Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 59, Number 3, 2013, pp.349-367.

© 2013 The Author. Australian Journal of Politics and History © 2013 School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.

Climate Discourse Complexes, National Climate Regimes and Australian Climate Policy

PETER CHRISTOFF University of Melbourne

This paper develops the concepts of the climate discourse complex, and national climate policy regime, in order to analyse significant patterns in Australian national climate politics over the twenty-five years from 1988 to 2013. Six major discursive fields — scientific, ethical, economic, technological, political/legal, and “everyday life” — contribute to the ensemble of discourses that constitute a climate discourse complex. The climate discourse complex in turn serves to frame and discipline climate debate and the articulation of a national climate policy regime. The composition of Australia’s climate discourse complex has been dominated by the economic discursive field. Debates over “old” and “new” economic discourses have been the key drivers of and constraints on the trajectory of Australia’s climate policy regime for much of the period under consideration. These debates have diminished and sometimes marginalized the influence of scientific, ethical and other discourses, contributing to Australia’s weak mitigation ambition. The paper also suggests that significant changes in Australian climate discourses and Australia’s climate discourse complex have largely been initiated by factors external to Australia, with the major shift occurring in the period 2006/2007.

The fitful starts, somersaults and reversals of Australian national climate policy offer a set of interlocking puzzles for analysts attempting to understand policy formation and implementation in this domain. To date, there has been a tendency to look at this history in bite-sized bits or fascinating fragments. This paper instead outlines a twenty-five-year overview that suggests significant patterns and continuities in Australian national climate discourse and policy formation. It also asks: what are the key drivers and constraints on Australian climate policy? And to what extent are they constant, changing or changeable: if they do change, then under what circumstances?1

The paper proceeds in four parts. Part one introduces the puzzle of climate policy in Australia. Part two then offers a schema for understanding the evolution of national climate change policy and politics by introducing the concept of a climate discourse complex, constituted from a range of interrelated discursive fields, which frames and constrains the meanings and practices of the national climate policy regime. In Part three, this schema is used to illuminate and interpret Australian climate discourse and policy over the past two decades. Part four offers analyses and observations about persistent patterns, trends and prospects in Australian national climate policy.

I would like to thank Matt McDonald, Mark Beeson, and especially Robyn Eckersley, for their comments on an earlier draft. 1 In doing so, it inevitably pays too little attention to sub-national (state and local) and international developments, although these are of critical importance to a full consideration of Australian climate policy.

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I: Australian Climate Policy as Story and Puzzle

There is any number of places at which one could begin to tell the Australian climate policy story. One could begin, as many have, with the Howard government. Throughout its four terms and until its final year, the Howard government’s climate policy was insubstantial2 and contradictory. The government fervently opposed the Kyoto Protocol internationally and, domestically, target-driven emissions mitigation. Yet it consistently benchmarked its performance against Australia’s Kyoto target, which it refused to ratify. It proclaimed the virtues of the market yet opposed the introduction of carbon pricing until forced to do so by Labor under the pressure of a looming election. In sum, the Howard government failed to promote a culture of decarbonization or to establish enduring and effective institutions for climate policy development and implementation3 despite the counter-examples of conservative governments in Germany and the United Kingdom.

How and why did this happen? How were these contradictions “managed”? One argument is that the government’s performance was conditioned by the PM’s personal scepticism about global warming and his strong support for the United States.4 Others have also emphasized the influence of non-government actors and actor networks representing the mining, fossil fuel energy, and metals smelting sectors; the patterns of close cooperation and allegiance between government ministers and industry actors in the production of energy and climate policy; and Australia’s structural dependency on fossil fuels during this period.5 While this approach successfully describes how individual actors colluded, it fails to explain why and how certain narratives in climate policy were elevated and alternatives displaced or overwhelmed.

Alternatively, one could focus analytically on contradictions between Australia’s climate, energy and trade policies. Successive Labor governments under Rudd, Gillard and again Rudd endorsed a weak6 conditional national emissions target of 5 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020. Momentum toward this target is enhanced by Labor’s carbon price and its national renewable energy target of 20 per cent of stationary energy production by 2020. Yet substantial assistance to the fossil fuel sector — including approximately AUD 8-10 billion in annual subsidies, substantial side-

2 National greenhouse emissions (minus land use and land use factors, or LULUCF) grew unabated throughout the period 1997-2007. See Summary of GHG emissions for Australia, available at <http://unfccc.int/files/ghg_emissions_data/application/pdf/aus_ghg_profile.pdf>. 3 Although the Australian Greenhouse Office was established in 1998, it failed to have any significant influence on national energy or climate policy and related practice. It was abolished late in 2004. 4 For instance, Peter Christoff, “Policy Autism or Double-edged Dismissiveness? Australia’s Climate Policy under the Howard Government”, Global Change, Peace and Security, Vol. 17 (2005), pp.29-44. 5 See for instance, Clive Hamilton, Running from the Storm: The Development of Climate Change Policy in Australia (Sydney, 2001), and idem, Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change (Melbourne, 2007); Guy Pearse, High and Dry: John Howard, Climate Change, and the Selling of Australia’s Future (Camberwell, Vic., 2007); Ross Garnaut, Garnaut Climate Change Review 2008 (Cambridge, 2008) and idem, The Garnaut Review 2011: Australia in the Global Response to Climate Change (Cambridge, 2011); Kate Crowley, “Climate Clever? Kyoto and Australia’s Decade of Recalcitrance” in Katherine Harrison and Lisa Sundstrom, eds, Global Commons, Domestic Decisions: The Comparative Politics of Climate Change (Cambridge, MA, 2010), pp.201-228. 6 Weak when assessed against the recommendations of climate scientific bodies such as the IPCC which suggest that an aggregate emissions reduction for developed countries of -25 to -40 per cent below 1990 level is required to ensure a reasonable chance of keeping global average warming below 2 degrees Celsius.

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payments to high emitting export-oriented or trade-exposed industries and to the power generation sector to “compensate” for the carbon price, and feverish promotion of fossil fuel exports by Labor and Coalition State and national governments7 — overwhelms any ecological advantage to be gained from Labor’s domestic climate policies.

This dissonance is clearest when one considers Australia’s trade in carbon. The UNFCCC requires nations to account for their “domestic emissions” — emissions produced within their borders. Australia ranks twelfth among the planet’s 195-plus nations for all domestic greenhouse gas emissions.8 It is fifteenth in the world for domestic CO2 emissions alone9 and its per capita emissions are among the highest in the world.10 However this approach to national emissions accounting includes only emissions produced within state borders. It “blinds” us to the global warming contributions and the associated responsibilities of states, companies and consumers that sit “before” or “after” the point at which those emissions are released. As a result, consumers of imported manufactured goods, and exporters of fossil fuels, remain unaccountable for their roles in the co-production of greenhouse emissions “released beyond the border”.

Some aspects of the relationship between trade and emissions are coming under increasing scrutiny. For instance, it is recognized that a significant and rapidly growing proportion of China’s total national emissions results from production for export markets.11 Goods imported from China often include “embodied emissions” displaced to China from countries that formerly manufactured these goods. However — and conveniently for economic beneficiaries such as Australia, Canada, the Russian Federation, and Saudi Arabia — little attention has been paid to trade in raw (or unburned) fossil fuels, which shifts responsibility for emissions from exporting nations and companies to the middle-consumers (the states and companies involved in producing emissions using these fuels for power or manufacturing).

While Australia’s domestic greenhouse emissions represent some 1.5 per cent of the global total, its global carbon footprint — the total amount of carbon it generates for the global economy — is much bigger. Australia is among the world’s largest coal exporters. When emissions from Australian coal exports are added to its domestic emissions, Australia’s carbon footprint trebles. Australian coal exports alone currently contribute at least another 2.2 per cent of global emissions. In aggregate, therefore,

7 For instance, like its predecessor under Howard, the Gillard government’s recent Energy White Paper envisages and encourages an untrammelled increase in fossil fuel exports. See Securing Australia’s Energy Future, Energy White Paper (Canberra, 2004) and Energy White Paper 2012: Australia’s Energy Transformation (Canberra, 2012). 8 Based on 2010 data including LULUCF, see UNFCCC national greenhouse gas profiles. 9 With the EU27 as one “country”. EDGAR 4.2 (JRC/PBL, 2011); IEA, 2011; USGS, 2012; WSA, 2012; NOAA, 2012. Top 25 CO2-emitting countries in 1990, 2000 and 2011, cited in Jos G.J. Olivier, Greet Janssens-Maenhout, Jeroen A.H.W. Peters, and Julian Wilson, Long-Term Trend in Global CO2 Emissions 2011 Report (The Hague/Bilthoven, 2012), p.12. 10 UNPD, 2010 (WSS Rev. 2010) CO2 emissions per capita in 1990, 2000 and 2011, in the top 25 CO2-emitting countries, cited in Olivier et al., Long-Term Trend in Global CO2 Emissions 2011, p.13. 11 Davis and Caldeira claimed China’s export-oriented emissions comprised some 22.5 per cent of the total in 2004. Steve J. Davis and Ken Caldeira, “Consumption based accounting of CO2 emissions”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America (=PNAS), Vol. 107, 2 (2010), pp.5687-92; Glen Peters, Jan Minx, Christopher Weber and Ottmar Edenhofer, “Growth in emission transfers via international trade from 1990 to 2008”, PNAS, Vol. 108 (May 2011), pp.8903-8908.

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Australia is currently the source of some 3.7 per cent of total global emissions — even before one considers the emissions embodied in its natural gas exports.12

When Australia’s current domestic and exported CO2 emissions are combined, it ranks as the planet’s sixth largest emitter of CO2 — after China, the USA, the Russian Federation, India and Indonesia.13 It is responsible directly and indirectly for well over one billion tonnes of CO2 per year. If planned and projected increases in Australian coal and gas exports are realized, its carbon footprint will more than double by 2030: Australia would be directly and indirectly responsible for over two billion tonnes of exported greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per year.

This “trade-adjusted” framing of Australia’s emissions profile makes it clear that whatever the benefits of Australia’s domestic GHG mitigation policy, these are extinguished by its energy export policy. If Australia were now to end its domestic use of fossil fuels, it would still export twice the emissions it had stopped producing locally. Yet to date this alternative discursive frame about Australia’s trade-related emissions responsibility remains invisible and “illegitimate”. Again, a focus on individual actors would fail to explain why and how this narrative has been displaced or overwhelmed.

II Climate, Discourse and Policy

This section introduces two interrelated concepts — the climate discourse complex, and the national climate policy regime — and briefly describes the fields of discourse that link them. To date, the most extensive studies of Australian climate policy and politics14 have provided stories of dramatic interactions between individual and collective actors — government ministers, lobbyists for fossil fuel policies (the “Greenhouse Mafia”), and ENGOs such as Greenpeace. These accounts have often been implicitly underpinned by elite theory and a belief in the policy-determinant role of Australia’s fossil fuel economy. But, by underplaying the discursive elements of Australian climate policy — the roles of discourse and the interplay between discourse coalitions and their champions — they ultimately provide an insufficient explanation of its drivers.

Story-telling confined to the political theatre of interactions between individual agents provides an intriguing but incomplete understanding of the forces structuring, disciplining and driving climate policy and, in particular, is lacking in its consideration of the processes and sites of the production of power (and policy). Akin to the old Marxist manoeuvre of identifying “class positions”, one needs to see how identities or subject positions are articulated, and how they interpellate subjects, in order to understand the location of hegemonic power. One way of doing this is to examine discourses as they constitute and empower, or disempower, actors and agents — with a strong neo-Gramscian emphasis on the production and role of discourses that can be regarded as dominant or even hegemonic as they empower their speakers. As Mary Pettenger suggests, “discourse conveys subjectivity, knowledge and power and [as

12 Calculation of emissions based on 2011 data on Australian coal export volumes from DFAT, multiplied by 2.6 as an aggregate emissions factor. See Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Composition of Trade Australia 2011, available at <http://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/stats-pubs/cot-cy-2011.pdf>. 13 Using trade-adjusted data for carbon flows. 14 See, for instance, Hamilton, Running from the Storm, and idem, Scorcher; see also Pearse, High and Dry.

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Livesey notes] […] situates actors (including both individuals and organizations) in matrices of power which privilege some interests and marginalize others”.15

Discourses can be defined as ensembles of “ideas, notions and categories through which meaning is given to social and physical phenomena, and which is produced and reproduced through an identifiable set of practices”.16 They are always provisional and dynamic and therefore change over time, being shaped through debate in discursive networks and promoted by discourse entrepreneurs or ensembles of actor/subjects who form deliberate or de facto discourse coalitions.17 In this sense, discourses both constitute and reflect the work of subjects, who are the bearers and shapers of interests, ideas and norms and through whom discourses can serve as the “guardians” and “enforcers” of legitimacy of specific world views, understandings or practices via processes of inclusion/exclusion.

Discourses are most powerful when they are hegemonic — “normalised” and largely unchallenged in the ways in which they structure and define the parameters of accepted practice.18 Under these circumstances, challenges to a hegemonic discourse are rare and often resolved invisibly — delegitimised and defused as “unreasonable” almost before they arise. Of course, not all discourses are hegemonic. Their dominance may result from and be dependent on the protection of interests through the active promotion of specific narratives, or deliberate censorship and blocking of attempts to disinter, examine and contest such a discourse.

The purpose of discourse analysis is to uncover and unpack dominant and marginalised discourses, to explore how they are articulated, and to chart how they change over time.19 However, despite Livesey’s reminder, discourse analysis tends to focus only on what is articulated. Freud, however, was always more fascinated by evasions and misspeaking. Of equal interest therefore are the silences — the failures of recognition, the absence of acknowledged contradiction … the dogs that failed to bark — that mark and surround dominant discourses. As Australian climate policy is constructed around its contradictions, silences and elisions — the things it cannot and will not speak about — this is a fruitful terrain indeed, as I show below.

The Climate Discourse Complex

The discursive terrain of national climate change politics and policy is more complicated and less restful than for most other policy domains. Indeed, because of its reach and complexity, an additional term is required to capture its characteristics. Recent thinking in international relations has addressed the problem of complexity in relation to international governance arrangements and the increasing density and

15 Mary Pettenger, “Introduction” in Mary Pettenger, ed., The Social Construction of Climate Change: Power, Knowledge, Norms, Discourses (London, 2007), pp.10-11. Also quoting Sharon M. Livesey, “Global Warming Wars: Rhetorical and Discourse Analytic Approaches to ExxonMobil’s Corporate Public Discourse”, Journal of Business Communications, Vol. 39 (2002), pp.123. 16 Maarten Hajer and Wytske Versteeg, “Voices of Vulnerability: The Reconfiguration of Policy Discourses” in John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard and David Schlosberg, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society (Oxford, 2011), p.83. 17 See Maarten A. Hajer. The Politics of Environmental Discourse : Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process (Oxford, 1995). 18 See also Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politic (London, 2001). 19 See also Karen T. Litfin, Ozone Discourse: Science and Politics in Global Environmental Cooperation (New York, 1994); Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse; Lene Hansen. Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (Oxford, 2006).

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multiplicity of overlapping regimes.20 For instance, Keohane and Victor coined the term “regime complex for climate change”21 to describe the governance outcome of interactions in the international domain of climate policy and cognate policy negotiations. Their interest, of course, focuses on the product of complex interactions between state actors and the regimes they construct, which reflect different interests, beliefs and aspirations. They speak of the way in which international regimes often come about not through deliberate decision making at one international conference but rather emerge as a result of “codifying informal rights and rules that have evolved over time through a process of converging expectations or tacit bargaining”.

22 One can talk in a similar vein about the existence of a national climate discourse

complex. The national climate discourse complex is a dominant (and occasionally hegemonic) ensemble of sometimes loosely coupled, sometimes mutually constitutive, climate discourses arising from several fields — such as the scientific, ethical and economic — as described below. It is not, therefore, a “meta-discourse” or a “nodal” discourse,23 but rather a structural arrangement or composite of different climate-related discourses and their elements that frames and governs public and private practices.24 The interrelationship between these constitutive elements, and therefore the discourse complex, is “path-dependent” — shaped by the outcome of previous contests over interests, beliefs, material capacity and power.

To a significant degree, the national climate discourse complex constructs and governs the shape of the national climate debate and resultant policy outcomes. However the discursive fields forming this complex are themselves dynamic and can vary at any given point in time, as well as change over time. As a consequence, while the climate discourse complex itself tends to stability and is sometimes hegemonic, it too is dynamic and can change in response to contests and challenges.

National Climate Policy Regimes

National climate discourse complexes shape and influence national climate policy regimes by ruling in or ruling out — legitimating and articulating the context for — certain policy approaches. Regimes are commonly discussed in the literature on international relations. Krasner’s oft-quoted definition of international regimes suggests they are “implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international

20 Kal Raustialia and David Victor, “The Regime Complex for Plant Genetic Resources”, International Organization, Vol. 50 (2004), pp.277-309; Karen J. Alter and Sophie Meunier, “The Politics of International Regime Complexity”, Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 7 (2009), pp.13-24. 21 Robert O. Keohane and David G. Victor, The Regime Complex for Climate Change, Discussion Paper, pp. 10-33; “The Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements”, January 2010, available at <http://www.papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1643813>. 22 Keohane and Victor, The Regime Complex for Climate Change. 23 Fairclough, “Critical Discourse Analysis”, p.10; also Norman Fairclough, Language and Globalization (Oxford, 2006), p.148. 24 This arrangement is more coherent — at least at the national level — than suggested by Dryzek and Stevenson, who argue that “when it comes to climate change there is no ‘nodal discourse, in Fairclough’s terms (2006, 39). Instead a plurality of discourses informs different understandings of the problem and appropriate governance measures”; see Hayley Stephenson and John S. Dryzek, “The Discursive Democratization of Global Climate Governance”, Environmental Politics, Vol. 21, 2 (2012), p.201; also Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience (Harvard, 1974).

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relations”.25 The term “regime” is also often used in the literature on national social and macroeconomic policy. The most systematic treatment of the concept of a “policy regime” at the national and subnational level is provided by Wilson.26

Regimes — including policy regimes — tend to be stable until disrupted by an internal or external stressor or enabler. At this point, conditions favourable to change may emerge, generating a legitimation crisis for the policy regime, creating opportunities for critically reframing the issue or the governance approach, and possibly shifting political alliances and the balance of power, thereby leading to the redefinition of the ideational and material basis of the policy regime.

While the climate governance literature frequently employs the concept of the regime (or regime complex) at the international level, the term has not been used in relation to national climate governance. Building on Krasner and Wilson, the concept of a national climate policy regime can usefully be used to refer to the implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations and practices converge in the national domain of climate policy. It can be deployed to describe the formal and informal institutional arrangements that constitute national climate change governance, and the manner of its transformation. It is this national climate policy regime that is framed and legitimised by the climate discourse complex.

Climate’s Discursive Fields

Those familiar with comparative climate policy would recognise six discursive fields — scientific, ethical, economic, technological, political/legal, and “everyday life” — that regularly appear in national climate debates. It is the dominant discourses that arise from these fields that constitute national climate discourse complexes and shape national climate policy regimes. Shifts of discourse within and between these fields — the result of slow transformations or radical breaks, the outcome of fierce contests between discourse coalitions, the rise and fall of views within each field — shape and reshape the character of the discourse complex and how it “prefers” certain discourses or elements of discourses over others in the institutionalisation of practices and understandings, including in the climate policy regime. These discursive fields are interrelated to a greater or lesser degree, sometimes mutually constitutive, sometimes more loosely aligned. Moreover, the fields are not nationally bounded: for instance, the fluidities of globalized communication and cultural production and the international nature of climate scientific discourse ensure that national fields are transformed by external developments as well as domestic ones. Last, some fields are secondary or dependent on others.

The salience of particular discourses, and of elements within discourses in each discursive field, changes over time. “Climate” is constituted and debated differently in these fields — and sometimes contested, in some cases bitterly — depending on

25 Stephen Krasner. “Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables” in Stephen D. Krasner, ed., International Regimes (Ithaca and London, 1983), p.2. 26 Carter A. Wilson, “Policy Regimes and Policy Change”, Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 20 (2000), pp.247-274. Wilson proposes that such policy regimes are issue-specific arrangements consisting of four dimensions. These include power or the arrangement of power (relating to powerful interest groups supporting the policy regime); the policy paradigm, which shapes the way problems are defined, the types of solutions offered, and the kinds of policies proposed; organization within the state; and the policy itself (i.e. the policy formally embodies the goals of the policy regime).

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cultural geography.27 Indeed how the construction of climate change in these fields occurs, and how it fits together into a national climate discursive regime, varies according to place, culture and historical moment. The fields can be broadly described as follows (this paper later suggests how they align to form an Australian climate regime):

The scientific field provides the framing discourses about the nature and material impacts of human and non-human contributions to climate change. It is comprised of multiple complex strands — including research into atmospheric and ocean chemistry, terrestrial and marine ecology, the dynamics of air and ocean currents, etc. Methodologically, the climate science discursive field has produced a “master narrative” — about the climatic consequences of the use of fossil fuels and clearing of forests and the unrestrained atmospheric release of key greenhouse gases — that is now widely accepted within this field. By contrast, the “scientific” counter-narrative that underpins climate denial now has insignificant credibility within this field (but not necessarily other fields!).

The ethical field bundles discourses of climate justice and ethics, including contests relating to historical responsibility, redistributive justice and compensation, and the normative appropriateness of different mitigation and adaptation solutions. The consequences of contests in this field influence state actor behaviour in the international sphere (in relation to negotiations and the timing and nature of individual and collective state action) and the timing, strength and resourcing of national, subnational and individual mitigation and adaptation behaviour of a wide range of actors in the domestic sphere. It also mobilises concern and action relating to the impacts of global warming on the “rights of nature” — the capacities for health and survival of non-human species.

The economic field is the site of contested discourses about welfare, efficiency, development and modernisation that operate on several levels from the “academic” to the “practical”. It is possible to divide the discourses in this field into two broad groupings — “old” and “new”. “Old” economic discourses support economic growth based on increased consumption of material resources. Its weak valuations of nature and of nature’s losses, and high discounting of the future, bias cost-benefit calculations against early action to counter global warming, in favour of continued fossil fuel use and short-term considerations of national economic security, employment, investment and welfare. By contrast, “new” economic discourses incorporate consideration of the future costs of climate change to humans and nature, and generally are consonant with notions of weak (and strong) ecological modernisation.28 The interrelationship between the normative and economic fields is strong, with debate focused on the justice of various approaches to cost-sharing the burdens of climate impacts, mitigation and adaptation, and with competing material interests working strongly to advantage themselves over opponents.

The technological field includes socio-technical discourses about alternative system futures,29 and discourses about the capacities of individual technologies or

27 For example, there is little contest over the veracity of climate science in Europe, while denialist challenges are common in the United States and Australia. 28 Peter Christoff, “Ecological Modernization, Ecological Modernities”, Environmental Politics, Vol. 5 (1996), pp.476-500. 29 Socio-technical systems are commonly understood as “a cluster of elements, including technology, regulations, user practices and markets, cultural meanings, infrastructure, maintenance networks and supply networks”. See Frank W. Geels, “From Sectoral Systems of Innovation to Socio-technical

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technological ensembles. This field, too, is influenced by normative discourses about the risks, reliability and other socio-economic implications of various scenarios — fossil-fuel, nuclear, renewable energy sources, geoengineering, etc — in meeting social needs.

The political/legal field is the site of debates over the appropriate forms and processes of choice and legitimation affecting climate action, including the effective roles and reach of the state, law and markets, and the nature and location of regulation. This discursive field is shaped by the extent and nature of social acceptance of climate science, and technological and economic narratives about possible futures. The importance of this field lies in its reflexive influence (through the support for and allocation, or hostility to and denial, of material resources and legitimacy to) on the scientific, economic and technological fields, as well as on “the lived reality” of public perceptions about global warming.

Climate law and climate security have developed as important elements of this discursive field. As McDonald indicates, discourse around climate security is itself comprised of several distinctive strands relating to national security, international security, human security and ecological security — themselves influenced by ethical and other considerations. Depending on which of these discourses predominates, different choices emerge for climate-related domestic action and international cooperation.30

The discursive field of “lived reality” is both framed by and mediated through these other fields. Few individuals and communities (particularly in industrialised societies) remain untouched by and/or immune to the constitutive influences of the climate discourses of science, economics, technology and governance. In this sense, the disjuncture sometimes assumed between “everyday” understandings of how the world works — including between colloquial and scientific perceptions about weather and climate — and these other frames is overstated. The reflexive importance of the discursive field of “lived reality” for the fields of politics is self-evident.

III: The Discursive Framing of Australian Climate Policy

Periodization of the twenty-five years of Australian national climate policy may be undertaken in a variety of ways. Here I emphasize the role and importance of the climate discourse complex, which frames, authorizes or delegitimizes, certain elements of climate-related debate and therefore provides the dominant settings for the national climate policy regime. Analysis of primary materials31 suggests that five periods may be discerned, each defined by a shift in the dominance32 of different critical elements constituting the discourse complex (Table 1). Table 1 appears to align these periods with the tenure of various leaders and governments: however, it is important to recognize that this discursive periodization is not primarily dependent on political

Systems: Insights about Dynamics and Change from Sociology and Institutional Theory”, Research Policy, Vol. 33 (September, 2004), pp.897-920. 30 See Matt McDonald, “Fair Weather Friend? Ethics and Australia’s Approach to Global Climate Change”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 51 (2005), pp.216-234, and idem, “Discourses of Climate Security”, Political Geography, Vol. 33 (2013), pp.42-51. 31 Drawn from sources — including statements about climate change by key political, industry and NGO actors; government publications; climate-related academic studies; and media reportage — in each discursive field. 32 Defined by the prominence and deployment of key themes and terms in assessed material.

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leadership, and involves continuities that run through and over-determine climate policy regimes as defined governments.

Table 1: Australia’s climate discourse complex and participating discursive fields

Constitutive Discursive Field

Government

Labor Hawke 1988 -1991

Labor

Keating 1992 -1996

Coalition Howard 1996 -2006

Labor Rudd 2007 -2009

Labor Gillard 2010 -2013

Scientific

O o X o o

Ethical

O X X o X

Economic

“old” X O O “new” X O O

Technological

Fossil fuel (domestic)

o o o

Fossil fuel (export)

o o o o o

nuclear o Renewable energy

X o o

Political/ Legal

National targets

X X o X

Legislated mitigation policy/ institutions

X o o

O Dominant discursive field o Contributing discursive field x Minor contributing discursive field

The climate discourse complex of the first period (1988-1991) was dominated by climate science’s revelations about global warming. Domestic and international media attention to the emergent predictions of climate scientists33 contributed to public recognition of and anxiety about the issue, although popularly and politically it was considered a manageable and temporally distant problem. Prominent at the Earth Summit in 1992, the issue was accompanied by a normatively charged narrative about the “unfairness” of the uneven distribution of economic benefits derived from greenhouse emissions and of the displacement of climate change’s impacts onto future generations of humans and other species. This perspective also contributed strongly to the emergent Australian climate discourse complex. Nevertheless, the tenor of the political and policy response to this discourse complex may be characterised as one of “naïve altruism”. When Australia’s initial emissions reduction targets were

33 Including widespread Australian media coverage of two national conferences on climate change organized by CSIRO in 1988 and 1989.

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proclaimed,34 they reflected these normative concerns along with Labor’s enduring commitment to multilateralism. However, scant consideration was given to the associated potential technological, legal or economic challenges, beyond the unimplemented measures described in the 1992 National Greenhouse Response Strategy.35

The second period (1992-1996) was marked by the rise, within industry and government, of a reactive economic discourse that emphasized the costs of mitigation, highlighted the apparent uncertainties of climate science, and extolled the role of markets in effecting timely and least-cost abatement. This last element reflected the penetration and dominance of the local variant of neo-liberal economic discourse (“economic rationalism”) across many Australian policy regimes at this time. While the underlying science remained unchallenged, it was displaced by the “economic turn”, which provoked what became known as a “no regrets” policy approach. This regime of policy inaction deferred mitigation, the need for which was regarded as “speculative”. The economic pragmatism of this climate discourse complex also reflected Labor’s linked emphases on modernisation, nation-building, and national economic growth based on market-based carbon-industrialisation, in a globalised market.

The third period (1996-2006) began during the period of the Keating government and dominated throughout much of the time of the Howard Coalition government. It deeply entrenched key elements of the second discourse complex by further emphasizing the immediate economic costs of mitigation, and the comparative economic advantages afforded by continuing to exploit Australia’s fossil fuel resources (including through the development of geosequestration and other “clean coal” technologies) and uranium.36 A defining aspect of this period is the extent to which the link between climate science and other (and specifically, economic) policies was all but severed, with the threats and impacts of climate change being regarded as a temporally distant problem37. These elements were further reinforced by the Howard government’s neo-realist approach to national economic security and “the national interest”,38 underscored by its sense of Australian exceptionalism and its rejection of multilateralism following the US’ abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. Little discursive support was given to emergent renewable energy technologies, which then were widely regarded as economically and technically unviable. Until 2006, Australia’s media barely reported the evolving scientific discussion of climate threats and impacts but instead amplified the emphases of key conservative political and industry actors on inaction in the face of the claimed negative short term economic impacts of “premature”, “regulated” and “targeted” mitigation on the national economy.39 Similarly, it was only towards the end of this period that climate-technological (including nuclear power) and legal discourses began to emerge.

34 In 1990 the Australian government adopted an interim mitigation target to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at 1988 levels by 2000 and reduce them by 20 per cent by 2005, with the caveat that any abatement measures not have a net adverse economic impact. 35 See The National Greenhouse Response Strategy (Canberra, 1992). 36 See John Howard, “BCA Annual Dinner Speech”, 13 November 2006. 37 John Howard, November 2006. 38 In The National Interest: Australia’s Foreign and Trade Policy, White Paper (Canberra, 1997). 39 Given the concentration of media ownership in Australia, the amplification of climate denialist views by Fairfax and Murdoch media outlets had a significant influence on public and political opinion.

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The fourth period (2007-2010) was initiated by contest and turbulence in the fields of science, economics and “lived reality” during the final year of the Howard government and then under the first Rudd Labor government. These disruptions resulted from publication of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report40 and the Stern Report on the Economics of Climate Change,41 and the popular success of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth — international provocations that coincided with a drought in Australia of historically unprecedented range and duration, which had served to resensitise public opinion to global warming. While the IPCC’s report underscored the strength of international scientific consensus about the sources and potentially catastrophic consequences of global warming, the Stern Report framed a convincing alternative discourse about the nature of climate change as a critical environmental externality and the result of “the greatest market failure the world has seen”, the economic benefits of early action on mitigation and the costs of delay. Both reports were widely reported internationally and in the Australian media. Stern’s work contributed to a shift in the domestic balance of climate economic and governance discourse towards political recognition of the utility of carbon pricing instruments, represented by the publication of the NETT,42 Shergold43 and Garnaut44 reports. Meanwhile Gore’s film enhanced growing public awareness of climate change. These shifts — and others relating to the “securitization” of the climate change — were captured in formal political debate and intensified as points of differentiation between political parties.

The critical change in the Australian climate discourse complex entailed a shift from the “old” to the “new” economic discourse. This was defined by explicit recognition of the existence of climate change, including as an environmental externality the inadequate response to which would cause significant economic harm. This shift was also conjoined to a new discursive emphasis on viable renewable energy technologies.45 Together, these changes propelled the evolution of a domestic regulatory discourse around mitigation targets, renewable energy targets, and associated policy measures to effect economic decarbonisation.

Initially this discourse complex also assumed a clear normative/environmental dimension which PM Rudd first championed as a normative rationale for national climate action, injecting his campaign speeches in 2007 with a tone of high ethical drama (“climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation”).46 This language stood in stark contrast to the narrative of national economic self-interest that had marked climate policy under Howard. However, the renewed prominence afforded

40 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Climate Change 2007, three volumes on The Physical Science Basis; Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability; and Mitigation of Climate Change (Cambridge, 2007). 41 Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge, 2007). 42 National Emissions Trading Taskforce, Possible Design for a National Greenhouse Gas Emissions Trading Scheme: A Discussion Paper prepared by the National Emissions Trading Taskforce August (Canberra, 2006). 43 Prime Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading, Report of the Task Group on Final Report, (Canberra, 2007). 44 Garnaut, The Garnaut Climate Change Review 2008. 45 Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Working Together for a Clean Energy Future (2012) and the Clean Energy Plan, available at <http://www.cleanenergyfuture.gov.au/clean-energy-future/our-plan/>. 46 Kevin Rudd, “Campaign Speech and Advertisement”, August 2007, available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqZvpRjGtGM>.

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scientific/normative discourses about global warming’s social and ecological impacts47 was displaced by a return to the dominant economic discursive frame, as indicated the extent to which economic considerations again dominated political debate and policy framing. Contests over the proposed policy regime associated with the “new” economic discourse included debate over the flawed implementation of various climate-related programs such as the Home Insulation Program (better known as the “pink batts” scheme) and over the economic impacts of the CPRS (including the need for substantial compensatory payments to minimize the purported impacts of carbon pricing on high emissions energy intensive industries). Short term economic considerations also constrained the level of Australia’s nominated “unconditional” emissions reduction target to — 5 per cent below year 2000 levels by 2020 — a target that fails to reflect the growing urgency expressed by climate scientists and contributes to the “ambition gap” between collective international mitigation commitments and the reduction in emissions required to keep global warming below even 2 degrees Celsius.

In all, Australia’s climate discourse complex, while still dominated by the economic field, has been “enriched” through its integration of elements relating to climate science, technological change and opportunity, governance,48 and (initial) recognition of the security implications of climate change.49 As is widely acknowledged, it was the failure to “translate” the key narrative of the new discourse complex, about establishing a national emissions trading scheme via the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), into a commensurate effective national climate policy regime that contributed to the collapse of Rudd’s popularity and his replacement as PM by Julia Gillard.

The last period (2010-2013)50 has been marked by the attempt to entrench the climate-related narrative of weak ecological modernization51 through national legislation, regulations and policy introducing a carbon price, national mitigation targets, a national renewable energy target, and associated funding measures and agencies.52 The failure of the Copenhagen climate negotiations in 2009 to achieve a new comprehensive legally binding international agreement, and the retreat by nation-states to voluntary domestic pledges, undermined political momentum towards new policy measures in Australia and invigorated opportunistic political opposition to the introduction of a carbon price and emissions trading scheme. However, while a bitter political contest has persisted throughout this period over elements of the “new” economic discourse (specifically, carbon pricing), the underlying premise of the “new” economic discourse — its link to climate science — has remained (to date) largely unchallenged.53 Nevertheless, the media focus on and divisive debate over the Gillard carbon “tax” has diminished the prominence of other climate-discursive elements

47 E.g. Greg Combet, “Addressing the Great Moral Challenge of our Generation”, Speech to the Parliament, 12 August 2009. 48 Including the establishment of Australia’s first climate change department — the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency — in December 2007. 49 Kevin Rudd, “The First National Security Statement to the National Parliament”, 4 December 2008. 50 The return of Rudd as Prime Minister late in Labor’s second term led to no climate policy changes of note during that term. 51 See for instance, Julia Gillard, “Channel 10 Interview”, 19 August 2010, available at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EyW7oFk6n8&feature=player_detailpage#t=138s>. 52 Embodied in the Clean Energy Act 2011 (Cth) and the Climate Change Authority Act 2011 (Cth). 53 Although leading Coalition politicians still proclaim their scepticism, see Jeremy Thompson, “Minchin ups stakes in carbon war” <http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/11/3161489.htm>.

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compared with the Rudd period,54 eroded public support for climate action,55 diminished awareness of the intensifying scientific narrative around the growing urgency of mitigation, and further delegitimized strong climate policy. (This trend was challenged early in 2013 when scientific/normative discourses reasserted themselves in response to the intensifying pattern of record extreme weather.56

These developments and key contributing influences and drivers are summarized in Table 2.

IV: Australian Climate Discourse and Policy: Leader, Follower or Laggard?

The history of Australian climate discourse, as reflected in the dominant characteristics of its climate discourse complex, can be described as one of punctuated equilibrium57 — long terms of hegemonic discursive stability disrupted by brief periods of turbulence and, less frequently, change. It also suggests patterns in the discursive framing of Australian climate policy. So what might explain these short periods of abrupt challenge and long periods of inertia and stagnation?

Firstly, throughout approximately two decades of climate policy formation, Australia has been a “taker” not a “maker” and a laggard (or at best, a follower) rather than a leader in most climate-related discursive fields — except science. Events, ideas and processes that have disciplined or redirected Australian climate discourses have generally been injected from overseas. For instance, the timetable for and progress of UNFCCC negotiations (before and after Kyoto and Copenhagen) have maintained or released pressure on domestic policy development. The publication of key international reports — the Stern Report and IPCC Fourth Assessment Report are two notable examples — has roused domestic media attention, raised public and political support for policy action58 and increased the issue’s political salience. Whenever a discursive contest over climate economics occurred in Australia, this was initiated externally. The establishment of the European Union’s emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) in 2005 and publication of the Stern Report in 2006 laid the foundations for the debate between “old” and “new” economic discourses in Australia from 2006 onwards, leading to the establishment of the National Emissions Trading Taskforce and then Shergold and Garnaut Reviews, and finally the proposal for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). The EU ETS — and associated policy learning — contributed heavily to domestic developments. Debate about technological alternatives has followed the development and implementation of renewable energy technologies and associated policies, particularly in Europe (and especially in Germany, with its feed-in tariffs). Similarly, in institutionalizing Australian climate mitigation and adaptation policies, overseas models and experience — such as the UK Climate Change legislation and Climate Authority — guided domestic legal and organisational innovation.

54 See for instance the minimal recognition of climate change in the 2013 White Paper, Strong and Secure: A Strategy for Australia’s National Security, which confirms analysis by Matt McDonald in “The Failed Securitization of Climate Change in Australia”, Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 47 (2012), pp.579-592. 55 Fergus Hanson, Australia and the World: Public Opinion and Foreign Policy, The Lowy Institute Poll (2012), p.5-6. 56 See Climate Commission, The Angry Summer (2013); Climate Commission, The Critical Decade: Extreme Weather (2013) and media reporting over January-March 2013. 57 Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago, 1993). 58 Fergus Hanson. Australia and the World: Public Opinion and Foreign Policy, The Lowy Institute Poll (2008).

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Secondly, the economic discursive field has dominated Australia’s climate discourse complex throughout much of the time from 1992 to the present. Significant academic attention is yet to be paid to the “neoliberal turn” as it affected the articulation and implementation of energy and climate policy across Australia’s federal system. This turn, which began in the 1990s, included the marketization of energy sector governance via privatisation of long-held state-owned energy assets and associated loss of strategic and planning control by the state; the privileging of enterprise and consumer sovereignty and choice; and — eventually — the privileging of the commodification and marketization of carbon pollution over direct regulation. The default in Australia therefore has been to argue over the economic dimensions of climate change, with most advocacy coalitions captured and drawn into debates conceptually framed in narrow economic terms. This dominance in part reflects the strength of critical veto coalitions based around the resource and power-generation sectors, with their discourse amplified by the media, and the corresponding weakness of the discursive power and strategic thinking of the environment movement throughout the same period, and the “path-dependency” of economic policy discourse given the material investment in Australia’s carbon economy.

Correspondingly, with the exception of two brief periods — in the late 1980s and during a short time during 2007 and 2008 — the explicitly ethical dimensions of climate discourse have had little prominence or impact in Australia. The persistent dominance of economic framing in the climate discourse complex has effectively delegitimised the ethical dimensions of the climate issue and locked civil society out of participation in climate debates. There has been little political reflection on the implications of climate change for Australian ecosystems and non-human species despite devastating projections for this continent59 or for vulnerable neighbouring developing countries (or even major trading partners) although this concern has become increasingly reflected in the discourse of major development and aid agencies. Nor has it been possible to break the taboo about talking of Australia’s role in the global carbon economy through its export of fossil fuels — although in 2013 this may be an emergent point of discursive and practical challenge arising from the environment movement.

59 See for instance, Peter Christoff, ed., Four Degrees of Global Warming: Australia in a Hot World (Oxford and New York, 2013).

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Where Australia has been almost unique among developed states has been in its response to natural events, and in the absence of a national “energy/climate security” discourse. The first decade of the twenty-first century has produced a series of unprecedented extreme events (drought, fire, heat and flood) and associated social and economic hardship that have revived and deepened public concern about global warming beyond its narrowly economistic range, increased the issue’s political salience and — specifically — punctured the complacency about the ethical consequences of climate impacts that had marked the discourse complex from 1997 until 2007. In contrast to the United States, where debate over energy security has sometimes been a code or substitute for a debate over climate policy, and the EU, where energy security debates have been consonant with technological discourses about mitigation and alternatives to fossil fuels, there has been no overt debate in Australia over climate security — unless one reads discussion of concern about the profound impacts of global warming on Australian communities as a debate about human security.

How then to explain the prevalence of Australia’s economistic climate discourse complex across governments of different political hue, and the silencing of alternatives? How is it that, compared to leaders on climate policy such as Germany and the UK, veto coalitions in Australia have had such force? This paper suggests four sources. Firstly, the environment movement has persistently failed to engage with the climate issue from its position of strength and greatest “authority”, based in its own ethical (including ecological) discursive frame.60 Rather, the dominance of the economistic climate discourse complex in the 1990s and the first decade of the present century largely reconstituted key ENGOs as acquiescent subjects “bearing” the new but still weak economic climate discourse while largely eschewing the alternative narratives of scientific and ethical challenge. While in recent years the environment movement has broken into diverse streams of climate action, its ecologically subaltern discursive narrative has not grown in influence. (Meanwhile, however, individual climate scientists and scientific agencies such as CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology have become more skilled in presenting their own “case”.)

Secondly, the Australian media (print media, television, radio) actively resisted coverage of global warming until 2007, when the publication of the IPCC Fourth Assessment report was the catalyst for change. Since then, successive political crises around the issue have provided the incentive for ongoing attention to the theatre but not the substance of climate politics. More recently, the rise of new media and social media has begun to erode the restrictive dominance of the conventional media over public information and associated climate discourse formation — but also led to a fragmentation of audiences.

Thirdly, specific institutional features of the Australian political-economic system, including its adversarial political culture and the federal system, have influenced climate discourse in the political field. The concentration in Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia of coal and gas deposits and the electoral consequences of government opposition to their development has impeded social, economic and political narratives about decarbonisation. In the context of Australia’s adversarial parliamentary political culture, the Coalition — in replacing Malcolm Turnbull with Tony Abbott — has preferred the immediacy of wedge politics and defined its

60 The prominent exception has been Friends of the Earth (Australia), which has been a leader among local ENGOs in pursuing the cause of climate justice in Australia and its region.

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leadership accordingly on the climate issue, rather than pursue bipartisan policy over an issue of national consequence.

Finally, the weak integration of current climate science discourse into national economic, technological, and political climate discourse reflects entrenched inadequacies in those other discursive fields and — especially — the intellectual weakness of Australian media and political institutions to recognise the authority of that science. This weakness has opened the door to the forms of climate denialism that have corrupted and impeded Australian political and public climate understanding, debate and policy development.

Conclusion

National climate discourse complexes are relational, and strongly shaped and partly constituted by international influences and factors. This seems especially the case for Australia. The present Australian climate discourse complex, dominated by its “new” economic frame, promotes an internationally negotiated climate policy regime based on weak ecological modernization. The associated policy regime is also new to Australia and remains fragile: that fragility is reflected in the present conjuncture of Australian domestic climate politics, with the Opposition strengthening its “blood oath” to repeal the carbon tax, following Kevin Rudd’s return to power, with a commitment to reject any carbon pricing mechanism. However the entrenchment of the “new” economic discourse complex over the past six years suggests that a full return to the inaction of former climate policy regimes is unlikely.

Even so, Australia remains a long way from embracing — let alone responding adequately to — the growing challenge of global warming. Its climate discourse complex has persistently been overweight on economic considerations while weak on the science. It currently still fails to register climate science’s intensifying message about the urgent need for rapid decarbonisation. As a result, domestic climate and energy policies — their targets, objectives and measures — remain inadequate to the task of combatting climate change and Australia continues to contribute to average global warming of four degrees or more. Key Australian environmental NGOs remain coy about naming the threat clearly. This silence signals a profound discursive failure, perhaps still explained by the “drag effect” of various economistic discourses.

This paper has also argued that Australian climate discourses and its climate discourse complex, and Australia’s climate policy regimes, have historically been respondents to external provocation. In particular, they have been powerfully overwritten by the behaviour of its major alliance partner, the United States — except during two moments of naïve altruism, in signing the UNFCCC in 1992, and then the long-delayed ratification of the Kyoto Protocol in 2007.

If so, it is likely then that events such as the re-election of President Obama and the shocks delivered by extreme climatic events in the northern hemisphere (including record temperatures and one of the worst droughts in US history) and associated shifts in public opinion, the publication of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report in 2014, and China’s turn towards decarbonisation, will provide the impetus for more radical domestic discursive and climate policy change in Australia.