Barnaby Joyce has vowed to wind back the “lunatic crusade” of net zero by 2050 in a private member’s bill once parliament resumes later this month.
The former deputy prime minister and Nationals backbencher’s clarion call on Friday afternoon laid bare the Coalition’s decades-long brawl over climate change and energy policy.
The New England MP, who has long been sceptical of the impacts of climate change, described the policy to reduce carbon emissions by 2050 to net zero as “treacherous” to Australia’s security in a post on Facebook on Friday afternoon.
Joyce also claimed Australia’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 was akin to self-immolation without the “authentic” participation of other countries.
“There is no more time to assess, to ponder, to nuance or to amend. Net zero must be repealed and as such, I will, at my first opportunity bring forward a bill to do that,” he wrote.
“The idea that, at this stage, we have put the focus of our nation on a lunatic crusade of Net Zero is treacherous to the very security of Australia.”
There’s no guarantee Joyce’s private member’s bill will be considered for debate if it is introduced in the upcoming sitting fortnight.
It is also unlikely to attract the full support of the opposition, which was reduced to 43 seats of 150 after May’s federal election.
The opposition is undertaking an internal review of its election policies, with climate change and energy expected to take centre-stage in an ideological tussle.
Joyce and his Queensland colleague Matt Canavan have long campaigned for the climate targets to be ditched, while some Liberals, such as the shadow home affairs minister, Andrew Hastie, have expressed fresh scepticism about the goal.
Joyce has previously labelled the estimated cost of net zero “utterly untenable” and urged the Coalition to walk away from the Paris agreement and its associated climate targets.
The shadow energy minister, Dan Tehan, told Guardian Australia in June the financial cost to reach net zero by 2050 may shape the Coalition’s decision on whether it keeps the target.
“The cost will be one of the most significant factors that will drive our decision,” Tehan said, accusing the government of obscuring the cost of signature climate policies, including the capacity investment scheme.
Within the Nationals, Canavan is also conducting a review of the party’s policy on net zero, which is expected to take months.
The Coalition has walked back its plan to introduce government-owned nuclear power plants into Australia’s energy mix as part of its approach to reducing emissions over the next three decades following the federal election.
It adopted its net zero by 2050 policy in 2021 following tense, protracted discussions between Joyce, then the deputy prime minister, and the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, ahead of the UN climate summit in Glasgow.
Morrison told ABC News in June he still believed the opposition should retain its net zero targets.
“I wanted to ensure that Australia could continue to attract investment capital, particularly out of so many other countries for which this was potentially becoming quite a stumbling block,” he said.
“I didn’t want us to become an island when it came to investment of capital, which was becoming a pretty serious problem, so I thought we took the right approach.”
The former NSW energy minister Matt Kean, who is now the Climate Change Authority chair, said the Liberal party needed to “get back to making rational decisions when it comes to energy policy based on engineering, economics and science”.
“That is the path forward for the Liberal party. Anything else is a road to ruin,” he said.
