The National Party’s new leader has built his politics on climate scepticism. But rising costs, extreme weather and the accelerating energy transition make that stance increasingly difficult to sustain.

The crowning of Matt Canavan means the National Party’s champion climate change sceptic is now at the helm – something which the Labor government might well be rejoicing.

Jeremy Webb

But belittling existential climate threat is a misguided strategy, especially given the havoc it wreaks in the rural electorates the National Party purports to represent.

This fact is not lost on voters. A recent Griffith University survey shows that since 2010 Australians who are concerned over climate change doubled to around 70 per cent. More than one-third of Australians reported having experienced at least one extreme weather or natural disaster event in the preceding year. Voters are also now more aware of the costs. Home insurance premiums have risen 50 per cent over the past five years of which half the rise is being ascribed to climate change.

So unlike King Canute, Canavan will be faced with the climate change reality tide wetting more than his feet. The Coalition’s incoherent policies, based on short term fossil fuel-based fixes, have a rapid expiry date given they are little more than a set of climate change accelerants.

To justify the assault on the transition to renewables, Canavan simply ignores a plethora of research both warning of the dire economic consequences of climate change and of evident successes in Australia’s transition. There is the refusal to acknowledge that electricity prices are now lower than they would have been if the renewable transition had not occurred and that ageing coal fired power plants are the chief cause of rising power prices. The cost of carbon emissions (over $100 per tonne as per the EU) is never mentioned.

In his dustbinning of scientific evidence Canavan is a member of an exclusive club of sceptics and deniers whose views have never been for turning. As the Griffith University surveys show, time is not reducing their numbers.

It has long been known that deniers and sceptics rarely if ever change their views: even in the face of alarming scientific evidence and climate cataclysms. While Canavan is obviously not for turning, like so many other denialists in recent years he has become slippery about his precise beliefs by morphing into a position which avoids being charged with outright denial but chips away on a broad front at the bona fides of the transition to renewables. COP reports are described as exaggerated and fear mongering. Liberal doses of transitional fossil fuels are advocated, net zero is kicked down the road and wind power is demonised. The infection of these views is almost complete within the National Party and widespread within the Liberals.

That Canavan tenaciously holds such hostile views in opposition to the research of the several thousand world leading academic experts who contribute to the IPCC may seem bizarre. He has had a stellar career as an economist – first class honours in economics and a pre-political career with the Australian Productivity Commission. However, it is well known that a conservative political persuasion – typically one infected with strong libertarian attitudes – is the invariable precursor to the adoption of denialism/scepticism. Diligent research does not come first.

This iron clad linkage between conservatism and scepticism has not been lost on the fossil fuel industry. The fact that not a few sceptics and deniers are highly educated has been well exploited through their funding of a raft of high powered right wing think tanks. In Australia into this funding frenzy has come a coterie of (highly educated) billionaires of the Gina Rinehart, James Packer and Clive Palmer ilk whose libertarian beliefs have evidently served them well as entrepreneurs.

In this way, the fossil fuel industry has used high flying sceptics and denialists to acquire asymmetric influence over the climate change debate and in turn over the National and Liberal Parties’ climate policies.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry is spending over $200 million annually on directly persuading the public to put a brake on the transition to carbon neutrality (in the US this figure is over $A5 billion). The combined power of the carbon lobby and its sceptic gladiators helps to explain why the National Party has effectively become a mining party and abandoned the longer term interests of the farming community who are most vulnerable to the economic effects of climate change.

Less mystifying then is that while there is growing concern over climate change in rural and regional areas there is markedly less acceptance that it is man-made. Polls show that while one third of all Australians are not accepters this view is twice as prevalent in rural and regional areas as it is in cities.

Canavan and the Coalition thus have acquired a small MCGA – Make Carbon Great Again – group of rusted on supporters and access to a contestable coterie (around 16 per cent) of Australians who remain undecided about the cause of climate change. While they may currently be sufficient to secure the National Party’s parliamentary seats, it leaves the Liberals high and dry by pushing the moderate undecided away from their hopeful clutches.

But over the longer term – and most likely within several years – Canavan will need to face up to the fact that he will have been dragging the Coalition into a dead-end policy street as he confronts two seminal developments. Firstly, the success of the renewable transition will become obvious and irrefutable. Secondly, the effects and costs of climate change will continue to rise exponentially.

Pity the farmers.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/03/canavans-scepticism-a-dead-end-policy-path/

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