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While Australia’s commentariat are playing gotcha with the Liberals over how the party’s nuclear commitment fits into the Paris Climate Accord, Peter Dutton, at least, seems to be planning for a 2025 election where a reelected President Donald Trump has torn up global climate politics.
Dutton hasn’t been caught. He’s playing a longer game and is exactly where he wants to be. His political attack on climate action is part of a long-term global assault by the fossil-fueled right. Right now, he’d be thinking he’s backing a winner and can rely on a feckless media perennially distracted by the latest Canberra stunt to miss what’s happening.
Amid the media handwringing over the optics of last Thursday’s US presidential debate (and the excitement at seeing the US polity opt to reenact our own chop-and-change leadership theatre), Australian journalists might have paid more attention to things Trump said, like his dismissal of the Paris accord as “a rip off of the United States” and “a disaster”.
It’s become too easy for the Australian media to follow the US media’s brushing aside of Trump’s policy commitments as “things Trump says” as though they don’t affect us on this side of the Pacific. If we had any doubts, Trump’s campaign confirmed after the debate that, yes, Trump would pull the US out of the accord next January. Politico reported fossil fuel lobbyists have executive orders ready for Trump’s signature “that could remove the United States from the entire United Nations’ framework underpinning global climate negotiations”.
It’s not just Trump. Opposition to climate action has become a core project of the right. In France (outside Paris, at least), this week’s legislative elections showed the depth of the existential challenge to the climate deal which is supposed to wrangle the world into dealing with the global emergency.
There the post-fascist Rassemblement National topped the polls with a climate policy of an end to renewables (particularly wind power), tax cuts for oil and gas to deal with cost of living pressures, and the high-cost rejuvenation of the country’s aging nuclear network. It reads like our own Liberals and Nationals have asked ChatGPT to run the French far right’s policy through Google Translate to get their own package.
No wonder Dutton must be thinking (as John Howard did as opposition leader) that the times will suit him, as he anticipates the election of Trump in November wrenching the Overton window of politics to the hard right. By the time we come to vote in 2025, Duttons’s repudiation of any sense of urgency in responding to the climate emergency will seem remarkably mainstream — and to a media obsessed by the politics of politics as remarkably “savvy”.
The path to mainstreaming denialism has been to make it mainstream on the political right, either by lurching the traditional conservative party to the fringe (as in the US and in Australia) or by replacing the traditional centre-right voice with a new, harder right-wing offering.
In France, the hard-right Rassemblement National has cannibalised the old Gaullist centre right. In the lead up to last weekend’s election, it split the residual centre-right Gaullists, forcing them to choose an alliance with the post-fascists (as the centre-right has in Italy and Spain) or line up with the (gasp!) high-taxing left in what the French call an anti-right “Republican bloc”.
It’s one of the (many) big unknowns about politics: do party leaders follow their base? Or is it the other way around? We’ll get a bit of an answer in next Sunday’s second round vote (between the top two candidates in each electorate) as to what choice centre-right voters in France will make when their first-choice party is excluded.
The good news is President Macron’s centrist Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has joined the second-placed left-wing bloc in declaring “Not one single vote must go to the Rassemblement National”. The bad news is a recent poll showed that only 62% of his Ensemble Party agreed with him, which is not enough to stop the far right winning a parliamentary majority.
Since the last federal election, Dutton, like John Howard and Tony Abbott before him, has made it a priority to close off any opening for Australia’s own right-wing parties. Adopting the global right’s approach to climate inaction — and other core components of the hard-right project, like on migration — ensures that the Liberal and National Party coalition will endure as the party of choice for Australian conservatives.
Once climate inaction becomes embedded in the political right, it osmotically becomes mainstreamed in the traditional media, either through political alignment, such as via News Corp, or through the destructive dead hand of bothsidesism, as we see so regularly from the ABC.
Right now, we need a better media understanding of where the right’s strategies are leading us, and a bit less over-caffeinated excitement about the short-term optics of the political circus.
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