If you keep doing the same thing, you’ll get what you’ve always got.

Pretty basic wisdom.

Not so, according to The Australian’s premier columnist, Paul Kelly. He believes the Coalition will be condemned to electoral oblivion if they give up on Net Zero.

Of course, they just went to an election supporting Net Zero and are now closer to electoral oblivion than ever, now holding 43 of 150 seats.

Then there’s the Net Zero supporting state Liberal parties who went to elections backing Net Zero, like the Victorian Liberals (29 of 88 seats), Western Australian Liberals (7 of 59), New South Wales Liberals (24 of 93).

Only the Queensland LNP are an exception, but they’ve spent their time in Government cancelling renewable projects and ordering a review into their emissions targets while also extending the life of their coal plants.

No one would argue that these elections were lost purely because of support for Net Zero; but it does tell you that folding to activists over Net Zero has certainly not helped.

In a sense, Kelly is right when he argues:

The row about Net Zero at 2050 is about far more than a policy position. It goes to the meaning of the Liberal Party and its identity. This penetrates to whether the Liberals have a credible future with the voters of urban Australia.

But the starting point is that they’ve already lost credibility with voters both in the suburbs and the cities.

That’s the reality.

And Kelly’s solution is that the Coalition should just not do anything about the policy that is driving up prices and making our energy grid worse.

No, really.

Kelly writes:

There is a universal view within the Coalition that Labor’s energy transition is economically and structurally flawed, that reliance on renewables means system unreliability, ongoing price escalation for consumers and business, growing risks to industrial processes and jobs, more government spending on clean-energy subsidies and consumer-price compensation, and a social licence crisis over wind farms.

He says Labor will almost certainly overreach and the Coalition should just wait for Labor to bring itself undone.

In other words, yes, Net Zero is a bad, unrealistic policy, and it will bring about all sorts of bad outcomes.

But instead of opposing it and trying to stop it, the Coalition should just ride it out and let Aussies pay higher and higher prices and let farms get taken over by solar and wind farms and then the votes will start rolling back in.

It’s patently ridiculous.

This is the same advice the Coalition have been listening to for years now, and look where it’s got them.

So what’s the alternative?

ADVANCE is fighting back against Net Zero because it is a genuinely bad policy that will damage our economy and our prosperity. It hurts our farmers while damaging our country’s natural beauty.

And it does all that without making the slightest difference to climate change.

We oppose it on principle and we are prepared to argue day after day to change people’s minds. 

And we don’t really care if, as Kelly writes, opposing Net Zero means;

Labor would have the full progressive orchestra behind it, singing in unison – teals, Greens, the women’s vote, the youth vote, the unions, the corporates, the finance sector, the NGOs, the education lobby and the full progressive media in its moralistic, outrage mode.

Standing on principle and being prepared to fight is what’s been lacking in the Liberal party in recent years.

Aussie voters want to help the environment and care about climate change, but they do not want to be made poorer, and that’s what Net Zero is doing to them.

So the Liberals need to stand up for Australia’s prosperity, stare down the media and activists, and argue every day against this massively damaging policy.

And who knows, maybe standing on principle will win back some votes?

^{Image source: The Australian, Liberal leader Sussan Ley says she wants the upshot to be a united Coalition stance, but that’s a monumental task.}