As Australia heads to an election, it must choose between climate reality and Trump-style denial

When it comes to energy, the country’s opposition leader Peter Dutton is apeing the White House’s moves, says Chris Wright

Australia is just weeks away from a national election, and one of the starkest moments of the campaign came during a televised debate this Tuesday.

Asked whether climate change is linked to Australia’s worsening extreme weather, opposition leader Peter Dutton replied: “I don’t know because I’m not a scientist.”

For a nation that has faced record-breaking wildfires, devastating floods and rising heat, Dutton’s refusal to acknowledge the connection was more than evasive – it was dangerous. And it signalled something deeper: a slide toward the kind of climate denial and delay politics that have become Donald Trump’s brand.

On 3 May, Australians will vote not just on who leads the country but on the kind of future they want: one that involves a transition to clean energy, already underway under prime minister Anthony Albanese, or Dutton’s Trump-style pivot towards fossil fuels and a nuclear plan that will take more than a decade to implement.

Though Dutton is smart enough to avoid explicitly denying climate change, and quickly tried to correct himself after the backlash, his proposed energy policy takes a page straight from the climate delay playbook.

He plans to spend US$380bn (£286bn) transitioning Australia – the world’s sunniest and windiest country – to nuclear power, without building a single reactor for at least 12 years. In the meantime, his proposal would funnel public money into extending the life of ageing coal-fired power stations, crowding out renewables.

After reviewing the modelling from both major parties, I fear the contrast is stark: my assessment is that Dutton’s roadmap would result in nearly three times more coal power by 2050, compared with the government’s existing plan, which prioritises renewable energy and emissions reduction.

But renewables aren’t the only thing under threat. During the campaign, Dutton suggested that Australia’s children are being “indoctrinated” by schools teaching about the climate crisis, while his deputy leader suggested on national radio that public schools that teach climate science could face funding cuts. Other party members doubled down, turning education into a front in Australia’s growing climate culture war.

Dutton has been in parliament for more than 24 years and has spent much of that time opposing, obstructing or delaying climate policy. He helped dismantle Australia’s first carbon-pricing system in 2014, and held senior roles in the coal-fired decade of Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison.

Albanese, by contrast, served in the Rudd and Gillard governments, which introduced carbon pricing. As prime minister, he’s pushed to accelerate Australia’s energy transition while managing a fossil-fuel-heavy economy. His government has committed to shifting the source of the country’s electricity supply from more than 60 per cent coal to 82 per cent renewables by 2030 – one of the most ambitious targets in the world.

Dutton and his party have not only vowed to scrap the 2030 emissions reduction goal, but have openly floated extending the life of coal plants, ramping up gas, and even withdrawing from the Paris Agreement altogether.

What became clear last week is that Australia’s climate wars are far from over. In fact, they may just be heating up, but what might once have felt like a licence for outright denial has become a tightrope tainted by the disdain in Australia for Trump.

Following Trump’s election, many of the biggest donors to Dutton’s Liberal Party were demanding a Doge-like election campaign. This includes the mining magnate Gina Rinehart, whom Dutton considers a “dear friend”, and the incredibly well-funded think tank Advance Australia, a local cog in the international right-wing propaganda machine known as the Atlas Network.

In a speech late last year, Dutton promised Rinehart and many of the country’s biggest mining companies that his government would “be the best friend the resource sector in Australia will ever have”.

But for Dutton, a former cop with a hardline image he’s now trying to shake, the US president’s recent decline in popularity has made this brand of Trump-lite politics especially challenging to pull off. At one stage in this election campaign, he promised to slash 41,000 staff and “end work from home” options for government workers, only to abandon the promise days later after widespread public condemnation.

Similarly, his party’s suggestion that it would leave the Paris Agreement and Dutton’s own comments about climate change last week have both been subject to rapid “clarifications” after he realised that the public isn’t looking for a Trump-style bluster campaign.

Dutton has also been relatively quiet about his party’s energy policy, which has been met with far more scepticism than he might have hoped. When asked to describe it, he has been vague on details and often sought to emphasise the relative costs of the renewable energy transition rather than his embedded support for extending coal power until 2050.

While his policies substantially mirror those of Trump in the US, his recent delivery has sought to shift away from hard-edged support for fossil fuels, in an effort to avoid turning off suburban women and young voters, who could have a bigger impact on this election than other groups.

But that is also why climate delay has become the tool of choice for so many on the right of global politics. It softens the edges of policies that aim to achieve the same underlying goal: to continue our dependence on fossil fuels for as long as possible, and to undermine both the rapid, market-driven expansion of renewable energy and climate-sensitive policy. This is exactly what we saw last week, and what I expect to see until the election.

Like so many on the international right, Dutton has a vision for Australia that promises to rewind the clock, and gamble the country’s future on a strategy designed not to deny climate change entirely, but to spread doubt, distraction and delay. The only question now is whether Australians will buy into it.