The commitment will force the Coalition to confront the issue of its 2030 target again after the Nationals refused to countenance any updates to the target during a bruising negotiation last month.
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It also puts pressure on Labor to reveal its 2030 target, a sensitive issue for the party after then-opposition leader Bill Shorten was criticised for not outlining the cost of its 45 per cent target at the 2019 election. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese said on Sunday Labor would have “more to say this year” on climate change.
Whichever party wins government after an election expected early next year will have less than 12 months to commit to a new 2030 target – or keep the existing one – ahead of the next major international climate summit in Egypt in November, 2022. The diplomatic language of the Glasgow pact, to which Australia agreed, “requests parties to revisit and strengthen the 2030 targets” but also allows national circumstances to be considered.
Senator Payne and Mr Taylor said the government’s 2030 target was “fixed, and we are committed to meeting and beating it, as we did with our Kyoto-era targets”. They said Australia’s 2030 and 2050 targets would be met “through our technology not taxes strategy”.
Liberal MP Jason Falinski, who is part of a group of MPs who pushed the government internally to be more ambitious on climate change, said the focus should now be on new technology and a 2035 target.
“We’ve now said look, we signed up to a 2030 target, we’re meeting and beating it,” Mr Falinski said. “We need to sign up to a 2035 target and not get hung up on 2030.”
Nationals senator Matt Canavan said COP26 was a “big nothingburger” and the Coalition should take on the “activist green lobby” instead of “paying lip service to it”.
“Unless we change, turn back to the promotion of coal exports and the coal industry we won’t be able to expose a difference between us and the Labor Party on coal,” he said.
”We can see the coal industry is going better than it ever has before, then you turn on the TV and people in Canberra are saying it’s going to die. If we’re going to close our eyes and be blind to what is actually happening … then people won’t put their vote and trust in parties they don’t believe are speaking the truth.“
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Queensland LNP senator Gerard Rennick said he was concerned voters would mark the Coalition down for adopting a policy it doesn’t believe in.
”If we didn’t lose votes through COVID … this will be a game changer for a number of reasons,” he said.
“They don’t believe in it, number one. And number two – we’ve gone back on our word.”
“I’m not going to support something I said I wouldn’t support three years ago. My view is those people who are real zealots about net zero will never vote for us anyway.”
Labor is expected to outline its 2030 target within weeks amid an intense internal debate on how ambitious it should be.
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Mr Albanese attacked the Morrison government’s record, saying “Australia’s report card is a definite fail”.
“That’s why the conference has agreed that countries like Australia that refused to increase their 2030 target have to return to the next conference in 2022 with a higher target,” he said.
While some Labor MPs don’t want their party to go any higher than the 35 per cent reduction already projected by the government, others want to go as high as 50.
Labor MP Josh Burns said Australia’s “targets are weak and our projections are not doing enough on the international arena”.
“But the good news if we are ambitious, it will mean more jobs and more opportunities for Australian businesses and workers to capitalise on,” he said.
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