ABSTRACT

Chapter 2 presents an overview of the two key discourses that shape and legitimate Australian climate policy and diplomacy. The chapter begins by historicising the ‘master’ discourse about Australia’s industrial competitiveness. This analysis shows that in the period of time between 1973 and 2015 improving the international competitiveness of Australia’s big fossil fuel mining companies, and through them the economy in general, was a bipartisan nation building agenda. Next, the chapter historicises Australia’s divergent ‘ancillary’ foreign policy discourses of the Labor Party and the Liberal/National Coalition Party as internationalist versus alliance-focused respectively. This analysis shows that since the end of the Second World War, Labor have sought to secure Australia’s interests via engagement with the United Nations, while the Liberals have looked towards alliances with Great Powers. This section also shows that Gough Whitlam’s ‘turn to Asia’ in 1973 is crucial to better understand the expansion of Australia’s fossil fuel export industry, which links to the previous section about industrial competitiveness. Overall, this chapter shows that the convergent and divergent economic and foreign policy discourses of Australia’s two major political parties, set within the historical context of war and peace in 1945, 1973, and 1989, is a much better starting point from which to explore Australian climate policy and diplomacy than the relatively shallow ‘greenhouse mafia’ hypothesis.