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When Parliament resumes today for the last week of sittings before a long break, the House of Representatives will continue its debate on Barnaby Joyce's private member's bill to abolish the net zero emissions target.
The government has taken the highly unusual step of giving the bill a priority almost always denied to such private member's business, to showcase divisions within the Coalition. Labor's decision to do so is political mischief-making of the highest order, but who can blame them? In the Senate, meanwhile, Joyce's consigliere Matt Canavan will be introducing his own private senator's bill to the same effect. (The fact that Canavan is currently supposed to be conducting a review of National Party policy on the issue shows how seriously that process can be taken.)
Tomorrow, it is likely that the issue will be agitated, for the second consecutive week, in the Liberal party room, as members of the party's right seek to circumvent the more authentic process of policy review being undertaken by the shadow minister Dan Tehan.
These events come as yet another state branch of the Liberal Party, the Queensland division, voted at its annual conference a fortnight ago to abandon the net zero target. (The hybrid Liberal National Party is the Queensland division of the Liberal Party as well as an affiliate of the federal National Party.) The terms of the motion were carefully worded to refer to a net zero "mandate" rather than "target", but the nuance was lost on almost everyone. Queensland joins other Liberal Party divisions in South Australia and Western Australia, the NSW branch of the National Party, and the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory, in rejecting net zero. The intensity of feeling among party members may vary somewhat from state to state, but overall, it is very strong.