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As Barnaby Joyce continues to undermine the Coalition’s position on net zero, pragmatists in the Liberal Party believe they need to treat the issue the same way Labor treated boat arrivals. By Jason Koutsoukis.
Barnaby Joyce: ‘He’s not hunting ducks. He’s hunting David Littleproud.’
It’s not an official title, but there’s growing consensus in the Liberal Party on how best to describe Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce: fuckwit.
“Or, as my wife said to me the other day after listening to yet another Barnaby net zero rant on the radio,” one Liberal MP tells The Saturday Paper, “a complete fuckwit.”
The word tends to be muttered behind closed doors, usually while scanning the latest headlines, sparked by Joyce’s gleeful torching of Liberal leader Sussan Ley’s efforts to decide whether the Coalition should maintain its commitment to net zero emissions by 2050.
Since the 48th parliament opened on July 22, Barnaby Joyce has delivered five anti-net zero speeches; reconciled with his arch rival, Michael McCormack; imitated a bull on live television, complete with finger horns and lowing; crossed the floor to support a government stunt intended to embarrass him; and, most importantly, kept himself the centre of attention.
In one recent speech, Joyce railed against net zero by recalling a parable about training a horse to eat rocks. “They’d just about done it,” he said, “and the damn thing died.”
Net zero, according to Joyce, is the same: a doomed effort in which success equals collapse.
“You’ll just about get there and the economy will be dead,” he warned, before detouring into complaints about power prices, inner-city elites and the curfew at Sydney Airport. “I’ll finalise this by saying this thing is national but, for me, it’s terribly personal.”
It may be personal for Joyce, but to many Liberals who’ve seen this dance before, it looks less like selfless concern for his constituents and more like concern for his chances of reclaiming the Nationals leadership.
“Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack, they’re using it to get at David Littleproud, no question about it,” one Liberal MP tells The Saturday Paper.
“I can understand Barnaby being Barnaby, because this is what he always does, but people are very disappointed with Michael.”
When it comes to the substance of Joyce and McCormack’s arguments against net zero, some Liberals are starting to push back.
In a Coalition partyroom meeting last week, attended by Joyce, first reported by Guardian Australia, Sydney MP Simon Kennedy warned that scrapping net zero would send “a terrible signal to the Australian people”. Kennedy’s remarks offered a glimpse of a quieter reality inside the federal parliamentary Liberal Party: that a clear majority still backs net zero and is increasingly wary of those who don’t.
Urging colleagues not to “chase fringe voices”, Kennedy’s intervention reflected concerns that the party will further alienate voters in key metropolitan seats if it continues to appear unserious about climate change and the environment. It also laid bare the tension now gripping the Coalition.
As far as Sussan Ley is concerned, the Coalition has established a clear process to rebuild its energy policy. She sees the current internal debate as being dominated by a small group of people making a lot of noise.
“We have about two years and nine months to the next election. We have the time to get energy policy right,” she told journalists at Parliament House last week. “We need to reflect on the result we had on May the 3rd, listen to the Australian people, and develop energy policy with two fundamental principles: playing our part in reducing emissions in a transparent and responsible way and ensuring that we have a stable, reliable grid that provides affordable energy for households and businesses.”
To that end, a consultative energy working group – chaired by shadow energy spokesman Dan Tehan and reporting jointly to Ley and Littleproud – has been tasked with rebuilding the Coalition’s policy from the ground up. The panel includes key frontbenchers Ted O’Brien, Susan McDonald, Alex Hawke, Angie Bell, Dean Smith and Andrew Willcox, and its remit is to produce a road map that marries emissions reduction with reliable, affordable power.
Ley is adamant the review won’t be rushed. There is no deadline and no manifesto looming on the horizon. Instead, she envisions an open-ended process in which every Coalition MP – Liberal and National – can contribute.
The aim is to unify the party around a serious policy, avoid another round of internecine warfare and restore credibility in the electorates the Coalition has lost over two elections. Until the working group reports back, everyone – not least Barnaby Joyce – is expected to hold their fire.
Other Liberal Party review processes are also under way.
Sussan Ley has tasked Queensland Senator James McGrath with a root-and-branch review of the party itself, to understand why it is losing support and what must change to avoid long-term irrelevance.
A parallel review led by party veterans Nick Minchin and Pru Goward is examining the disastrous recent election, which saw the Coalition win just 43 seats in the House of Representatives, their worst ever result. That report is expected to be made public before the end of the year.
Together, these internal reviews reflect the recognition inside the Liberal Party that it cannot afford to drift any further from the concerns of voters who care about climate, integrity, gender equity and economic credibility.
While the official Coalition policy review unfolds, deeper faultlines are surfacing not just between the party’s parliamentary wing and voters but also between the parliamentary wing and rank-and-file branch members.
“The Liberal Party will decide the policy in the Liberal party room, and the National Party will decide their policy in the National party room. And then we will come together in the shadow cabinet and make decisions about the Coalition,” one Liberal adviser tells The Saturday Paper. “There are noisy people out there pushing their position on this, as you’d expect, but that does not reflect the breadth of where most people are at.”
The divide over net zero within the Coalition is not as simple as a split between elites and the party base but between two different visions of what Liberal values mean in a world seeking to expand renewable energy sources and reduce carbon emissions.
“There’s people out there that say the Liberal base hates net zero,” the adviser says. “But net zero is splitting our base between people who look at it and say, ‘This is a risk to our economic prosperity,’ and others – also traditional Liberal voters – who see it as an economic opportunity. These are aspirational Australians, professional, entrepreneurial people who believe in markets and see a business opportunity.”
The result is a dilemma over how to hold together a party whose traditional supporters are divided – not just geographically but also generationally and economically – over the risks and rewards of decarbonisation.
“Older people are more sceptical of all of it,” the adviser says. “Whereas younger people, Millennials, are looking at it through the prism of climate change is real, it’s a problem, we need to play our part – and if we’re doing that, good. Then, they just want to get on with their lives.”
Adding to the complexity are motions passed by state party branches – including in South Australia and Western Australia – formally rejecting the 2050 net zero target.
A source close to Ley is dismissive of their significance, comparing them to fringe resolutions at Labor conferences, on issues such as AUKUS, that have no actual bearing on the policies the party will take to the election.
“Just because Alex Antic got the South Australian division to vote against net zero, it doesn’t mean that will affect our ultimate position,” the adviser says. “We respect the members, we listen to them, but ultimately we need to find a consensus position that is going to appeal to mainstream Australian voters.”
Not all federal Liberals agree. Western Australian MP Ben Small – the only Liberal backbencher to publicly call for the party to dump the 2050 target – now argues the Coalition should reverse its position.
“Since 2021, my worst fears have been confirmed – emissions targets around the world are not supported by credible plans and, worse still, the trade-offs that we are being asked to make as a country are economically catastrophic without moving the dial in global terms because the largest emitters have walked away from 2050 or never agreed to it in the first place,” Small tells The Saturday Paper.
“By the 10th of January each year, China has emitted more carbon than Australia does in an entire year. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by pursuing policies of taxes and penalties to drive down economic activity in this country and move the jobs that go with it overseas. In my view, Australia should be a fast follower and not a first mover in this space.”
Andrew Hastie, the only Western Australian Liberal to represent a metropolitan Perth seat, has also publicly endorsed the call to abandon net zero.
Several other Liberal MPs who spoke to The Saturday Paper this week insist that the politics of pragmatism is asserting itself inside the party room – and that the debate over net zero is more settled than it seems.
“I think it’s fair to say that there’s actually a bigger cohort of Coalition MPs that support net zero, who believe that it’s in our best interest politically to continue down the path of committing to net zero emissions by 2050, while also holding the government to account for their complete inability to actually achieve their targets,” says one Liberal MP.
This group sees net zero not as an ideological totem but as a political baseline – a box to be ticked so the party can move on to issues that have more day-to-day resonance. “Let’s stop talking about ourselves and stop talking about 2050,” the MP adds. “In the last two weeks, green hydrogen has completely fallen over and report after report is saying that the government is going to fail on meeting their current emissions targets.”
In this view, the smarter strategy is not to rage against net zero but to stand back and prosecute Labor’s failures.
“Instead of leading with our chin politically, let’s actually take a step back and just hold them to account and let their failures speak for themselves on issues such as housing, Medicare, electricity prices. I think every government gets a bit of a free pass in their first term, but if they keep failing to deliver in the second term, then they’re going to lose credibility with the community. And we must try to capitalise on that.”
The MP agrees that while net zero has become a proxy for leadership politics – more so within the Nationals but also within the Liberal Party – there is little appetite for a genuine reversal on the policy. Support for net zero comes from MPs who voted for Sussan Ley in the leadership ballot and from those who voted against her. “I don’t believe they’ll move across to another potential leader because of net zero,” the MP says.
The bigger challenge is strategic. In outer suburban seats, net zero and climate change more broadly are not issues voters typically stop their local MPs on the street to talk about.
“No one has raised it with me,” another Liberal MP says. “I’ve been out and about quite a lot since the election. And at seven or eight events last weekend, for example, and no one brought it up with me.”
Yet in the seats the Liberals need to win back – such as Sturt and Boothby in Adelaide; Kooyong, Aston and Deakin in Melbourne; and Wentworth, Bradfield and Mackellar in Sydney – the picture is very different. “I genuinely believe that we cannot win them back without having a credible climate change plan,” the MP says.
This is not about winning votes on the issue but neutralising the issue to stem further losses. Proving basic credibility on climate change, the logic follows, will enable the Liberals to get the conversation back onto the party’s traditional turf. “I look at it more around … you’ve got to neutralise the issue, as opposed to winning votes on the issue from a Liberal perspective – similar to what Labor did with stopping the boats. It tore them apart for 15 years, but eventually they worked it out.”
Still, managing Coalition unity won’t be easy, particularly with Joyce and McCormack amplifying Nationals’ anger about the impact of renewables infrastructure on rural communities.
“I’ve got complete empathy and understanding for the Nationals,” the MP says. “But ultimately, I think they have to ask themselves whether they want to be a vocal minority rallying against this or do they actually want to be at the benches of government making decisions to minimise the impact on their communities?”
The more durable position, this MP argues, is to defend net zero as a framework while attacking Labor’s implementation of it.
“There is a bigger group that are committed to net zero but who at the same time acknowledge that the government actually doesn’t have a credible plan to get to net zero,” the MP says. “We should actually be prosecuting that case, as opposed to tearing ourselves apart over something that’s 25 years away.”
A third Liberal MP agrees that the Coalition’s main priority should be exposing the flaws in Labor’s approach, not reversing the Coalition’s own commitment to reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
“What we’ve got to do is be able to get some real pressure and real scrutiny on the government and the approach that they’re taking,” the MP says. “Because that’s got to be fundamental to then be able to work out, ‘Okay, well, what is the sensible way forward?’ ”
In this MP’s view, the government’s climate policy is already fraying at the edges. “Chris Bowen has sort of admitted as much,” the MP says, pointing to a shift in language around the government’s own goal for 82 per cent of Australia’s electricity to come from renewables by 2030, which is now framed as an “intent” rather than a firm commitment.
“Cheaper electricity prices, they’ve walked away from,” the MP says. “And the next thing, which is going to be fascinating to see, is where we’re going on emissions reductions.”
The same MP accuses Labor of relying on “accounting tricks” to give the appearance of progress, including “different base amounts and different bases and different accounting methodology” on land clearing. “That’s the only way they’ll be able to tell a story that emissions are getting lower.”
Meanwhile, the MP says, the government has done little in harder-to-abate sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing, agriculture and transport.
“Full transparency is what we need to be focusing on, because more and more of this is becoming the picture globally. It’s all aims and intents.”
That leaves Barnaby Joyce in a familiar role: louder than he is influential, disruptive but not decisive, determined to keep going.
Joyce’s theatrics are less a rallying cry and more a sideshow.
As one retired Liberal MP observed this week: Sussan Ley, for all the difficulties she faces, seems to understand the old saying that if you want to hunt ducks, you’ve got to hunt where the ducks are.
“Barnaby Joyce, proud shooter that he is, should understand that too,” says the former MP. “The problem for us, though, is that he’s not hunting ducks. He’s hunting David Littleproud.”
This article was amended on August 12, 2025, to correct the number of seats won by the Coalition in this year’s federal election.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 9, 2025 as "‘He’s not hunting ducks. He’s hunting David Littleproud.’".
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