Satirical editorial cartoon of Coalition style men reclining in a day spa while fossil fuel pipelines labelled Gas and Coal siphon money offshore, sponsored by APPEA and MCA.

Saturday long read: the Coalition’s Net Zero position is not a policy, it is a scented screensaver.

Written by urbanwronski

Saturday long read: the Coalition’s Net Zero position is not a policy, it is a scented screensaver.

The Zen of Net Zero: How a Screensaver Became the Coalition’s Climate Policy

Fossil donors run the choir.

The Coalition’s Net Zero stance is a scented screensaver designed to calm donors while the plunder continues.

The Coalition have refined climate positioning into a kind of day spa screensaver.

Pan flute. Floating lotus. Motion without computation.

This is the Zen of Net Zero, the serenity ritual where nothing must be done, because doing anything would break the spell.

It is the refuge of those already on the fossil payroll, the same boys and girls who brought us Big Tobacco’s industrialised doubt and Big Gambling’s responsible play theatre.

This Zen is also the natural end stage of neoliberal self eating, the hollowing out of branches, the collapse of civic clubs and unions, the destruction of the local party as a community organ.

Once that architecture died, parties became boutiques for capital, not communities for policy.

On top of this, forty years of Laffer worship.

We cut taxes. We under taxed mining. We under collected the rent of our own land.

The dividends did not go into community. They went into private accumulation.

The screensaver hides the crime scene.

[ABC RN: Late night bumper sting. The faint hum of a radio transmitter under a soft female voice reading headlines about heatwaves in Brazil, insurance retreat in Florida, flood levee failures in northern NSW. The jingle is one of those ancient ones from 1999 that sounds like The News, The National Interest and Late Night Live had a child. Then: silence, as if the ABC mothership is breathing in.]

This is your reminder that what we live inside at the moment is not merely a failure of ambition, but a failure of courage: a political caste too frightened to confront the truth that the future is already here and it is demanding adult supervision.

We now return you to the comedy of the absurd.

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Morrison as prototype

Scott Morrison understood this intuitively.

His gas led recovery was a marketing séance. He tried to raise the dead with a laminated Bunnings brochure.

The press gallery largely let him, because Morrison discovered two props that silence the gallery: hi vis, men in uniform.

If a man in camo said gas was strategic then gas must be strategic. Performative authority replaced evidence. Cosplay replaced policy.

Australia’s energy future was reframed as a military procurement mystery box. The screensaver stayed on.

Delay is now the product

This is the lineage the modern Coalition continues, including Senator Matt Canavan.

Climate policy must never harden into numbers, because the minute you select a decade, you have to act.

So Canavan frames climate targets as the destruction of regional life, as if Net Zero means forcing graziers to crawl around the paddock at sixty kilometres per hour to appease the United Nations.

This is not analysis. This is fantasy theatre.

The screensaver is not harmless. Screensavers waste energy.

This is the whole game, a carbon wasting performance of calm, while the last gush of superprofit is siphoned out the back of the country.

Nothing must change because the money still flows in the right direction.

Enter: Netting and Zeroni

And now, since the Coalition’s climate position resembles an esoteric religious practice, let us observe, anthropologically, how they talk to each other about it. To aid clarity, we have invited two celebrated antipodean communication consultants from the Land of the Long White Cloud, or as their invoice header once misprinted it, the Land of the Long White Shroud. They began as juniors under a tall chap in a hat called Fred Dagg, then brushed leather elbow patches with the late, reborn John Clarke, and now advise political parties that prefer incense to engineering. Meet Mr Netting, a ledger man, and Mr Zeroni, a connoisseur of ambiguity.

This is where you discover the real doctrine:

Nothing must change, except the slogans and the rate of donation from our friends in fossil fuels.

That is the constant. Not targets. Not years. Not emissions. The constants are APPEA, the Minerals Council of Australia, Santos regional sponsorships, Origin and Peabody and Whitehaven networks, and think tanks with a resource partner column at the bottom. These are the real carbon priests. The reason we have the day spa screensaver instead of a transition plan is not confusion. The Coalition is spoken for.

Netting and Zeroni: Broad Church

Netting: Mr Zeroni, you have said repeatedly tonight that the Coalition must avoid clarity.

Zeroni: Correct, Netting.

Netting: But does that not get confusing?

Zeroni: Only if you let it, Netting. Otherwise it is exciting. We are a Broad Church. We have the happy clappers. We have the former SAS unhappy clappers. We have the vast majority who are content to sit there and text each other, check their share portfolios and monitor the rental yield on their holiday unit in Burleigh Heads.

Netting: So confusion is cohesion.

Zeroni: Exactly. Clarity forces you to choose. Confusion allows everyone to believe they are right. It is inclusive. It is also less work.

Netting: And this is your climate policy.

Zeroni: Yes. Net Zero means never saying the quiet part aloud.

Netting: Which is.

Zeroni: That nothing must change, except the graphics packages and the slogans. Last year we were Technology Not Taxes. This year we are Dependable, Affordable, Reliable. Next quarter we can be Strong, Balanced, Stable. A junior can update the lot in Canva before morning tea.

Netting: The donation flow?

Zeroni: Healthy. That is our renewable. APPEA breakfasts, MCA sundowners, a sprinkle of regional sponsorships that arrive like rain on parched ground. The market signals are clear, therefore we cannot be.

Netting: You oppose renewable build out because it reduces bills too quickly.

Zeroni: Precisely. Sudden relief can be destabilising. Better to let bills remain educative. Citizens learn restraint. Investors learn confidence. Everyone learns patience.

Netting: I thought the line was that renewables increase bills.

Zeroni: Yes, and no, and yes. It depends which way the vibe is blowing. Net Zero is a feeling, not a mathematics. Feelings are cheaper to produce.

Netting: Nuclear is cheap, according to you.

Zeroni: Cheap in theory, expensive in detail. We keep it in theory. That is how we maintain affordability.

Netting: And Senator Canavan?

Zeroni: A pioneer. He has proved that climate action will slow the nation to sixty in the bush, perhaps less, which is excellent for safety, culture and the preservation of heritage utes.

Netting: Has anyone opened the spreadsheet.

Zeroni: We do not open the spreadsheet. Spreadsheets contain numbers. Numbers attract accountability. Accountability shortens careers.

Netting: You think this is sustainable.

Zeroni: Indefinitely. Until the poles melt, or the polling melts. Those are our two triggers.

Netting: Those are your two KPIs.

Zeroni: Exactly, Netting. We are metrics driven, as long as the metrics do not measure outcomes.

Netting: Thank you, Mr Zeroni.

Zeroni: Always a pleasure. It is good to provide this level of clarity.

Netting: Right.

[Silence. Mug set down. Page flips. A biro clicks twice. Theme rises, the dry ABC woodwind sting that says a door has just shut on the absurd and we are alone with the truth.]

Australia does not suffer from a lack of climate solutions. It suffers from a lack of political adulthood.

Urban Wronski is a forensic satirist of Australian power and its alibis.