Scott Morrison Angus Taylor
(Image: AAP/Dan Himbrechts)

Australia’s media elite have made up their mind about Morrison’s “Australian way” climate change plan: “a vacuous piece of nonsense”, “policy junk”, “unrealistic” — and that was just yesterday’s panellists being thoughtful on Insiders.

But hang on a minute. Traditional media seems to be saying: never mind the policy, feel the politics. Sure, as policy the climate announcement may be junk — a plan to avoid having a plan — but that’s not how journalism in Australia has decided to judge things.

The test that seems to matter? Will it skate Scott Morrison through the next election?

It’s a sign of just how damaged Australia’s media — like the rest of its political elite — has been by the shock of the 2019 election. The misreading of the politics of that moment has challenged their self-confidence that they can offer a unique understanding of “what comes next”.

Then it encouraged them to go along with the conservative’s tactic of making the campaign a referendum on the, umm, Shorten government. The economic impact of Labor’s climate action? Deep, probing questions. Morrison’s “end of the weekend” laughed off as the desperation of a falling man.

Now, rather than a deeper analysis of the policy demands needed for Australia to meet the challenges of global warming, it’s deepened the desperation to nail the politics of the moment.

Even serious policy gurus find it hard to resist. Terrible policy, says Peter Hartcher, eviscerating it point-by-point in the Nine papers, but smart politics. (His masthead companion Rob Harris, meanwhile, gave the plan an intellectual burnish with the news that Morrison had even read a book by tech billionaire Bill Gates in preparation.)

The leading sceptic of the politics of the play appears to be The Australian’s Paul Kelly. He is both more supportive of the plan (or, at least, more understanding of the constraints Morrison is working under) and more dubious of its political success, arguing that by accepting the 2050 target (at least rhetorically) Morrison is sacrificing the scare campaign he waged in 2019.

Politics or policy, the rapidly accepted wisdom rests on the belief that dropping the one word “preferably” from net zero emissions by 2050 is a significant marker. In truth, it’s just the latest iteration of the Coalition’s 30-year-long “no regrets”, as explained in Marian Wilkinson’s 2020 book The Carbon Club. “No regrets,” she writes, “meant Australia would only reduce its greenhouse gas emissions if it didn’t cost us.”

Or in Morrison-speak: “Technology not taxes.” Like the boasted pivot to science by News Corps’ tabloids this month, it’s the latest manifestation of the key denialist trope: acknowledge the inconvenient science if you have to, but contest the transition if you can.

As a result — and particularly since the 2013 “axe the tax” election — Australia’s peculiar focus on the politics of climate change has priced that cost not in emissions, GDP or current account, but in electoral success.

There’s hope (or fear, depending on your point of view) that the trope’s soothing power fell apart with the shock of the bushfires of the summer before last. News Corp’s refusal to accept that the bushfires were linked to climate change finally forced James Murdoch to leave the family company.

The most recent IPCC report, released in August, confirmed the message: yep, turns out Australia’s fires were (and will be) intensified by global heating.

For three decades, conservatives have won elections by talking out of both sides of their collective mouth on climate change — concerned in the city, denialist in the bush. But now they’re wedged behind the competing demands of their two constituencies, under threat from liberal independents (hello, Zali Steggall) in its wealthy city suburbs and from extreme populists (hello, Pauline Hanson!) in regional Australia.

It’s always been tricky, pulling off a worried head-shaking to its wealthy urban constituents with a sly winking to its regional voters along with sotto voce assurances to its fossil-fuel donors. It called for the “modern Liberals” running in the city and the Nationals running in the bush with a same-same-but-different messaging.

Morrison is betting that reshaping the “no regrets” con will get him through once again. Reporting politics over policy may prove him right.