The Coalition – what’s left of it – picked Halloween to meet in Canberra to drive a stake through the heart of net zero, the undead policy stalking the West and draining the life out of its productive industries. Unless the opposition kills it off, the Australian economy will be, as Tony Abbott once memorably put it, ‘dead, buried and cremated’.

Yet, opposition leader Sussan Ley, who promised to ‘listen’ to ‘many views’ on ‘the commitment to net zero by 2050’, won’t even attend the meeting. If Ley can’t face a roomful of her own MPs, how will she hold the government to account? If she is incapable of prosecuting the case against net zero, a policy that is driving the cost-of-living crisis and threatening the survival not just of Australian manufacturing and agriculture, but her party, how will she persuade voters to put her in the Lodge?

While Ley is hiding from the most consequential debate in the country, she should take her listening tour to the Hunter, where Rio Tinto has told 1,000 full-time workers that the Tomago aluminium smelter is threatened with closure – despite massive taxpayer-funded subsidies – because of sky-high power prices.

Or she could visit the ten electorates with the fiercest community opposition to renewable projects. Nine of them are held by the Coalition. One of them is hers. Another belongs to Dan Tehan, the opposition’s spokesman on energy and emissions reduction.

According to polling by the Institute of Public Affairs, 79 per cent of Australians want affordable, reliable energy before net zero. Only 21 per cent think cutting emissions should come at the expense of keeping the lights on.

Meanwhile, inflation has made a mockery of the Reserve Bank’s forecasts, making a rate cut in November about as likely as generating renewable energy in a dunkelflaute, the cold dark doldrums when the winds don’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. The ABS confirmed that the culprit was electricity, with prices rising by almost 10 per cent, similar to the previous quarter.

In the face of so much damage, you’d think that opposing net zero would be a no-brainer, but that would ignore the torrent of money flowing from Big Unreliable lobbyists into the campaigns of MPs who return the favour by voting for the subsidies that make renewables viable and profitable.

As Upton Sinclair, America’s most quotable socialist, wrote: ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’  Sinclair learned this lesson the hard way after losing his 1934 run for governor of California – as the title of his memoir put it: I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked.

It’s a quote climate catastrophist Al Gore assiduously recycles in his global jeremiads to describe the latest villains in his climate morality play: the ‘climate realists’, apologists for Big Fossil, as he sees it, such as Tony Blair, who advocates carbon capture and storage to reconcile the supply of affordable, reliable power with the dogma of doom pushed by greenhouse alarmists.

But Sinclair’s aphorism applies just as well to Gore, the high priest of the Church of Net Zero, whose carbon footprint could blot out the sun. His followers flocked to hear the prophet of doom, who dropped into Sydney in October to preach on the sins of emissions and the profits of renewable repentance at the 20th summit of the Investor Group on Climate Change, and at a private function for Wollemi Capital. The co-founder of Wollemi was candid in July when he said the ‘climate space’ offered ‘an enormous commercial opportunity… with the added benefit of reducing emissions and addressing a moral imperative.’ Salvation with dividends. What’s not to like?

This noble sentiment is no doubt endorsed by Wollemi’s board members, who include none other than Matt Kean, the chairman of the Climate Change Authority (CCA). Kean declared his material interest in agricultural projects generating carbon credits, which he holds through Wollemi Capital, while advising the federal government on, wait for it, carbon farming.

If you think that sounds like a conflict of interest, you are not alone. It has been discussed by everyone from One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts and former Liberal senator Gerard Rennick to Stephen Bartos, a former head of the NSW budget watchdog, and the Centre for Public Integrity director, Geoffrey Watson, SC.

Kean, however, is impervious to criticism, saying that the CCA chair was always intended to be an industry player. Gore is also unlikely to be troubled with petty concerns like the potential to use public office for private enrichment; after all, he is saving the planet. He apparently told the climate faithful that if ‘they were going to get this done, they needed to crowd in private capital’.

There was no shortage of government representatives in the audience, happily using taxpayer dollars to ‘crowd in’ profits for private investors, including the NSW Treasurer and the federal government’s secretary of the department of climate and energy, as well as the Smart Energy Council – lobbyists for Big Unreliable. There were also backers of Mike Cannon-Brookes′ Sun Cable, Qantas’ chief sustainability officer, the CBA’s head honcho on environmental matters and half a dozen super funds. Together, they have the clout to ensure that Australians pay up to three times: through higher taxes to fund subsidies, higher electricity prices, and through compulsory retirement savings.

If Ley has trouble distinguishing between the interests of rent-seekers and the national interest, she could reflect on the fate of Kean. As NSW Treasurer and Energy Minister, he championed climate action, which was, he said, in the best interests of households and businesses. Unfortunately, it was not in the best interests of the NSW Coalition government, which was tossed out at the next election, although it was a golden parachute for Kean into his new career.

Indeed, the federal elections that the Coalition has convincingly won since Kevin Rudd campaigned in 2007 on climate change as the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’ are those where it put the economy first, as Abbott did in 2013 and Morrison did in 2019. At those it lost in 2022 and 2025, and almost lost in 2015, it put the ruinous cost of climate appeasement ahead of jobs, growth and the cost of living. Put like that, the choice is simple: the Coalition must kill net zero, or, like Sinclair, get licked at the next election.