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Revolt of the mods: Kovacic, Ruston, Wilson could quit frontbench if net zero dumped

Three more members of Sussan Ley’s shadow cabinet have opened the door to quitting the frontbench if the Liberal Party dumps support for net zero emissions by 2050, just two days before a crunch party room meeting designed to settle the fractious debate.

On Sunday, opposition housing spokesman Andrew Bragg told the ABC’s Insiders program that he would quit if the Coalition walked away from the Paris climate agreement and dumped net zero.

“Well, sure,” he said, “but I don’t imagine we will ever leave Paris.”

He added that conservative MPs who wanted to put a “fatwa” on the use of two words – net zero – in the policy were being “absolutely ridiculous”.

On Monday, fellow frontbenchers Tim Wilson, Anne Ruston and Maria Kovacic opened the door to following Bragg and resigning from the frontbench if the net zero by 2050 target was axed.

Kovacic, a leading moderate openly campaigning to keep the net zero policy, told this masthead: “I support our Westminster system of government, and that requires members of the frontbench to support all policies of their party”.

Currently the shadow minister for women and shadow assistant minister to Ley, Kovacic said she would have to go to the backbench if the party rejected net zero.

“As with any area of policy, if the party room decides on a policy that a shadow minister cannot publicly support, they would have to resign and move to the backbench,” she said.

Ruston is the opposition health spokeswoman, deputy Senate leader and a key moderate ally of Ley who has made the case for the party to retain support for net zero.

Asked if she would resign if net zero was junked, Ruston said: “No comment”.

And Wilson, a strong supporter of net zero and the opposition’s industrial relations spokesman, said only that “I’ll have more to say in the coming days” when asked if he would resign.

Several of Wilson’s colleagues told this masthead that he was leaning towards quitting if net zero was junked, but it would depend on the final form of the new policy and whether he would be able to help influence its design.

Such a move would see Ley lose four of her key supporters on the frontbench and potentially deliver a fatal blow to her troubled leadership, already damaged by the resignation of conservative frontbencher Andrew Hastie, the forced sacking of fellow conservative Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and a series of missteps from Ley, including calling for Ambassador Kevin Rudd to be sacked and accusing the prime minister of anti-semitism because he wore a Joy Division T-shirt.

In the past week, several Liberal MPs have suggested that a challenge to Ley for the leader’s job is all but inevitable, with only the timing and the identity of the candidate to be determined.

One supporter of Ley, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely about the opposition leader’s future, said that “Sussan’s leadership is terminal, it’s just a question of when”.

Earlier on Monday, Kovacic told Sky News that she was disappointed in her fellow Liberal senator, Sarah Henderson, who last week said that internal Coalition fractures were the worst she’d ever seen and Ley was “losing support”.

Kovacic said Henderson’s comments were unhelpful and undisciplined, prompting a swipe in return from the Victorian senator.

“I’m not going to add to my comments, other than to reiterate that from the backbench, we can agree to disagree. So there’s nothing undisciplined about that,” she said.

Henderson did not repeat her criticisms of the opposition leader but instead commended Ley for “bringing us all together on Wednesday to thrash this out”.

“And I’m really hoping … that we reject net zero in its entirety, because it’s not fit for purpose for a country such as ours,” she said.

South Australian Liberal senator Leah Blyth, another opponent of net zero, told Sky News that Australia was a resource-rich country that should have cheap, reliable energy, but instead “we seem to be impoverishing ourselves for no benefit globally”, pointing out that Australia still sells huge volumes of coal and gas to other countries for them to use.

Asked if she would continue to support Ley if net zero was maintained as party policy, Blyth said the debate was “not necessarily about the leadership” and “let’s see what happens on Wednesday, and then we can certainly have that discussion again next week”.

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