Malcolm Turnbull knows a thing or two about being eaten alive in the Liberal party room. “They’ve got the memory of a goldfish and the dining habits of piranhas,” he said last week, watching his successor Sussan Ley drown in the same bloody waters that claimed him. The Coalition has just scrapped its net zero by 2050 target, and Turnbull’s diagnosis cuts to the bone: “This is what happens when you outsource your policy development to Sky News and the right wing media echo chamber.”

He calls it a “fact-free, reality-free culture war” designed to gratify the Murdoch ecosystem. And he’s right. But here’s what Turnbull won’t say, or can’t say, because it would require him to admit his own party’s fundamental corruption: this isn’t just a Coalition disease. State capture extends to Labor, also.

Let’s start with the obvious villains. The Liberal Party’s abandonment of net zero came after the Nationals ditched the policy earlier in November, and was immediately celebrated by Advance Australia, a dark money operation that masquerades as grassroots while being bankrolled by a small handful of Australia’s super-rich. Advance director Matthew Sheahan called it a

“major victory in the fight to take back the country from the activists and elites.”

The irony is breathtaking. Advance, funded by mega-millionaires and Liberal Party donors, operating out of virtual offices with fake residential addresses, claims to represent “ordinary Australians” against inner-city elites. In the 2021-22 financial year, the biggest funder of Advance was the Liberal Party itself, which gave it $500,000 via its election funding vehicle, the Cormack Foundation. This is astroturfing on an industrial scale, a manufactured “grassroots” movement designed to give politicians cover for policies written by fossil fuel corporations.

Turnbull says this has been “a problem for nearly 20 years in the Coalition that they’re allowing the policy agenda to be dictated by right-wing media.” True enough. The Coalition lost blue-ribbon inner-city seats to teal independents in 2022 precisely because voters demanded climate action. And now they’re doubling down on the same climate denialism that cost them government, pouring taxpayer money into coal and gas plants while the planet burns.

But here’s where Turnbull’s critique becomes incomplete, even dishonest. Because while he’s pointing fingers at the Coalition’s media-driven madness, Labor is quietly approving fossil fuel projects that make the Coalition’s rhetoric look like mere window dressing.

Since forming government in 2022, the Albanese Government has approved 31 coal, oil and gas developments. Lifetime pollution from these projects is expected to exceed 6.5 billion tonnes of CO2-e – equivalent to about one-eighth of global annual emissions, about 15 years of Australia’s current emissions.

Read that again. Six and a half billion tonnes. While Anthony Albanese talks up renewable energy and net zero commitments, his government has greenlit an apocalypse. If approved, the North West Shelf extension would be the most polluting fossil fuel project green-lit by the Albanese Government, releasing 4.4 billion tonnes of climate pollution over its lifetime, and Labor approved it weeks after winning re-election in 2025.

In 2024, on the same day, then Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek boasted on social media that ‘In 2024 Labor has approved 0 new coal mines’, details of coal mine extension approvals were uploaded without fanfare to the federal government’s public portal. Zero new coal mines, just massive expansions of existing ones. It’s the kind of semantic game that would make Orwell weep.

Three Hunter Valley coal projects approved in September 2024 will create 1.1 billion tonnes of emissions well over double Australia’s annual emissions from all sources. Australia increased its subsidies to fossil fuel producers and major users by around 30% from 2022/23 to 2023/24 to a total of around AUD 14.5bn.

So yes, Turnbull is right that the Coalition is trapped in a fact-free culture war dictated by Murdoch and his Sky News shock jocks. But Labor’s betrayal is arguably worse because it’s cloaked in the language of climate action. By comparison, the pathologically deluded Coalition’s climate vandalism seems almost truthful, they tell you they’re going to wreck the joint. Advance supplies a press-kit of lies. Labor smiles, signs the Paris Agreement, and then approves decades of coal mining that will cook the Pacific.

This is what state capture looks like in a mature democracy. You don’t need crude bribes or brown paper bags. You just need revolving doors between politics and mining corporations, fossil fuel extraction as one of Australia’s most polluting sectors expected to emit 62 Mt CO2-e in 2035, about 21% of total emissions, and a political class that has decided its future lies with digging stuff up and shipping it overseas rather than building the clean economy of the 21st century.

Australia is the world’s second-largest exporter of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions. Think about that. With 0.3% of the world’s population, we’re the second-biggest exporter of climate pollution on the planet. Australia’s coal and gas exports were responsible for 1.15 billion tonnes of CO₂ emissions in 2023, and that’s before you count the domestic emissions from extracting and processing those fuels. Australia is the world’s third-largest liquefied natural gas exporter after the US and Qatar, with its transnational operators exporting nearly $70 billion worth of the fuel in 2023-24. That’s real money, real political donations, real jobs in marginal seats. And both major parties are addicted to it.

The Coalition at least has the excuse of ideological capture, they genuinely seem to believe climate science is a UN conspiracy. Labor has no such excuse. They know the science. They know the consequences. Approving new fossil fuel developments threatens our crucial relationships with our Pacific allies who have long called for Australia to stop approving coal and gas projects. Our neighbours are literally drowning, and we’re selling them out for gas export revenue.

Turnbull notes that scrapping net zero won’t help the Liberals regain inner-city seats because “all of those electorates are very committed to action on climate.” He’s right. But Labor won’t hold those seats either if voters wake up to the gap between its rhetoric and its actions. The teals didn’t just campaign against Coalition climate denialism, they campaigned for real action. Labor’s “all of the above” energy strategy is a betrayal of that mandate.

The fish bowl Turnbull describes, where politicians with goldfish memories and piranha instincts tear each other apart, isn’t confined to the Liberal party room. It’s the entire Australian political system, swimming in fossil fuel money, fed by Murdoch media narratives on one side and mining corporation talking points on the other.

Australia still lacks federal-level strategy, plans or committed timelines for a transition away from coal and fossil gas as agreed at the first Global Stocktake at COP28. That’s not just the Coalition. That’s bipartisan policy failure.

Between 2023 and 2035, Australia’s fossil fuel exports alone would consume around 7.5% of the world’s estimated remaining global carbon budget. If we include domestic CO₂ emissions from current policies, this means by 2035 Australia, with 0.3% of the world’s population, would consume 9% of the total remaining carbon budget. We’re not just failing to solve the problem, we’re actively making it worse, regardless of which party holds the treasury benches.

This is the real culture war, and it’s got nothing to do with Sky News talking points about woke elites. It’s about whether we’re going to let fossil fuel corporations and their purchased politicians destroy our children’s future while pretending to care about climate change. Both major parties have failed that test. Turnbull knows it about the Coalition. He should be honest enough to admit it about Labor too.

The fish are eating each other in a tank that’s rapidly running out of oxygen. And the people feeding them, Murdoch, the mining billionaires, the influence peddlers at Advance Australia, are counting their money while the temperature rises.