Advance launches last-minute lobbying campaign pressuring Liberal MPs to dump net zero target | Australian politics

Right-wing lobby group Advance has launched a last-minute lobbying campaign to pressure Liberal MPs to abandon the net-zero emissions target at a special meeting in Canberra on Wednesday.

The campaign group emailed supporters on Tuesday afternoon, urging them to flood Liberal MPs’ inboxes with a general anti-net zero message in the hours leading up to the crisis talks.

Supporters were instructed to fill out their personal information via an online form, which automatically sent a pre-written email to all federal Liberal MPs.

“Closing every factory, closing every mine, every job lost below net zero is a choice, a bad choice,” the email reads.

“The Liberal Party must prioritize Australian workers. Scrap net zero before it destroys what’s left of our industries.”

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The eleventh-hour email attack is the culmination of Advance’s long-running campaign to pressure Sussan Ley to abandon the 2050 net-zero emissions target agreed under Scott Morrison and maintained by Peter Dutton.

Liberal MPs will meet in Parliament House at lunchtime as Ley tries to end a bitter internal political war that has divided the party and turned into a proxy war for its leadership.

The Liberal shadow ministry will meet at 9am on Thursday to confirm a position before talks begin on a common policy with the National Party, whose decision to scrap the target earlier this month put pressure on Ley to follow suit.

A joint meeting in the party room is planned for Sunday to confirm the coalition’s new position.

After a week of intense wrangling between conservatives who want all references to net zero removed and moderates who want the target to remain in some statements, senior Liberals were confident a consensus could be reached at Wednesday’s meeting.

Guardian Australia surveyed a cross-section of Liberal MPs who believe there is majority support for ditching the net-zero emissions target while publicly adhering to the Paris agreement.

Even if a future Coalition government does not withdraw from the Paris agreement (as Donald Trump has twice done with the US) such a position would constitute a breach of Australia’s obligations under the agreement; This requires countries not to back down from their existing commitments.

The Albanian government has committed to Australia’s net zero emissions by 2050, with interim targets of 43% by 2030 and 62-70% by 2035 compared to 2005 levels. Anything below this would violate the Paris agreement.

The key point of contention among Liberal MPs is the use of the words “net zero” and whether it should remain a vague target or be scrapped altogether.

A senior Liberal rejected the suggestion that it was a moot point, insisting the majority of MPs were in favor of scrapping the proposal.

A promise to pursue the net-zero “target” and commitment to the Paris agreement may be enough to placate moderate Liberals such as Andrew Bragg and Maria Kovacic, who have refused to leave the front lines if the party abandons its commitments entirely.

Queensland Liberal MP Phillip Thompson accuses frontbench colleagues of ‘throwing out'[ing] “All his toys are out of the crib.”

“And anyone who wants to threaten to resign should resign. You’re not that important anyway,” Thompson, from a rival right-wing group, told Sky News.

Federal Liberal party leader Andrew Hirst will report on voter attitudes towards net zero emissions and energy policy at Wednesday’s meeting to help inform the debate.

There is support among some Liberal MPs to accept a proposal from National Representatives to peg Australia’s emissions reduction rate to the OECD average.

On Tuesday, Liberal leader Tim Wilson, who supports net zero, said such an approach was “frankly bizarre”.

“It makes more sense to me that we set sovereign targets like net zero that we control, that we define, and then develop a plan for how we implement Liberal principles,” Wilson told Sky News.

“Frankly, I find the idea that we would outsource to a globalist standard like the average of OECD emissions strange. And I don’t think that’s really an acceptable policy.”

Dan Tehan, the shadow energy secretary, likened taking a position on net-zero emissions to “putting a needle in a needle”.

“It’s a challenge and when Sussan Ley asked me to take on the challenge I knew it was going to be difficult,” he said.