CANBERRA OBSERVED Paris still rules in the party room

Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg have been lauded as achieving a brilliant policy breakthrough with their bold new energy policy, which will allow the nation to escape the “climate wars” that have dogged the political landscape for the past decade or so. “We’ll always have Paris.” The problem though is that in achieving a policy consensus among all the conflicting players, the competing interests and ideologies that have been at loggerheads over this time, the Coalition also needs to focus on the main game, which is being re-elected. The Government describes its National Energy Guarantee (NEG), designed by five top…