ABSTRACT
This book shows that key members of the Gillard Labor Government and the Abbott Coalition Government, and representatives from the Australian fossil fuel industry (ACA, MCA, and APPEA), exhibited strong discursive compatibility about the importance of protecting the competitiveness of Australia’s mining industry in climate policymaking. But with an importance difference. In the Gillard years, Australian climate policy and diplomacy protected the competitiveness of Australia’s existing fossil fuel industries as well as incentivised Australia’s future low pollution industries, which would keep Australia competitive over time as the world transitioned to lower pollution activities. By contrast, Abbott’s domestic climate policy was designed to not only restore competitiveness to Australia’s fossil fuel industry (from a perceived loss during the Rudd and Gillard years), but also to maximise the attractiveness of Australia’s territory and resources, compared to competitor nations, to multinational fossil fuel mining companies by incentivising investment in Australian coal and gas/LNG.
The findings in this book can be explained in terms of a discursive renovation of Putnam’s two-level games model, which provides an expanded understanding of the domestic and international pressures visited upon the executive. That is, the ‘win-set’ size at the international level is not solely determined by the presence or absence of domestic veto players seeking to protect their pre-given interests (i.e. Pearse’s ‘greenhouse mafia’ hypothesis). Rather, it is shaped by a confluence of domestic and foreign policy discourses that produce the meaning of the national interest and thereby determine the boundaries of legitimate policy and diplomacy.
