Populism of the radical right and opposition to climate policy in Australia

Hostility to climate policy by populist radical right (PRRPs) parties has been widely observed yet there is no settled interpretation or explanation of the reasons for this hostility. Studies that seek to explain the rise of either radical right populism or climate denialism/scepticism are unable to shed light on the connections between these two phenomena. Moreover, none of the explanations for the rise of radical right populism in general, such as the ‘left behind by globalisation’ argument (an interest-based, structural argument) or ideological arguments based on nativism have identified opposition to climate policy as primary driver of radical right populism. The most significant study to date on these connections by Matthew Lockwood (2018) has suggested that hostility to climate policy is mostly a by-product of radical right nativist ideology, with hostility to liberal cosmopolitan elites playing a reinforcing role. However, very little attention has been devoted to analysing the political communications of PRRPs to ascertain how they express their hostility to climate policy, including the justifications they offer and the particular in-groups and out-groups that are constructed in relation to both nativism and populism. This paper seeks to address this deficit by providing the preliminary results of a combined content and discourse analysis of opposition to climate policy by PRRPs at the national level in Australia over the period 2015-2022. The analysis is guided by three questions. First, how is opposition to climate policies by PRRPs justified or legitimated? Second, to what extent does opposition to climate policy take a populist and/or nativist form? Third, to what extent is this opposition consistent with the interest-based structural explanation and/or ideology-based explanations that are invoked to explain the rise of radical right populism in general?