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The Prime Minister has been busy brushing shoulders with the Pope and various other world leaders in Rome.

But back home, an internal battle over the Liberals' path forward on nuclear, net zero continues to internally and sometimes externally rage as the party room remains divided over that key policy.

It comes as the Liberals and the Nationals continue to thrash out a power-sharing agreement.

The Nationals are pushing for more representation on the shadow front bench.

Welcome to Politics Now.

Hi, I'm Patricia Carvelis.

And I'm Jacob Griber.

And Jacob, hot off the heels of his first bilateral trip to Indonesia, the Prime Minister went straight over to Rome for the inauguration of Pope Leo.

He told the Pope that his late mother would be looking down from heaven with the biggest smile she's ever had.

This obviously is a very important trip for him as he's expressed the personal dimension.

He was raised a Catholic and this is an important part I think of his foundation story.

Jacob, with world leaders all converging in Rome, the visit has also proved, you know, Not a bad networking opportunity, right?

He's really leapt into it with gusto, I think.

He's sort of more comfortable in this space, you get the impression.

He's obviously on an incredible high from the election campaign itself, which defied, you know, even some of the most optimistic forecasters.

But yeah, so he's landed there.

Obviously, the main reason for the trip is the inauguration of the new Pope.

But he met with the Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky.

There's an issue there outstanding of some old tanks of ours.

These are Abrams tanks,

which the ABC's Andrew Greene has been reported have been delayed, but the Prime Minister has assured Zelensky that they are now on the way.

He's not detailing what that means, but take his word for it, they will soon be on the ground.

I think we can safely assume.

He's also saying that Australia is going to do whatever it can to put pressure on Russia, even though the president of Ukraine would like us to do more.

And as part of his speed dating, he caught up with the the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen.

And she's been doing the rounds trying to sign people up to security pacts.

She's been talking to the Japanese, the Koreans, and others.

And the EU clearly sees Australia as a strategic partner.

I detected a little bit more reticence there from the Prime Minister to fully engage and say, yes, that suits us.

So that'll be interesting to see when we get a chance to push him on it, what the nuance is there.

I don't know what you're hearing, PK, on that front.

That's very interesting, this security stuff.

And I think the word China is always there over the top of all of it.

And then, of course, the Europeans are keen for a trade deal, which gets us back into some of our favourite products.

Prosecco, Parmesan, Fetter, all the good things in life.

Whether they can, when they're made in Australia, can we use those names or do they have to be called South Australian salty cheese for pizza or something?

Yeah, which is not really the most glamorous names.

But yeah, look, I'm an Australian first, but you know, Fetter is Greek, so I'm always a bit sort of tortured on this issue.

But I understand why Australia that makes some of the best produce.

So I'm going to end up on Team Australia.

Don't worry.

I know what matters to me.

These are really great products that we make.

And we do make Feta.

We do make Proseca, right?

So there's a lot of sticking points.

And that's the reason a free trade agreement hasn't been landed and Australia has walked away before from the EU and said, look, we can't do a deal.

Has anything really substantially changed is the big question.

I haven't seen substantial change yet.

That means that we're closer, although.

you know, we've got a new term of this government and that is a change in and of itself, right?

They've got a bit of heft and an ability over the next period of time to do some heavy lifting to try and land this.

And I think for them on that one, like for the Albanese government to be able to land another free trade agreement in

the context of a Trump universe where the world under him is kind of minimising free trade, but for Australia to seek to do that, I think would be quite a powerful statement too, right, Jacob?

It's a huge opportunity if you think about it.

I think things have changed actually in this space dramatically.

And you alluded to it.

It's the Trump thing.

America going alone, turning on allies,

playing, frankly, a really stupid game.

And so the rest of the world is actually now realising, you know what, we've actually got to work harder at this.

And there's this real impetus now that you see America is, what, 15% of world trade?

That still leaves 85% of world trade out there, where there are still improvements to be made.

For instance, Australian beef access to Europe would be be a huge win from our point of view, from our farmers' point of view.

And of course, the big space that sits underneath a lot of the security questions, rare earth metals, critical minerals, Australia's really got tons to offer there.

And

it would be the win, really, that Albanese could hook on to in his second term if he pulls it off.

Conditions are good for it.

And you can see it.

You know, one of the other little

picks that came out of the inauguration was the PM with Canada's new Prime Minister, Mark Carney.

Similar story to Albanese.

They were both leading parties that were in trouble with Conservatives or, in our case, coalition, sort of being speculated as the frontrunners.

Along comes Donald Trump.

Canada swings back to the centre-left.

Australia swings to the centre-left.

So those two, yeah, they looked pretty chuffed, didn't they?

The two of them.

Okay, so let's do a fake conversation between them because I say fake because obviously I don't know what their private conversation is, but you can imagine it, right?

Like it was a real kind of, oh God, can you believe this guy?

What a gift.

You know, they know Trump has been a big feature of their win.

I think in Albanese's case, he probably thinks there's a lot more to it than just Trump.

And I actually think that, personally, I don't think Trump was the only factor for Australia, but I reckon in Canada, because remember, Canada was a different situation.

And I really think it's an important thing to look at.

You know, they were looking like they were about to turf out a long-term centre-left government, which is what happens.

That's part of the political cycle very often.

And then Trump comes along, changes everything, and ends up helping incumbents.

And Mark Carney obviously turns that all around.

In our case, one of the things that always confused me, and I just wanted on the record how confusing I found it, was the way Peter Dutton framed our election as just like 1996, you know, where people got rid of the Keating government and elected Howard, just like 1996, it was nothing like 1996.

He framed it all wrong.

It was a three-year Albanese government after a long-term coalition government.

It was not the same as 1996.

And I think some of the results that we saw, and I've sort of digress here, but really, are because that framing was all wrong.

You know, it was a three-year government.

They were actually a very new government.

And that's why I think the Australian public gave them another chance and more and with source on top, right?

Because

they did have a newness to them all.

But you know, that selfie, I think, spoke volumes back to the Carney Albanese selfie.

And you can almost see them, yeah, ganging.

You know, maybe the two of them with, I don't know, Keir Stahmer and forgive me, I've forgotten the German Chancellor's name.

But there's this sort of coalition now of

you wouldn't call them anti-Trumpers, but in a sense, sense that's who they they are the expression of voters turning on this MAGA right and we've even seen that again this morning with some results out of Eastern Europe Romania I think I've got that right haven't I they they moved

they were heading towards a far right candidate now they've gone back to the center now I know Piquet you're working on a four corners program that I think if I'm allowed to mention you know might be coming in the next week or in a week from about now

What other things are you, what have you learnt?

What have you learned here from this global I am not ready to reveal what I've learnt yet?

Although, yes, that's why some people, you know, probably noticed I'm not an afternoon briefing at the moment.

I've been filming interviews just to work out what went wrong for the Liberal Party and the direction it's going to take.

And it takes us neatly to

what is already on the record.

And, you know, we certainly, in that piece, which we'll broadcast very soon, go into more of that detail.

Is

the Liberal Party specifically, we're focusing on the Liberals,

trying to work out who they're going to be and what their policy offering is going to be going into the future.

Like, what are the lessons of its loss?

So at the moment, Susan Lee, the new leader, can I say her mother died over the weekend?

It was a beautiful statement she put out on that.

I actually was quite moved by it, just

her saying that her mother had seen her press conference.

You know, she's obviously at the end of life, but they put the press conference on of her daughter becoming the opposition leader, the Liberal Party leader, the first woman to do that.

2025.

I know women feel this very strongly: like, wow, are we still in First Land?

But we are.

And her mother saw that press conference.

Anyway, I mean, maybe it's the mum in me, but I always find those things.

It's a very real human moment, isn't it?

It doesn't matter where you sit on the political side.

It's totally right.

It's just

universal.

and and and the sort of sense of history of it it's it's true men are all over that wall and the liberal party wall same with the labour party they've only got julia gillard on that wall um the walls are very male and now there's a female leader but that let's go to the job she has to do beyond you know her gender and the symbolism of that which is significant but not the whole story She now has to manage getting a deal with the Nationals.

Now, they're in opposition, so the deal, it doesn't matter quite as much in so much as power sharing like you have to do in government but it does decide the roles and clearly the Nationals are trying to flex their muscle and equally there have been some demands they seem to be backing down on some of them surprise surprise because some of them in my view were a little bit over the top like you must commit to nuclear power plants you must commit to getting rid of net zero by 2050 well really

don't they need to review everything first?

How is she going to manage this?

This whole issue of energy and nuclear and net zero in 2050 is the ultimate coalition Rorschach test.

It's the ultimate way of determining where a member of the coalition sits on the political spectrum.

It's such a divisive issue for them.

To me, this feels so...

We've been doing this for well over a decade now.

More, more, if you go back to the original role against when Malcolm Turnbull was initially opposition leader during the Rudd era, if you recall, Tony Abbott beat him by one vote in the party room.

That was essentially about climate policy.

Tony Abbott becomes Prime Minister in 2013, vowing to get rid of Julia Gillard's carbon tax.

That makes him as Prime Minister.

And as our colleague Alan Kohler has pointed out in, I think, a really good piece online,

That was the high watermark for the coalition.

They had a huge number of seats.

They're down to a fraction of that now.

So this has been a long-term decline.

And there are many reasons for that.

But one of them is this intractable issue for the Coalition on Climate.

And now we're seeing the latest potential victim of this.

I'm not predicting anything, but Susan Lee has an incredibly tough job here marrying these two wings of the party.

You've got the people who are on board with this and officially this is across the board on the books.

Don't forget, PK, net zero by 2050 is official policy for both the Liberal and National parties.

But there's a big wing in the National Party that wants to kill this.

And this is what David Littleproud is trying to hold together.

He's trying to hold those forces together.

We don't know how close Matt Canavan got in that leadership attempt last week, but I've heard reports that it wasn't just two or three votes out of 20.

It was more like seven or eight.

And if you think about it, in a small party room, that means he's only a vote or two away.

So Little Proud has that hanging over his head.

And so you can see him trying to land this crazy, crazy

juggle.

And at the base of it is nuclear.

And that was the thing he came up with in the last term to be able to sort of say, look, we are going to net zero, but we're going to do it with nuclear.

So that means we can let coal go for longer.

We can emit more in the medium term.

Now he's nuancing it because the voters have clearly said they don't want nuclear.

So what's he saying now?

He's saying, oh, well, maybe we go back to just talking about getting rid of the moratorium on nuclear.

That's John Howard's thing.

Is that going to be enough, Patricia?

Do you think that solves the problem?

Well, it's interesting you say that.

That's the position that they had before Peter Dutton started talking about seven nuclear power stations.

Yeah, I think it's unlikely from many conversations I've had that anyone's going to land on still bankrolling nuclear power stations.

I feel very confident in saying that's not going to go to the next election.

And I know that's, you know, where did you get that confidence, Carvelis, so early?

But I just, I think philosophically it was also always a problem for liberals, the idea of taxpayer-funded anything, right?

So if they want to go back to the principles of Menzies as well, small government,

that neatly fits into that philosophy as well.

And perhaps we should remind listeners, that was originally the idea was let's get rid of this John Howard 1999 moratorium on nuclear power.

Let's just get rid of that and let the private sector then figure it out, see if they can come up with a version of nuclear power that they can make money from.

Peter Dutton said, no, the Commonwealth will own these stations.

It will be a taxpayer-funded investment from the first dollar to the last.

And that's, yeah, just to clarify that.

No, it's a good important clarification.

So I think they'll probably land at getting rid of the moratorium.

But that still doesn't answer the question of, okay, you get rid of the moratorium.

What evidence do we have?

And we don't have a lot that all of a sudden it means there'll be a sort of investment fuel, you know, this kind of tsunami of investment into Australia of nuclear.

And that will happen straight away, you know, the day after the coalition were to be elected sometime in the future, and that can get you to net zero.

They still have a problem getting to net zero.

And so I think that's why some of them, even in the Liberal Party, probably want to get rid of it.

And if we can turn it back to the government, which is always important because they've got so many numbers,

it's next level.

This provides unique opportunities for the government, right?

Like it's now able to properly roll out its renewables plus gas plan.

That makes it harder and harder.

What's the coalition going to be opposing as they accelerate that rollout, Jacob?

And then the other thing which I want to bring into this is at the moment, we've got a new environment minister in Murray Watt.

He's, you know, Mr.

Fix is kind of the persona he has.

He's going to be putting the hard word on Susan Lee, isn't he, for a deal on environment laws, which will be her first legislative test as leader to show is this new modern Liberal Party interested in actually getting better environment laws or

will she be sort of pushed around and not able to do something, which will be a problem for her.

That's how I see it, Jacob.

And I think the PM's ready for that first test.

Yeah,

I'll come back to that in a second.

Just on just one more point you were making there around the nuclear thing.

Remember that Coalition's plan that they announced at the end of last year was for nuclear to be part of the mix

from, I think, 2037 onwards, 2035 onwards, that sort of timeframe.

You've got to push that out now by another three years because that's the length of the political cycle.

So

just under three years from now, is the Liberal Party really going to run with a policy that doesn't have any effect on the grid until the 2040s, you know, in a practical sense.

In the meantime, there'll be another three years of very, very aggressive rollout of renewables.

There'll be more wind, more solar.

We'll be that much further down the path.

And those two things don't live together very well.

Solar, renewables, and nuclear don't play nice.

It's one of the reasons there are problems in Europe, countries like Spain in particular, where nuclear is essentially running constantly at a loss.

They don't make money out of it

because renewables are sitting alongside it.

And so they're in a sort of death spiral, those two things.

That situation is only going to get more extreme three years from now, not less extreme.

So the Liberal Party will have to find a way to explain all of that that's cogent and makes sense to experts and not just

on late-night TV shows, if you know what I mean.

I do.

So there's that.

I think it's going to be very interesting.

I think that's the big issue.

But then you also alluded to what Murray Watt, the new Environment Minister, is dealing with.

And that's a piece of leftover business from the first term.

It's actually leftover business from the last Morrison government, which commissioned a review.

Susan Lee was Environment Minister.

She got Samuel

Graham Samuels to do a review of environmental laws that are a quarter of a century old now.

They don't work.

Extinctions continue to go up.

We keep...

trashing land, we keep making terrible mistakes on that front.

But at the same time, we have these approval systems that take forever for otherwise perfectly legal, legitimate businesses' minds to get up.

And so

those two things have to be resolved and that's what this whole process is about.

It got kicked into the long grass before the last election because WA kicked up a stink about it.

But Albanese's made it clear he wants this done.

Murray Watt has been out of the gates very strongly, I would say, in the first week.

He's done more interviews and discussions and newspaper profiles on this topic than I think we saw in the first year of his predecessor.

So he's running hard on it, and one of the ways to get it done will be through the coalition.

And the coalition

is on board for parts of this.

Are they serious about getting this into law?

It's going to be a real, this is the first big test of the second term.

They've got 90, is it 94 seats now?

I think we're up to for Labor.

Extraordinary mandate.

Are the other side,

and by which I mean the Greens or the Coalition simply going to block, or does does Labor have some kind of

moral force here from voters?

And if you think that's true, then they probably need to move pretty quick, don't they?

You wouldn't want to dawdle on this one.

They need to use all of this political capital early.

That's absolutely right.

Especially as you know, they have other things that are looming today.

The announcement that the Productivity Commission is looking at things like, you know, company tax and other issues.

Clearly, there's going to be more in their to-do box, which will be hard stuff, productivity, hard reforms that they will be confronted with.

So they want to knock this one off, which is really a first-term thing, quite frankly, that didn't get done.

You want to get that done quickly and not have it loom again, and also get WA to play nicely.

Good luck with that.

Look, before we go,

Thursday afternoon, Queensland Senator Larissa Waters was chosen as the Greens leader by consensus after a very tight-lipped party room meeting.

Now, I listened to the party room as a listener rather than as a participant, and hats off to my excellent colleague Frank Kelly who predicted it.

And when I was listening, I was like,

brave woman.

It's always hard predicting who you think will win.

And then she got it.

She nailed it, like never loses her touch.

So Larissa becomes the leader of the Greens.

And Jacob, do you think that takes the Greens in a different direction?

She certainly has a very different communication style.

Like the way that it's been framed is perhaps she'll lean more into the environment, climate issues, you know, the green in the greens, right?

Rather than all of the sort of economic radicalism that perhaps we saw under Anna Bant and Max Chandler Mather.

Is it a different direction potentially?

To be honest, it feels more like a compromise or

a pick that both sides could agree on inside the Greens.

Because, I mean, look, it's a very small party room.

So you only need one person to be offside with someone else and then the numbers completely change in any sort of leadership sense.

You did have the people who are more on the sort of very pragmatic side of things.

Sarah Hanson-Young did a lot of deals with Labor in the latter half of last year to get all those bills through.

So she's a sort of can-do candidate

and was pushing very, very hard on those nature-positive laws.

For instance,

she convinced the Greens to reduce some of their demands for things like a climate trigger in exchange for these laws to apply to native forests in New South Wales, which turned out to be pretty difficult for Labor.

But she was trying to find a way through pushing back against some of the harder line Greens who want climate policy written into every single piece of legislation, even when it actually may not make a lot of logistical sense.

Labor always said there were other places that they deal with emissions with, including the safeguard.

And so you had her on one side, and then you had Maureen Faruqi, who is much more,

I guess you'd call it the old Lerian sort of, you know, watermelon greens, red on the inside, green on the outside, bit more activist, bit more

engaged in issues like Gaza, issues like equality, much more above environmental issues.

And that's the tension in the greens.

It's always the tension in the greens.

And I feel like Larissa Waters is a kind of safe down the middle sort of candidate

to bridge that.

She came through the middle, that's for sure.

It'll be interesting to see how she deals.

And I did like, and I thought it was a really smart line from her at a press conference.

I think she said, you know, I want to get shit done.

And look, yes, I like it when people swear.

I admit it.

But I feel like it's relatable.

It's a good description for how she plans to manage her leadership work.

Well, she'll be tested on that, I think.

And the government will call her out if she can't get the Greens to agree on

concrete, hard legislative change.

And top of that list is nature positive.

But there are plenty of other things that are going going to come up there's going to be sounds like tax reform might even see the light of day in this term uh heaven forbid heaven forbid it's not like we don't need it

so yeah she's she she will be held to that let's get stuff done get let's get shit done it's it's what voters actually want alongside all the noise and the colour of politics i think voters made it really clear the other interesting element just to end our podcast on for today is that the prime minister now really you know he faces faces in a different way obviously they have different status but you know the libs have kind of got lower numbers now so I can get away with this

two women leaders

it's very different isn't it to what he was facing Peter Dutton

pretty you know hyper masculine kind of dude and then also Adam Bant different kind of style of course but you know another dude now he is facing two women leading parties that he has to negotiate with and now he's the only bloke to be fair to the Prime Minister, he leads a party that is chock full of talented women.

So I wouldn't say they've dropped the ball on women.

And you'd have to say his absolutely closest advisors, closest sort of cabinet kitchen, cabinet

people he really relies on for that 3 a.m.

phone call, you know, when the shit hits the fan, like, who do you ring?

He's ringing Katie Galla, he's ringing Penny Wong, he's ringing people like that.

It's a really good point, Jacob, because

as I analyse men and leadership, that is a metric that I look at.

And I'm sure I know a lot of women who think it's important that women have power, whether it be the leader or close, would notice.

And it's a really important point.

You know, one of the criticisms that I heard about Scott Morrison for a long time, even from his own colleagues, by the way, not just commentators.

was that he doesn't have enough women in his ear.

You know, he doesn't have women in his close circles.

And that was a little odd.

And your wife doesn't count.

Right?

So, again,

like he didn't listen to many women.

Albanese does, even though he's a bloke.

And it'll be interesting to see how the gender stuff plays out because gender has been a big theme of this election again.

We'll have to wait a while, but we'll see it in question time, won't we?

That dynamic, the body language, the language that the Prime Minister uses about his opponent.

You know, he famously told Peter Dutton, what was it, sit-down, buff head,

you know, that sort of language.

It'll be fascinating to see

how he does it when he fronts up to.

And I can't help but share a view here because I have really strong feelings about this.

Absolutely, any sexism should be

called out if it comes, that hasn't happened yet, but like if it were to, but a robust kind of equality of debate.

I mean,

don't treat us like wallflowers.

Well, I mean, I've watched her in the chamber.

She goes hard.

She does, of course she does.

She's a senior political leader.

She's more than willing to

put it out there.

Yeah, and women, we are serious players

and should be treated as such.

I'm finished now.

Thank you, Jacob.

That's it for the party room for today.

Tomorrow, we'll be back for more.

And of course, if you have a specific question that you want to record and send in a voice note, send it to the partyroom at abc.net.au.

I'll be with Fran on Thursday.

I'm really looking forward to it.

I've missed her, but Jacob, I've had you every Monday to hang out with, so I'm doing okay.

See you, Jacob.

Take care.