Editorial
The sweet spot

Mostly sweet spot is a sporting term, used to described the optimum point at which a bat would make contact with a ball. It had an earlier, fleeting use in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island: “this here is a sweet spot, this island – a sweet spot for a lad to get ashore on”. Later it would be used by American oil barons to describe productive wells.

The latter two references are most germane to Anthony Albanese’s use of the phrase this week, the language of pirates and fossil fuel giants. Announcing his government’s 2035 climate target, he said: “We think we’ve got the sweet spot. There will be criticism from some who say it’s too high; there’s some who will say that it’s too low.”

One of the mistakes of politics is the belief that if people are unhappy with a decision then it represents a successful compromise. Another mistake is the view that compromise is the measure of good leadership.

Labor’s target is an eight-point window that won’t achieve net zero. It is what happens when you listen to business rather than science. Even the top of the target is shy of what is necessary. The bottom is a disaster.

The Climate Change Authority had earlier modelled a target up to 75 per cent. This is the level advocated by good science. Instead, the government talks about what is achievable, as if it doesn’t have a say in what this word means. The technology to achieve net zero already exists and so the only impediment to this goal is ambition. Albanese puts both ideas in the one sentence, balanced on a fulcrum of mediocrity: “This is ambitious, but it’s achievable.”

The new target follows the 2030 target, which is itself insufficient and which the country will very likely miss. That failure is already disguised by the sham market for offsets and other fraudulent accounting. The real term reduction is much less.

Meanwhile, the government continues to be warned about the effects of climate change. Heat deaths will become commonplace, as will flooding. National security will be compromised, the degree to which the government will not say, refusing to release the report it commissioned on this.

These issues are compounding. The missing of the 2030 target will undermine the 2035 target and both are inadequate to achieve a net zero target by 2050. None of it is reversible. It only gets worse. The calamity only gets greater.

In sport, when the ball hits the sweet spot, it is only good for one side. The other loses. This is the reality of Albanese’s target, a compromise of expedience over evidence, of cowardice over vision, of today over a plan for tomorrow.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 20, 2025 as "The sweet spot".

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