Politics

The politics of climate and the environment is just as messy at the United Nations summit in Belém, Brazil, as it is in Canberra and the Australian states. The fate of the planet is running a poor second to vested interests and crude personal power plays.

On Thursday, Liberal shadow ministers, in a fraught four-hour meeting, decided to have their cake and eat it too. Gone: a formal goal to achieve net zero. Kept: a ‘welcome outcome’ if somehow their new stance, more favourable to fossil fuels, achieves carbon neutrality by 2050.

Barnaby Joyce has always talked a story about himself bigger than the brim on his Hopalong Cassidy hat. He is a one-man plot line, but his achievements for the people he professes to represent are slim to infinitesimal.

It is not true that Australia has never experienced a revolution. Fifty years ago, the nation saw a bloodless coup where the underpinning conventions of our parliamentary democracy were overthrown. The outrage of the Dismissal established dangerous precedents, and in the intervening years we have failed to put in place safeguards that would prevent it happening again.

There are concerns in the opposition and the government that Sussan Ley’s ‘weird’ attack on the T-shirt Anthony Albanese wore when he returned from the United States says more about her lack of authority in a divided party room than her ability to deliver reforms she once championed.

Not for a very long time has a single meeting between a prime minister and an American president been such a pivotal event for a government and its opponents.

Effective leadership is much more nuanced than just the strength and charisma of the individual appointed to lead. It has as much to do with their capacity to build and inspire a unified team to deal with the tasks and challenges at hand.

Late last month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese used a speech at the British Labour Party’s yearly conference to define himself as a defender of ‘democracy itself’. He placed himself in this category alongside his ‘mate’, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Soon after Labor’s thumping election win, Jim Chalmers was assuring doubters he would not be ‘changing policies we took to the election’. Within three months, however, that determination was undercut by Anthony Albanese quietly telling the treasurer to come up with a more saleable prescription on superannuation reforms.

Of several possible birthday options, the Liberals observe October 13, 1944, the date on which a conference of anti-Labor parties called by founder Robert Menzies began in a Masonic hall near Parliament House in Canberra. Menzies would likely be rolling his eyes at the party’s antics this week.