The Liberals are holding a crisis meeting about Net Zero. Let that sink in. A party in its death throes, debating how to back out of something they have never remotely understood. Net Zero is not a tree-planting fad, nor a spreadsheet con. In the real science and the real global standards, Net Zero means deep, brutal cuts to fossil fuel use at source, electrification powered by renewables, industrial process reform and tiny residual offsets for what cannot be avoided. Which is exactly why the Liberals hate it. Because real Net Zero demands the end of their donors’ business model.

Their political class still thinks Net Zero is a backdated indulgence system where you keep burning coal today and pay for the papal pardon in 2040, preferably by claiming someone else’s forest. They think carbon accounting equals carbon abatement. They think planting fantasy acreage cancels the physics of combustion. It is the IPA version. The Murdoch version. The mining donor version. Net Zero as a get out of jail free card. That is not science. That is the fossil fuel industry’s counterfeit Net Zero: delay disguised as action. Net Zero was real, The Liberals never were.

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A quick reality check:

Deep, brutal cuts to fossil fuels – IEA says fossil fuel demand must fall 25% by 2030, 80% by 2050
• No new fossil fuel projects – IEA and IPCC both say no new coal mines, no new oil/gas extraction needed
• Electrification – Nearly 50% of energy from electricity by 2050, 90% from renewables
• Industrial process reform – Steel, cement, chemicals need zero-emission processes
• Tiny residual offsets – Only for hard-to-abate sectors (not a license to keep drilling)

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The Con, Explained

The real grift? Net Zero was never meant to allow the continued expansion of coal and gas. Real Net Zero means rapid cuts at source, right now, and only tiny slivers of offsets for the genuinely unavoidable. But the fossil fuel lobby butchered the definition and re-sold it as a permission slip to keep digging.

Their bastardised version of Net Zero says you can keep burning coal and gas today and plant or buy something tomorrow that “cancels it out.” It is numerology. It is astrology with spreadsheets. Carbon emitted today heats the climate today. A tree planted decades later does not reverse a tonne already in the atmosphere. Trees take decades to grow. They burn. They rot. They get double counted. They do not behave like a bank account.

And when the forestry maths started to collapse, the industry simply swapped to the next magic trick. CCS. Dirty hydrogen. Fugitive methane “performance credits.” Anything except actual emissions cuts. As former Australia Institute chief Ben Oquist warned in 2022: “Instead of rushing to end fossil fuels, there will be a gold rush for offsets, dirty hydrogen and CCS designed not to stop climate change, but to drive up coal, oil and gas.”

This is the heart of the hoax. Fake Net Zero exists to block Real Zero. It is delay politics masquerading as climate policy. It is the continuation of fossil fuel extraction under the camouflage of climate action.

This is the con. And, in a farcical tour de force, as if enacting a Dario Fo political satire, our:

Liberals are now so deep in the hallucination they are fighting one fake solution to defend another.

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A Party Hollowed Out

The Liberals helped dig their own grave by becoming the altar boys of neoliberalism. They thought they were the priests. But neoliberalism hollowed out the suburban middle class that was their base; globalised capital that now sees them as redundant, and drove women from their tent by treating care and community as waste on a profit line. The last straw for many was their blokes’ wilful stupidity in denying climate change. But the Liberals are on to it. Thrashing it all out in a Party Room.

Look how they cradle the corpse of the ideology that killed their own electoral base; call it modernity. Can they “debate Net Zero” while doing it? By tomorrow, net zero will be thrown out the window. Brilliant. Just don’t expect to hear any clear explanation that it is the mining lobby’s version they’ve abandoned.

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The Murdoch Parasite

This is where the Murdoch monster flips from protection racket and booster to parasite. The Liberals once owned the propaganda machine. Now, the machine owns them. The abysmal, Sky News After Dark doesn’t serve the Liberal Party; the Liberal Party serves Sky News After Dark.

They are no longer a political party. Someone needs to tell their fearless leader. They are a a “content vertical”; a dedicated channel or segment that focuses on a single, specific topic for a targeted audience, for a media empire with a shrinking, ageing audience. It’s a feedback loop in a mausoleum. Murdoch needs them for the culture war; they need Murdoch because nobody else is listening.

And what is the script? That Net Zero is tyranny. That science is just another opinion. So the Liberals, desperate for relevance, parrot talking points badly while the planet burns and their voters flee?

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The National Party: A Fossil Lobby in an RM Williams Shirt

Their coalition partners morph into an AI caricature of Pauline Hanson with a rural accent. The One-Nationals have long since given up the agrarian conservatives cos-play; they are a mining lobby in an RM Williams shirt and an Akubra. A frantic retreat from even this fake solution isn’t strategy; it’s blind panic.

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The Real Fraud of Net Zero

Let us be precise about why this debate is farcical in Australia:

1. The Timeline Lie: CO2 from fossil fuels heats the atmosphere the moment it is burned. Offsets in 2040 do not reverse warming in 2025.
2. The Accounting Scam: Most corporate pledges exclude “Scope 3” emissions — the burning of the fuel they sell. It is like McDonald’s claiming to be vegetarian because they do not count the meat once it leaves the car park.
3. The Land Grab: There is not enough land on Earth for the fantasy forests required to “offset” expanding fossil fuel production. This becomes a new colonialism: rich countries displacing poor communities to create monoculture carbon farms.
4. The Technology Fairy Tale: Plans rely on miracle technologies like direct air capture and carbon capture and storage that do not exist at climate relevant scale. And fossil hydrogen rebranded as “green hydrogen” is just marketing.
5. The Core Deception: The Australian version of Net Zero was redesigned to allow fossil fuel expansion. It is not decarbonisation. It is delay disguised as climate action.

Climate scientists are beyond exasperated. The carbon budget is finite. We are burning through it now. We need Real Zero: immediate and deep cuts to fossil fuel extraction and combustion. Not promises to balance the books in 2050.

But the Liberals cannot say this out loud because they are not engaged with physics. They are engaged with political positioning. Net Zero, even in its bastardised form, is a position they cannot take without rupturing both their mining donor networks and their Murdoch lifeline.

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This Isn’t Turbulence. It’s Entropy.

Parties can survive being wrong. They cannot survive being structurally refuted. Or rejected. The Liberals are in the early clinical stages of institutional death, disputing reality itself.

The evidence? The professional class walked. In 2022, eight of the wealthiest, best-educated seats turned teal. This was the first open revolt of the educated middle class against neoliberalism in an advanced democracy. Women saw the climate obstruction for what it was: a generational betrayal.

The Liberals’ response? They mocked the data. They sneered at their former base. This is political anosognosia; the inability to perceive one’s own illness. It is the terminal stage.

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Political Species Extinction

This is the pathology. The most powerful anti-Liberal forces are now doctors, engineers, and teachers in the suburbs who no longer see the party as a modern organisation. Once the professional class leaves a conservative party, it never returns. They are the carriers of institutional modernity.

The Liberals are collapsing into a brittle, niche subculture with no pipeline of young voters, women, or professionals. This isn’t a polling crisis; it’s political species extinction. And they’re spending their final moments debating the finer points of an accounting con. Getting all fired up to reject Net Zero. Dan Tehan can fix it? Call an undertaker. Here’s what the coroner’s report would be looking like:

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Cause of Death: Denial
Manner of death: Self-inflicted.
Instrument: A media ecosystem that rewarded conspiracy over competence.

They refused to accept limits; physical, demographic, or economic. They chose the narcotic of outrage over the discipline of governing. That choice worked until the electorate grew up and fled.

Physical limits: climate physics, planetary boundaries, the carbon budget. It’s part of the born to rule delusion, a form of collective narcissism. The Liberals acted as if Australia could keep digging and burning fossil fuels forever without consequence. They denied the physical reality that you can’t pump infinite CO2 into a finite atmosphere. They rejected the limits of what the Earth’s systems can absorb.

Demographic limits: the composition of the electorate is changing. Australia is urbanising, diversifying, educating more women, becoming less Anglo, less religious, less socially conservative. The Liberals refused to accept they couldn’t govern indefinitely for older, whiter, male, suburban homeowners. They kept playing to a shrinking demographic as if it was still 1996.

Economic limits: neoliberalism’s promises hit reality. You can’t keep casualising labour, suppressing wages, inflating housing costs, and gutting public services while expecting the aspirational middle class to keep voting for you. The economic model they championed created precarity, not prosperity, for the people they needed. They refused to accept that endless growth, deregulation, and trickle-down had limits and casualties.

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The Danger for Labor

Labor knows the Liberal Party is dead on its feet. But this grim insight brings no automatic power. If anything, it tempts Labor into the most dangerous posture of all: custodian of the dying carbon economy. It tempts Labor to manage the decline of the old order instead of accelerating the birth of the new one. It tempts Labor to keep the mining cheques flowing, to keep the gas lobby quiet, to keep the headlines calm, by maintaining the polite fiction that “2030 targets plus Net Zero in 2050” is a plan.

Labor is already flirting with the same fake Net Zero accounting language the Liberals use. It grants the illusion of action while preserving political optionality. That is the danger. Not that Labor will capitulate to the Right. The danger is that Labor will become a sort of technocratic curator of fossil fuel harm, carefully stewarding the carbon death economy through one last breeding season, and calling it “transition.”

Real Zero means cutting coal and gas production this decade. Not expanding it. Not approving new basins. Not offering subsidies. Not pretending the atmosphere can be bribed to forget. If Labor cannot say that sentence out loud, then Labor is not governing the future. Labor is stalling the future to avoid upsetting the ghosts of the old economy.

The Liberal Party is dying. The Liberal Party is finished. The question that now matters is whether Labor will govern what comes after, or whether Labor will become the hospice nurse quietly adjusting the morphine drip for the carbon order as it wheezes out its last breath.

Labor faces many challenges. The question is whether it can shake off the torpor of a term of climate inertia and seize the initiative. Don’t hold your breath. Our young people are very underwhelmed.

Generation Justice is a group of young people aged 14–28 from across Australia who have each lived through climate impacts like heatwaves, fires, floods and ecological destruction. 

In April, they lodged a formal human rights complaint with the UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change, alleging that Australia is violating their rights to life, health, culture and to a healthy environment by failing to take ambitious and meaningful action on climate change. 

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History’s Verdict

History will not record this as a partisan quarrel. History will record this as the moment when one of the core parties of the Australian state chose hallucination over reality. When confronted with planetary physics, they clung to accounting. When confronted with the end of the industrial age of coal and gas, they clung to culture war as anaesthetic. The Liberal Party did not suffer an electoral loss. The Liberal Party suffered a reality loss.

The planet will not negotiate with ideology. Physics does not care about pledges. Markets are already moving. Capital is already moving. Young people have already moved. The only thing that matters now is rapid decarbonisation. Everything else is fraud, performance art, or hospice music. The Liberals are dead. They just do not know it yet. And the last act of their afterlife is to argue about offsets in an empty room while the future walks out and gets on with building the next civilisation.

That’s how a party dies: not with a bang, but with a PowerPoint presentation on offsets, on a loop, delivered to an empty room. With breathless, deathless commentary from Sky and our ABC. And anyone with any sense would be tuning in to Generation Justice and others like them anyway.

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