Must We Always Have Paris?

While the Coalition’s decision to dump net zero is to be welcomed, its ongoing commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement is both illogical and politically precarious.

With the Coalition having finally dumped the policy of net zero, it is important to recount how it became a policy position in the first place, the failure it brought the Liberal and National parties, and what needs to be done next in order for us as a nation to dump the policy for good.

Despite the rhetoric and one-off subsidies to consumers, Australians are by now well aware that Australia’s energy costs have been rising rapidly, driven largely by the ideologically driven emissions policies of all levels of government.

Alongside rising power prices there is the attendant energy insecurity—a threat to our national sovereignty—and the entirely predictable consequence of businesses failing. This act of economic self-harm is attributable to emission reduction policies, most notably the policy of net zero emissions by 2050.

Net zero was adopted as federal policy under the Morrison government in 2021. Scott Morrison likely committed to the policy in a doomed attempt to save inner-city Liberal seats under threat from the Teals.

The Liberal Party went on to lose six inner-city seats to Teal independents, and was never a serious player in the energy policy space.

This was especially evident at the election last May, with the Coalition’s vague and poorly communicated nuclear energy plan, which was likely pitched as a means for the Coalition to support baseload power in the grid while maintaining its commitment to net zero.

This plan was successfully fearmongered by the Albanese government, using memes of three-eyed fish and polluted water to ridicule the plan, an exercise facilitated by the lack of fine detail provided by the Opposition.

Nuclear as a viable solution to the woes of our energy grid would take many years to come online, so the Coalition’s energy “policy” left the immediate issues facing our grid largely unresolved.

Even if an expansion of gas exploration and production were to serve as a gap filler until nuclear is ready, the commitment to net zero means those emissions would have to be offset elsewhere, essentially passing on the problems of net zero to other industries across the country. Net zero is the gift that keeps on taking.

While removing the ban on nuclear and inviting investment (and maybe even subsidies) for nuclear energy isn’t in isolation a poor policy, using it as justification for net zero is. A regrettable consequence of this is that nuclear is likely to remain politically poisonous for a generation, as the carbon tax did after the 2013 election.

Australians are ready for the debate on net zero.

After the 2025 federal election, debate within the federal party room on the policy of net zero was fierce and divisive. National Party MPs Barnaby Joyce and Llew O’Brien threatened to leave the Coalition over it, with the former eventually doing so, and this internal debate spilled out into the public.

The Nationals were quick to react to this threat out of necessity. Losing members of parliament before One Nation’s rising poll numbers were tested at an election would have been a disastrous outcome for them, so they finally took the position that people such as Senator Matt Canavan had held, on principle, for years, and abandoned net zero in early November.

The debate on net zero within the Liberal Party took longer, but was fast-tracked by the Nationals, and was essentially over when Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s two biggest internal rivals, Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie, combined forces to outnumber the pro-net zero cohort at a party room meeting. Shadow cabinet formally abandoned the policy ten days after the National Party room had.

By overturning its commitment to net zero, the Coalition can now credibly highlight the significant costs the policy is imposing on Australians and the significant costs it will impose into the future.

This is a significant turning point in the broader net zero debate, because for the first time since 2021, one of the major parties in Australia has formally opposed this economically ruinous policy.

There will at last be a politically charged debate around the policy and, much like the Voice debate, more politicians will be able to argue the case against net zero with the blessing and assistance of their party. And media will now have fewer excuses to exclude people who are concerned about energy security from the public discussion of climate and energy policy.

Australians are ready for the debate on net zero; the main question left to be answered is how far the government is prepared to backtrack in the face of sustained criticism of its policies.

The frantic tone of the Albanese government’s attacks on those Liberals and Nationals who dare to question net zero reveals just how much the Prime Minister wants to avoid this debate. (So too do the farcical proceedings of the Australian Parliament’s Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy.)

These attacks are designed to restrict the parameters of debate, or to close it down altogether, and it appears to have worked thus far, with net zero going largely undebated by the political class since the Morrison government adopted it as policy.

The Coalition now has the opportunity to debate energy policy on its own terms, and to force the Labor Party to prosecute the case for net zero, just as it was forced to do on the carbon tax.

HOW WAS THIS POSSIBLE?

The IPA has been producing research and analysis on the policy of net zero emissions, and on broader emission reduction policies, since before the days of the Rudd/Gillard government and its emission trading scheme.

We have consistently made the case that economic and energy policies that focus on cutting emissions rather than growth and productivity will leave Australians behind, whether it be through their power bills, jobs, or food security.

Mainstream Australians are increasingly aware of the impacts that net zero is having on the cost and quality of life; now that the Liberals have finally found the courage to drop net zero this growing number of disenchanted Australians represents a potential new constituency.

This non-existent tightrope is one the Coalition intends to walk.

This is not wishful thinking—the numbers bear it out. When people understand the finer details of net zero, their support for the policy falls dramatically. Recent IPA polling revealed that 79 per cent of Australians want affordability and reliability to be the government’s energy policy focus, while only 21 per cent backed meeting net zero targets. The polling also showed that 74 per cent of Australians are not willing to spend more than $50 per year to meet emission reduction targets. This lack of support will only become clearer and stronger now that there is a mainstream party opposed to the policy, much like the public backlash against the emission reduction policies of Rudd and Gillard once Tony Abbott announced the Coalition’s opposition to it 15 years ago.

Alongside the various researchers at the IPA who have over the years argued against the carbon tax, the Paris Climate Agreement, and net zero, there have been many brave people willing to oppose net zero without political support.

People within the Coalition such as Matt Canavan, Alex Antic, Colin Boyce, and Garth Hamilton have all vocally opposed the net zero target for years, and have done so at the expense of shadow cabinet status within the party room.

Special mention should be made of Senator Canavan, who has long made the case within and outside the National Party Room, and was the driving force behind the Nationals’ decision to drop net zero.

Pauline Hanson and One Nation have been opposed to net zero since the beginning, and haven’t wavered in their rejection of the policy. It is no coincidence that since net zero has become a more visible political issue, the party’s popularity has increased.

THE LIBERALS’ EMISSIONS “PLAN”

The Coalition will now have to explain exactly how the policy of net zero will be abandoned, and what will replace it as the backbone of Australia’s energy policy settings.

The announcement by Sussan Ley on the specifics of what should be done next was muddled and inconsistent. The left are correct when they say that one can’t abandon net zero as a policy but still remain earnestly committed to the Paris Climate Agreement, yet this non-existent tightrope is one the Coalition intends to walk.

The Coalition’s energy policy document, Affordable and Responsible, has two key priorities—affordable energy and lower emissions. The affordable energy priority is flawed, given its commitment to baseload power involves nuclear, which as previously mentioned will take years until ready, rather than a commonsense commitment to upgrading our existing coal fired power plants and expanding the number of them. However, these are policy positions that can be improved and massaged over time.

The priority that doesn’t sit well with the dumping of net zero is lowering emissions. The Coalition’s policy document, released in November, states:

The Opposition is committed to the Paris Agreement and to doing our fair share to reduce emissions in a way that protects household budgets and keeps our economy strong. Australians care about our environment and want to see responsible action to address climate change. That’s exactly what we will do.

The Paris Climate Agreement asks of signatories to, over time, meet emission reduction targets that are ever harsher and more aggressive. In reality this means that as long as we remain committed to the agreement, our emission reduction policies can only get increasingly extreme.

Considering Australia’s share of global emissions sits at approximately one per cent, and no emission reduction effort by Australia will have any effect on the Earth’s climate, the only impact our commitment to Paris will have will be an entirely negative one on the viability and productivity of our industries.

This agreement is more than just a pact to lower emissions, it is an ideologically radical agreement driven by economic ideas which are particularly disastrous for Australia, given that the mining and agricultural industries are fundamental to our economic livelihood.

But far from focusing solely on emission reduction policies, the Paris Climate Agreement is a sweeping exercise in woke, referencing gender equality, intergenerational equity, ‘Mother Earth’, ‘Climate Justice’, and the ‘traditional knowledge’ of various groups of people. It is more pagan polemic than policy.

Additionally, Australia’s commitment to the agreement requires us to make the deepest cuts to emissions on a per capita level, whilst heavy emitters such as China are able to increase their per capita emissions.

Being opposed to net zero while still committed to arbitrary and vague emission reduction mandates signals to the electorate that you’re not sure exactly what you think on energy policy, and calls into doubt the credibility of any plan put forward.

WHAT SHOULD THE PLAN BE?

For the Coalition to oppose net zero properly, it has to be opposed to the Paris Climate Agreement as well. But even that isn’t enough.

The Albanese government has successfully entrenched net zero and the Paris Climate Agreement into Australia’s overall legislative framework. It means that the agreement is potentially protected from future governments, even if they are explicitly elected on a platform to abandon it.

Net zero and the Paris Climate Agreement are today protected by a spider’s web of laws. The legislation imposes harsh regulatory mandates, and funnels billions of dollars in subsidies, all to transform Australia’s energy system from one based on reliable and affordable energy to one based on unreliable, expensive, and economically destructive “renewables”.

The separate pieces of legislation that support net zero serve as the foundations of its implementation at the federal level. IPA research published in June 2025 uncovered the five key federal legislative pillars that support it. These are: The Climate Change Act 2022, which entrenches the Paris agreement targets in federal legislation; the Safeguard Mechanism, which mandates large projects to reduce their emissions or purchase carbon credits to continue to operate; the Future Made in Australia Policy, comprised of subsidies and government support for the renewables sector; the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard, which is essential to the process of electrification of Australian life; and the Large-scale Renewable Energy Target, which requires electricity retailers to purchase credits from the renewables sector to incentivise generation.

The five pillars of net zero ensure that regardless of a future government’s view of the Paris Climate Agreement and the net zero target, these cannot be easily reversed, even if mainstream Australians want them to be.

The significant economic and social costs of net zero, including higher power bills, lower energy reliability, and the continued decline of Australia’s economic competitiveness, are now embedded into Australia’s legislative framework. This will make it difficult for a future centre-right government to implement the reforms required to reverse this decline and to advocate and legislate policies that allow for the restoration of our energy system.

Given the improbability of a centre-right government winning a majority in the Senate, the task of reversing these pieces of legislation will be long and arduous. Properly abandoning the policy of net zero, and the attendant decline in our living standards, will require unambiguous commitments and extraordinary powers of persuasion, aimed directly at voters rather than through the filter of woke media.

The Opposition needs to come out with a plan to repeal all of these laws and to create new laws which shore up our energy future. After removing the five pillars of Net Zero, repealing section 487 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), which enables green lawfare that delays projects, must be the very next step.

Presently, a “person aggrieved” can challenge ministerial decisions on major projects under the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1975 (ADJR Act) providing they are a person “whose interests are adversely affected” by a decision. However, section 487 of the EPBC Act extends the meaning of “person aggrieved” under the ADJR Act to include organisations or associations which are engaged in activities “for [the] protection or conservation of, or research into, the environment”.

Previous research by the IPA, Section 487: How activists use red tape to stop development and jobs, published in March 2020, found that between 2000 and 2020, legal activism by environmental groups in Australia had put $65 billion worth of investment at risk by holding major projects up in court for a cumulative total of 10,100 days, equivalent to 28 years. Over the same period, 94 per cent of the legal challenges under Section 487 failed to substantially alter the conditions of a project.

Removing this section from our environmental laws would make it easier for coal and gas project proponents to support the energy grid.

The Opposition must then commit to a broader deregulatory agenda so that projects can get off the ground. This could include the creation of a government agency with a strict agenda of finding red and green tape for the government of the day to remove, such as the ‘Territory Coordinator’ in the Northern Territory, introduced by the Country Liberal Party in early 2025.

It is undeniably a positive development that the Opposition has dropped net zero, but the Coalition parties will have to prosecute the case against it convincingly if they are ever to implement the legislative changes outlined above.

The consequences of prosecuting a policy poorly were witnessed in May, when a sensible commitment to nuclear energy was neither developed nor delivered competently. If the case against net zero is presented poorly by the Opposition, and undermined by a lingering and contradictory commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement, it will fail to convince voters. And, worse, it will be a long time before it is politically palatable to oppose it again. Australians cannot afford such a blunder.

This article from the Summer 2025 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Research Fellow, Saxon Davidson.