It was hidden in one line of Peter Dutton’s budget reply speech. But it is a crucial reason the Albanese government must be voted out of office – and also prevented from becoming an even more destructive minority government dictated to by the Greens and Teals. What was hidden in the budget reply is, effectively, a Coalition direct public assault on the extremes of Labor’s disastrous renewables-only anti-fossil-fuels madness that underlies Australia’s cost-of-living crisis and negative per capita economic growth. But it is masquerading as only a specific issue for small business and regional Australia, with the Nationals’ David Littleproud hot on the chase as the Dutton opposition is almost being brave on climate, but not brave enough to make it overtly a key issue.

Implementing this significant Coalition promise, which is to repeal the Albanese government’s latest oppressive piece of very expensive green tape, the mandatory climate reporting law, would play an important role in putting an end to any remaining fantasy of achieving net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. But the Coalition appears to want to do so without actually running the political  risk of overtly saying so. This is at a time when multi-millions of dollars from rent-seeking renewable energy billionaires are being directed towards their self-interested net-zero political cause via the ‘independent’ Teals. Climate will be an issue.

But with the net-zero bandwagon losing momentum among Australia’s main trading partners, led by the Trump redux administration, there is a mounting political case for taking the climate catastrophists head on. Australians, already carrying the rapidly increasing cost burden of the net-zero nightmare, now face the coming cost-of-living impact of this latest law, of which the ordinary voter is generally unaware. But there is no doubting the significance of what is happening nor its impact; Asic chair Joe Longo, describes these new requirements as ‘the biggest change to corporate reporting in a generation’ while the Australian Institute of Company Directors welcomes Australia becoming ‘one of the first developed countries to implement such a comprehensive and extensive mandatory reporting regime’.

When Dutton in his budget reply said, ‘We will not force large firms to spend more than a billion dollars a year policing the emissions of every small business they deal with – as Labor is trying to do,’ he was effectively confirming the Coalition’s bold up-front commitment in January by Angus Taylor to scrap, when in office,  the Albanese government’s onerous mandatory climate disclosure laws that began operating three months ago. Describing them as ‘a $2.3 billion compliance tax on the Australian economy that will make it harder for Australia’s farmers, manufacturers, and miners to attract capital, insurance, and financial services, it will also reduce  the attractiveness for international companies to invest in Australia’.

In downplaying, as mainly a small business issue, the much broader climate and economic significance of Taylor’s January denunciation of the new rules, Dutton appeared to be seeking to minimise the Coalition’s political exposure.

The new rules are operating even before Asic has released its final version of the ‘guidelines’ under which it will police them – promised in the first quarter of this year. Carrying severe penalties, including prison, the new law is  aimed at forcing the private sector to meet the government’s net-zero climate agenda – at the private sector’s (and ultimately Australian consumers’) huge cost. Listed and private companies, financial institutions, registered investment schemes and superannuation funds, will need to publish an annual sustainability report revealing scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions caused by their operations and electricity consumption. It will eventually see the rolling out of controversial scope 3 emission rules in 2026 – the indirect greenhouse gas emissions created by customers and suppliers in a company’s supply chain, both domestically and overseas. This is the element that Peter Dutton focussed on in his budget reply speech, as it extends a ludicrous administrative task from big businesses, at which it is nominally directed, to small businesses that deal with them; for example, a farmer who supplies a retail chain or a regional small business supplying a big mining group. When Labor and the Greens teamed up last September to ram through these new mandatory disclosure laws to impose an unacceptable compliance burden on the Australian economy, there was widespread support from a supine woke-heavy big business sector. The AICD joined in a public statement supporting mandatory climate reporting along with other key investor and business groups such as the BCA, ACSI, and the Australian Shareholders’ Association, with editorial support from the Australian Financial Review.

The Albanese legislation goes far beyond comparable international requirements. While Jim Chalmers boasts of them being ‘world-leading rules’ that would provide ‘a rigorous, internationally aligned and credible climate disclosure regime that will support Australia’s reputation as an attractive destination for international capital and incentivise investment in the energy transformation’, they have put Australia out-of-line with its peers, particularly on scope 3 emissions which are excluded by most of our trading partners, including the UK, Canada, Japan and the US (which specifically did so even under the climate-obsessed Biden administration due to concerns about compliance burdens), while South Korea is having a bitter unresolved dispute over this issue.

But whether corporate boardrooms are really committed to these self-imposed climate-reporting financial wounds is open to question. A year-old survey showed that climate disclosure across the ASX remained relatively low – less than half of listed entities disclosed climate-related information in their annual reports. Of the 61 per cent of the ASX 200 which made net-zero commitments, seven per cent had no supporting interim targets, while only 25 per cent of targets set were science-based model potential impacts using scenario analysis. Only one per cent provided financial quantification of potential outcomes.

So the Coalition may have little reason to fear big business joining in a green assault on its plan to cancel Albanese’s oppressive new climate disclosure law, especially in view of what is emerging in the US from the current Trump-led reversal of all Biden’s climate burdens. This is particularly so after last week’s decision by the SEC to call off its legal battles to enforce last year’s Biden Climate-Related Disclosure Rule that required large publicly traded companies to disclose climate action, greenhouse gas emissions, and the financial impacts of severe weather events. Due to voluminous legal actions, it was never successfully implemented, and now won’t be as the SEC ceases its defence of ‘the costly and unnecessarily intrusive climate change disclosure rules’. Forbes magazine describes this as ‘ killing climate disclosure and sustainability reporting at the national level’, while leaving states like climate-obsessed California, still in the game. On 3 May, Australians get the opportunity to vote to kill off our ‘costly and unnecessary’ local version.