Party, and nowhere more so than at the very top. The Prime Minister told a recent party conference:
Wouldn't it be an extraordinary national paradox if this country had achieved great prosperity, in no small measure due to the resources that providence has given us, and we are then to be knee-jerked into a response to global warming that crippled the very industries that gave us that prosperity?24
At another press conference he said:
There's one thing I am frozen in time about and that is a determination to protect the industries of this country that give us a natural competitive advantage. I am frozen in time on that because I believe in the coal industry and I believe in preserving the competitive advantage we now have and that is why, that is why we didn't sign Kyoto, because Kyoto could well have put us at a competitive disadvantage.
Most of his key ministers are also believers, as is the backbench. Recently promoted to Howard's front bench, Andrew Robb provides a good example. He encapsulated the conventional wisdom of quarry vision when he said:
Australia's prosperity has been and continues to be built on an abundance of cheap energy sources. That is our past; that is our future. That is what has given us a competitive edge in this country. That has given us the living standards that we all enjoy. The living standards that we take for granted would be seriously compromised if investment in those traditional energy sources were discouraged.
I could quote endless similar ministerial offerings. It is said to the nation, and it is proclaimed internationally. We are selling ourselves as one great big quarry.
A host of major policy decisions by the Howard government completely depend on the current commodities 'super cycle' being different from all other cycles, in which there has been a reliable downturn. Permanent spending measures, like income tax cuts and superannuation tax breaks, are now being funded with commodity boom revenue that history, along with many economic commentators, suggests is temporary.
Howard's preference
When John Howard talks about climate change, he looks uneasy because he is usually on the defensive; it is not an issue he likes to raise. Now that it's been forced on his public agenda he looks unconvincing as he tries to persuade the public that he takes climate change seriously and is committed to combating it. His unease reveals the impossibility of crafting messages simultaneously acceptable to two very different audiences. On the one hand, he must give comfort to the neoliberals who see greenhouse policy as an assault on economic freedom based on flawed science. On the other hand, he has to speak to an electorate that is increasingly alarmed about climate change and the Howard government's response over the past decade. Howard's unease reflects his scepticism.
Howard's strong views on climate change go way back. He has always been consistent on the issue: simply put, he doesn't believe it is serious. His engagement is driven by a political imperative rather than an environmental one. This is the man who in the mid-1990s said, 'We should never have got on this particular truck in the first place at the Rio conference.' In 2006 he warned his colleagues not to be 'mesmerised' by the report by Sir Nicholas Stern indicating that the cost of not responding to climate change may be up to twenty times the cost of an effective response. With Stern warning that the cost of inaction might be the equivalent of both world wars and the great depression, and that Australia was more vulnerable than most, Howard told his colleagues, '. . . nobody can prove that, that's just pure speculation on his part.'
Unlike his predecessors, as Liberal leader Howard has never ever supported absolute reductions in Australian greenhouse emissions or making the biggest emitters pay to pollute. He indulged the interest of ministers like Robert Hill in investigating what Australia could extract from the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, and he has repeatedly allowed exploration of emissions trading at the bureaucratic level and through government consultation with business. But never have these discussions threatened effective policy. As we saw earlier, the decision not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol was taken by Howard alone, not by cabinet – and the environment minister heard about it second-hand. Furthermore, when – failing Kyoto ratification – a submission for a domestic emissions trading system was supported by at least five senior relevant ministers in all the relevant portfolios, Howard himself killed it off. Something he now claims not to remember. Anyone who deals with the Howard government knows that John Howard makes its greenhouse policy. The environment minister, the industry minister, the foreign minister and the treasurer are merely on the mailing list.
Howard's scepticism about the environmental imperative hasn't changed. When he says he is suspicious of the more 'gloomy scenarios' and 'doomsday predictions', he is talking directly to his neoliberal constituency whom he knows believes climate change is 'junk science'. To the neoliberals, the message is clear – I'm still with you.
What has changed is Howard's assessment of the political imperative. He has control and he wants to persuade the electorate while staying true to the neoliberal faithful. A notorious incident in February 2007 demonstrated how difficult a balancing act it can be. In the publicly televised parliamentary question time, Howard said he was not convinced of the link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. Much later that day he returned to say he had misheard the question which he thought asked about a link between emissions and the drought. Whether or not this is true, it had the desired political effect: to the public he was not a denier, but the four-hour delay in correcting his comments suggested otherwise to his neolib audience.
John Howard's response to climate change is steering his country and his party towards the rocks. High emissions in the name of dry politics.
I don't enjoy writing this – and I shouldn't have to do so. I waited and hoped for years that someone, somewhere in the parliamentary party would challenge Howard's misguided policy. I knew about his scepticism, I knew about the ascendancy of the neoliberals. Even so, I hoped that enough common sense and plurality of thought remained for someone to speak out. This task shouldn't fall to a rank and file member. I still hold out some hope for change, but I suspect it will be forced upon the government rather than come from within the party.
I continue to hope that someone in that ministry or Liberal party room will be moved to honour our promising start; that someone will realise that spin about clean green energy exports and distant new technologies is not good enough. I hope they will start to appreciate that Australia has to do the right thing by itself and the world by reducing its own emissions as soon as possible, and that this won't bankrupt the economy. Hopefully, someone up there is capable of moving beyond the quarry vision and amnesia to breaking the silence. If ever there were an opportunity for a Liberal MP to do something worthwhile for his or her country, this is it.
I waited. I did what I could to let people know my concerns. I raised them with various ministers and backbenchers, but to no avail. The party left me no choice but to expose what really lies behind John Howard's greenhouse policy
