In this interview, Robyn Eckersley discusses the research and findings of the recent article in Environmental Politics – Nationalism, populism and climate scepticism in Australia: comparing radical and conservative, centre-right discourses.
Congratulations on your recent article! What is the key message that you hope people take from this research?
There are two key messages.
The first is that nationalist populism is not confined to radical right populist parties, who have added opposition to climate policy to their playbook. Conservative centre-right parties (like the Liberal-National Coalition in Australia) are also recruiting it to legitimate their opposition to climate policy, and these parties are more established, more numerous and more consequential for climate policy.
Second, our discourse analysis deconstructed how nationalist and populist discourses ‘work’, how they are mutually enforcing and how they garner their legitimacy. The take-away for policy makers is that populist claims should not be dismissed (irrespective of whether they are genuine or disingenuous), and that they can be addressed or mollified by just transition policies based on more extensive participation by those most affected before decisions are made. In contrast, exclusionary nationalism is a major threat to the Paris Agreement and should not be pandered to or appeased.
You found that ‘extractivist resource nationalism,’ not ethnonationalism, is doing the heavy lifting against climate policy in Australia. Does that make it harder to counter because it looks like a legitimate economic argument rather than fringe ideology?
Yes, ‘extractivist resource nationalism’ was indeed doing the heavy lifting in the discourses of Pauline Hanson (leader of Australia’s radical-right populist party) and our sample of climate sceptics in the Liberal-National Coalition. In both cases we found linkages between national and resource sovereignty, political nationalism and economic prosperity to underpin the claim that fossil fuels must be exploited to the maximum. The discourses also valorised fossil fuels (our coal is high-quality coal) and the ‘hardworking’ people in the fossil fuel industry (bosses and workers) for doing nation-building work. These claims also cast proponents of climate policy as betrayers of the nation, set upon undermining this hard work with costly policies that will lead economic ruin.
However, in our theory section we traced the historical connections between resource extractivism and white nationalism by highlighting Australia’s history as a settler-colonial state. Australia was seen by the British colonisers as ‘terra nullius’ (empty land belonging to no-one), with rich resources available for extraction via farming and mining. This not only erased the First Nations but also established a colonialist posture towards the land and its original inhabitants. A ‘White Australia policy’ was a founding policy of federation in 1901 and it remains central to Paul Hanson’s One Nation Party platform.
So, the absence of any direct recruitment of white ethnonationalism should not be taken as a sign that it does not exist. Moreover, at least one climate sceptic from the Coalition tried to make an indirect link to ethnonationalism by claiming that unsustainable migration was a bigger threat to Australia than carbon dioxide. However, we concluded that the main reason ethnonationalism was mostly absent in the discourses is because it is very difficult to directly link opposition to climate change with opposition to immigration without performative contradiction. For example, opposing climate-induced migration would amount to an admission that climate change is both real and harmful, which is denied!
Your central finding is a remarkable convergence between the PRR and the CCR sceptic faction. But you also found minor divergence: Hanson was slightly more open to renewables, Canavan more hostile. Does that gap matter for climate policy, or is it noise?
The gap was not significant. Hanson was open to renewables ‘at some point in the future’, but not at the expense of fossil fuels. In contrast, Matthew Canavan, whose discourse was the most developed and emblematic of the climate sceptics, vigorously defended fossil fuels over renewables on grounds of price, reliability and environmental footprint.
Incidentally, as an update, Matthew Canavan is now the new Leader of the Nationals Party (elected in March 2026). He has just launched his ‘Patriot’s Agenda for our National Economic Revival’ that promotes ‘energy abundance’. Notably, renewables are now in the energy mix, but he is still prioritising fossil fuels and nuclear energy, and doubling down on his celebration of Australia, and all things made in Australia so we can move from extraction to manufacturing. He is even calling for more Australian babies, so that Australia does not have to rely so much on migrants!
You show that climate scepticism is itself a populist claim, attacking scientific expertise as elitist. With Trump Presidency withdrawing from the Paris Agreement again, does “epistemological populism” now have a global wind at its back?
Epistemological populism entails valorising the common sense and ‘practical knowledge’ of the ‘people’ (in our case study, typically those who live and work in regional Australia in the mining and agricultural industries) against the knowledge claims of ‘dodgy climate scientists’ and other experts who cannot be trusted. This is a different strategy from cherry-picking contrarian science, which seeks to draw on the authority of science to undermine climate science. We found examples of both in our analysis, but the latter is more of a throw-back to early repertoires of climate scepticism.
Yet we also found more general populist claims that move beyond questioning climate scientists and expertise: that regional Australians (especially those working in or otherwise dependent on the fossil fuel industry) are the forgotten people and/or the sacrificial lambs of the energy transition, who are not properly recognised or represented in the parliament by self-serving and out-of-touch urban elites.
Both types of populist claims play to the highly technocratic nature of many climate policies, so both have ‘wind in their back’, as you put it, because they both garner their legitimacy by appealing to some kind of democratic failure or lacking (whether genuinely or disingenuously). By blending these populist claims with nationalism, the latter is given respectability.
Finally, what’s next? Are you publishing more on this topic?
Yes, and it is a continuation of the same larger project on ‘Right-wing populism and the political feasibility of climate policy’, led by Dr Håkon Sælen, CICERO, Oslo and funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
The next project, with Guri Bang and Ida Marie Støp Meland, takes the form of a cross-national and longitudinal study that compares the evolution of climate oppositional discourses in the legislature by conservative centre-right politicians in the USA and Australia over the period 2011-2025. We are interested in tracking and comparing the ‘ideological morphing’ of conservatism in its opposition to climate policy in each country. We are also exploring the idea of ‘variety of conservative-nationalist populism’ in states with significant fossil fuel dependencies and adversarial, two‑party‑dominant political systems.
Bio
Robyn Eckersley is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor in Political Science at the University of Melbourne and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. She has published widely in the fields of environmental political theory and International Relations, with a particular focus on ecological democracy, the greening of states, and the ethics, politics and governance of climate change. She received a Distinguished Scholar Award (Environmental Studies Section) at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in Toronto 2019.
