Ley's net zero decision may bring her extra time as leader, but at what cost?

Welcome back to your weekly federal politics update, where Courtney Gould gets you up to speed on the happenings from Parliament House.

Sussan Ley insists the Liberals' new position on net zero is clear. It's as clear as mud.

After hours of being locked in various rooms at Parliament House, the Liberals confirmed what has been expected for months: It is walking away from the 2050 net zero emissions target.

The policy beyond that is a bit of a watch and wait. The Liberal Party won't set targets until it is returned to government and those targets will be benchmarked "in line with comparable countries". They'll also unpick Labor's key mechanisms to force down emissions in heavy industry and transport. 

It opens the door to reunification with the Nationals on the matter. Three members from each party will meet tomorrow to thrash out a final Coalition position, which they'll reveal on Sunday.

Bringing a knife to a gunfight

It's easy for the opposition to make these promises. They're facing an uphill battle to be returned to the government. It's entirely likely they will not be returned at the next federal poll, or the even one after. That theoretically takes us to 2032 before the Coalition would even need to consider potentially doing something.

The moderates within the Liberals who wanted to keep the target were outnumbered from the beginning. They brought a knife to a gunfight. They entered, and exited, the party room on Wednesday mostly alone. Meanwhile, a conservative faction flexed their symbolic muscle.

Led by Angus Taylor, the man who took Australia's initial net zero pledge to COP26 in Glasgow back in 2021, and fellow leadership hopeful Andrew Hastie, the group marched into the party room for the meeting.

As they exited, Hastie paused to shake hands with fellow net zero opponent James Paterson for the cameras, as if to say "job done". It was a message in itself.

Ley has argued that Australia couldn't afford to pursue net zero, or the energy transition, at any cost. But she couldn't say how the Liberals' approach would bring prices down.

The truth is every option will cost money. Whether that be the transition to renewables, keeping coal open for longer, or hell, even nuclear. None of this is free. Or cheap.

Ley's leadership stands on the shoulders of the moderates. The Liberals threw them a lifeline by retaining a commitment to the Paris climate agreement.

Australia signed up to the agreement around nine years ago and under it committed to balance the removal of emissions by the second half of the century. Otherwise known as net zero.

Maybe that is enough to keep them going. Maybe the moderates were watching Ley's press conference and texting each other to say, like the ill-fated Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, "we'll always have Paris".

But will they really if they won't commit at a domestic level to the targets already submitted?

Ley's decision may have brought her extra time as leader. The question will be at what cost.

Don't look at us

The cover of the Coalition's net zero chaos has given the government space to hold things closer to its chest.

Take the nondescript car with a Nauruan flag attached that pulled into the Senate driveway at Parliament House earlier this week.

Inside it sat David Adeang, the country's taciturn president. The leader of the tiny Pacific Island nation had just two weeks ago quietly accepted the first members of the so-called NZYQ cohort.

He was here for a meeting with Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke. After slipping through without notice a day earlier for meetings with Penny Wong and Pat Conroy, he wasn't expecting to be greeted by cameras — probably because the government never announced Adeang was here.

The president declined to answer any questions put to him by the ABC on the way in and out of the building. My colleague Stephen Dziedzic reported the secret meeting. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, when asked, insisted there was "nothing secret about it".

He argued Adeang was here to attend a leadership program hosted by the Pacific Security College, which was also attended by representatives of other Pacific Island nations.

But given we still know so little about the potentially multi-billion dollar deal and recent reports in the Nine newspapers that bikie gangs had won a lucrative contract to provide security for those former immigration detainees, not being forthcoming with the meetings cloaked it in the air of secrecy.

A day later, Albanese announced a surprise new security treaty with Indonesia. President Prabowo Subianto had made his first state visit to Australia to make the deal public.

The announcement had all the imagery of a Top Gun movie (and an unexpected bagpipe interlude) but details of the agreement were thin other than a vague reference for ministers to consult one another on threats and how each responded to them.

It's likely we won't get any more details until Albanese heads to Indonesia to formally ink the deal next January. It comes within months of the government signing another major deal with Papua New Guinea, with eyes to create a "web" of treaties across the region.

More questions than answers

Albanese isn't one to call a press conference for no reason. But this week, he did so twice. The first was linked, very thinly, to marking the fact we were one month out from the start of the social media ban for under-16s.

With D-Day, December 10, for the ban fast approaching we're still mostly none the wiser on how the restrictions will work.

We know that YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok and X will be subject to the ban. That list could change too as the eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant has stressed the list will evolve as the technologies do.

Age verification? That's up to the platforms to take "reasonable steps". What are reasonable steps? Well, that hasn't been defined. But it won't involve a digital ID. That's pretty much it.

It doesn't make conversations around the family kitchen table any easier to have.