For someone who once dismissed climate change as 'absolute crap', Tony Abbott sure has influenced our response to it. As prime minister, he repealed laws that were working to cut pollution, started a war against renewable energy that hobbled investment for years and created a smokescreen of a policy to obscure the fact that Australia's emissions are still rising.
Even as a backbencher, his legacy continues. The Morrison government's characterisation of Labor's electric vehicles target as a 'Car-Bon Tax' is straight out of Abbott's playbook. By setting the boundaries of what is considered politically acceptable, Tony Abbott has influenced the level of ambition in every party's climate policy, including Labor's.
Now Abbott's rein is coming to an end. Public concern about climate change is at the highest level in a decade, Abbott has lost credibility with voters, and he is even fighting off a strong independent in his own seat. Before we dismiss him as a political dinosaur, though, it's worth recapping how he shaped the debate and what lessons we can draw for future action on climate change.
Abbott's rise began in December 2009 when he rolled Malcolm Turnbull for the Liberal leadership. It's hard to imagine now, but at the time Labor and the Coalition were working together on a bipartisan policy to reduce greenhouse pollution. Abbott broke this attempt at compromise and turned climate change into a partisan left/right issue like it has been in the US.
After the 2010 election, the Gillard government created a cross-party committee of Parliament to establish a carbon price, but Abbott chose to boycott the process and launch his 'carbon tax' crusade instead. Coalition leaders spouted lie after lie about the impacts (Barnaby Joyce famously claimed a lamb roast would cost $100) and major lobby groups like the Business Council of Australia backed them up. It didn't help that Labor delayed publishing details of the policy, creating an information vacuum that the Coalition could fill with myths.
Previous Liberal leaders had at least engaged with the detail. They would pay lip service to climate change but propose inadequate emissions targets or seek out loopholes to shirk our international responsibility. Abbott simply ignored the issue and changed the topic. As his chief of staff Peta Credlin revealed later, he made the climate debate about power prices and cost of living instead.
Like his previous decision to reject bipartisanship, Abbott sacrificed Australia's long-term interests for his own short-term political gain. Big areas of public policy always involve communicating complex ideas to the public, but Abbott abrogated this responsibility to run a scare campaign instead. His framing dominated the discussion to the point where more Australians would recognise the phrase 'carbon tax' than the name of the legislation (the Clean Energy Act) or how it worked.
"Perhaps the most remarkable measure of Abbott's influence is how even his opponents have adopted his approach."
Tony Abbott actually went to the 2010 and 2013 elections supporting the Renewable Energy Target (RET), but then attacked it once he became prime minister. He commissioned a review of the RET by climate sceptic Dick Warburton, and the resulting uncertainty stalled investment in the industry, costing thousands of jobs.
Perhaps the most remarkable measure of Abbott's influence is how even his opponents have adopted his approach. Six days after losing the Liberal leadership ballot in 2009, Malcolm Turnbull wrote an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald arguing that any Abbott policy on climate change would 'simply be a con, an environmental fig leaf to cover a determination to do nothing'.
The con turned out to be Abbott's Emissions Reduction Fund, which pays businesses to reduce their pollution, but has major integrity issues (including actually funding fossil fuel power stations). Under this policy, pollution has risen at least four out of the past five years and is higher than in 2013. Yet when Turnbull became prime minister, he stuck with Abbott's discredited approach. None of the alternatives — an emissions intensity scheme, a Clean Energy Target or a National Energy Guarantee — could make it through the right wing of the Coalition. The latest budget includes more money for the Emissions Reduction Fund, doubling down on bad policy.
Even environment groups have shifted their positions in response to Abbott. Since the repeal of the carbon price legislation, green charities have been on the back foot, spending a lot of energy shoring up support for renewables instead of arguing for policies that would more directly close coal.
So how did Abbott manage to wield so much influence for so long? It wasn't through better policy or a greater understanding of the topic. Abbott's power came from controlling the public narrative, especially through the Murdoch press.
There are three reasons he cut through when Labor didn't. The first was extraordinary message discipline. Abbott set the frame early by defining the term and then repeating it endlessly. Once the Gillard government accepted that their legislation represented a 'carbon tax', Abbott had won. The media started using the term and Australians were asked to support a new tax (which they dislike) on something called carbon (which they don't understand). One after-effect is that the debate was dumbed down, and progressives also need to resort to sloganeering to compete.
Abbott's second trick was to bait the left. This is a common strategy of the Republicans, transplanted from the US to Australia. Conservatives have realised they can elevate their message to national news by saying something provocative on left-leaning platforms like Twitter. Abbott peddled myths about renewable energy, and people would share posts saying 'It's NOT true wind and solar cause blackouts or increase power prices'. All it did was reinforce Abbott's preferred frame.
The third trick was to focus on concrete case studies rather than abstract statistics and targets. Abbott and co. spoke about costs that were immediate and local — quarterly power bills, jobs in Australian towns and cities, the price of a lamb roast. Businesses volunteered their factories for him to tour wearing a hi-vis vest with the media in tow.
In contrast, the arguments for action on climate change were future-focused and global — intergenerational inequality, looking after other species, and 'saving the planet'. The environment movement is now much more focused on immediate and local climate impacts like heatwaves and bushfires, plus benefits like clean energy jobs, but it took Abbott's devastating 2013 campaign to teach this lesson.
After the May election, Abbott may no longer be in Parliament. At the very least, it's likely he will no longer directly influence the Australian government's policy on climate change. But his words will echo in politicians' memories for many years to come, limiting what they are willing to propose. Already Labor has put forward a version of the Liberal Party's own NEG policy to neutralise a future scare campaign.
Tony Abbott may be almost gone, but his slogans will haunt us for years.
Greg Foyster is a Melbourne writer and the author of the book Changing Gears.
Main image: Tony Abbott in 2014 (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images)