Thread by @davidfickling

The real victor of Australia's election has been popular will on the environment. Living up to that mandate will be harder. #AusVotes22

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

A few important points on this election, relative to history:

It's almost certain that Labor's majority will be the smallest for an incoming Australian government since 1931 or 1913.

(shown here as a proportion of all House of Representatives seats -- the House now has twice as many MPs as it did until the 1940s)

But the scale of this loss for the Coalition is astonishing. Since it was formed in the late 1940s it's *never* had as small a share of the House of Representatives as it's now likely to end up with.

And the Liberal party will have the smallest number of seats since the 1940s. Of course that's partly because the unified Queensland LNP has taken part of their caucus.

But the majority of the party in the House will now be a Queensland/rural faction. Little broad national base.

We're likely to see ~16 Greens/independents/minor parties in the 151-seat House. All but three of these are likely to be Greens or teal independents who campaigned on climate.

Even if Labor gets a majority, it's going to need those votes in a few years as its vote is eroded.

I would bet that most of those 16 seats will be more solid than the most marginal Labor electorates in 2025.

Look at how independents have solidified their grip on affluent Sydney seats like Wentworth and Warringah over the past few years.

Of six independents/minors elected to parliament in the 2013, 2016 and 2019 elections, the only one who's failed to win re-election is Clive Palmer in 2013-2016.

So Labor won't be able to ignore climate as an issue as it's done in the past. But it also can't take its coal seats like Hunter and Paterson for granted, and will still want to pick up Flynn in future (Gladstone, a big coal and LNG port).

It seems to me that Labor's easiest path to holding government over multiple cycles involves seeking an awkward pact with those dozen-odd urban climate-tinged electorates. There's no comparable trove of regional/mining seats out there for it to pick up.

Meanwhile the changing shape of the parliamentary Liberal-National Coalition will likely (at least initially) make it even more fanatically opposed to action on climate than it already is. Unless its leadership show a great deal more vision than they've shown in recent years.

Labor's climate policy is not particularly ambitious, largely depending on coasting as the grid decarbonizes for economic regions, plus some incentives for EVs and energy-efficiency in industry, with a few smaller but more impressive plans on hydrogen and green steel.

The elephant in the room her has always been energy exports. There's bipartisan silence on this issue from the major parties, even though about three-quarters of Australia's carbon footprint is its exports and only one-quarter domestic emissions:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Australia is the world's biggest fossil fuel exporter after Russia and Saudi Arabia. Coal is dirtier than oil, so in carbon terms it's probably marginally ahead of even Saudi.

People look back on the Rudd-Gillard era as one of modest if faltering progress on climate issues. But it's worth bearing in mind that exports of both coal and LNG increased by about 45% over the six years they were in power. Good for the economy, terrible for climate.

Remaining wedded to fossil fuel exports is so much in Australia's short-term economic interest that it's quite hard to see that shifting, even though climate change will be devastating to us in the longer term.

Australia's vulnerable farmlands, and the rapidly-dying Great Barrier Reef, don't care whether our coal and LNG is burned at home or abroad.

It will be interesting to see whether the climate-focused independents manage to tackle that issue, really the most important one now.

Do read this report from the suburbs of Melbourne, ground zero for the wave of independents that have taken office:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

And today's column on the challenge ahead for new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese:

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

(ends)