It is hard to believe just how much time has been wasted.

Nearly 10 years ago the Australian featured on its front page a story thatsuggested concerns about climate change causing sea levels to rise were all a load of bull.

It cited Kevin Court, who was not, as you might expect, a climate scientist, but merely an 80-year-old Wollongong local who told the Australian that “I have swum at this beach every day for the past 50 years, and nothing much changes here. All this talk about rising sea levels – most of us old-timers haven’t seen any change and we’ve been coming down here for decades.”

Take that, science!

This week we were reminded just how little conservative media and political parties have progressed in that time.

Revealed: 'fierce' Pacific forum meeting almost collapsed over climate crisis Read more

A wasted decade of inaction for which all blame can be laid at the feet of editors of newspapers who have chosen to pursue conspiracy theory and ignorance over facts, and a political party happy to feed off and accentuate the results of that ignorance.

This week the Australian featured again a story suggesting fears about climate change were all for naught. This time the issue was the Great Barrier Reef and, wouldn’t you know, it all is fine.

Was this a report of a new study? Was it reporting of extensive research of the reef done by its environment reporter?

Of course not.

It was an article citing Sussan Ley, who, laughably, is Australia’s environment minister. Ley, after going for a snorkel on the reef out of Cairns, told the Australian that “I was expecting to see dead areas with a few patches of life. I saw the exact opposite to that.” She suggested “It gives me heart and hope that the future of this magnificent part of the world is a good one.”

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Ley is not the first federal parliamentarian to think that one snorkel on the reef is enough to dispute scientific reports on the devastation that is climate change.

Pauline Hanson did the same thing in 2016.

Yes, our environment minister is now someone who is basically mimicking Pauline Hanson, where anecdote is trumping science.

Perhaps she could read the position statement by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which notes that “the widespread impacts of climate change are already evident. In the northern two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park there were two consecutive years of mass coral bleaching and mortality in 2016 and 2017 with associated loss of marine life”.

It also notes that “climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef. If we are to secure a future for the Great Barrier Reef and coral reef ecosystems globally, there is an urgent and critical need to accelerate actions to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.”

At the same time this week, the prime minister was in Tuvalu at the Pacific Island Forum, doing all he could to ensure the issue of climate change was being fobbed off – by reportedly trying (and failing) to remove mention of climate change “crisis” and also removing mention of coal in the forum communiqué.

Perhaps this should not surprise us, but that does not mean we should accept it with a shrug. For just as Alan Jones’s vile misogyny, ignorance and lies on climate change , also on display this week, should not go uncriticised (even though we expect no better from him), we must continue to push for our government to acknowledge reality and then work to do something about it.

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Because while our conservative media and government is ignoring the issue, our major institutions are not.

This week the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank, Guy Debelle, gave a speech specifically about risks to the economy at the 14th Annual Risk Australia conference. He devoted one section to “climate risk”, in which he told the audience of risk managers “to take appropriate account of one risk that plays out over a longer horizon, namely climate risk.”

He also advised that “climate is a challenging risk to assess but an increasingly necessary one. Businesses need to take account of both the physical risks and the transition risks”.

He referenced information released this week by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which noted its regulatory guidance for company directors was to “adopt a probative and proactive approach to emerging risks, including climate risk” and “disclose meaningful and useful climate risk related information to investors”.

Such bodies don’t do these things for laughs or to please the greenies. They do it because they know climate change is real and that companies that ignore it could be held liable in the future.

It is why reinsurers (companies that underwrite insurance firms) very much take climate change into account. Earlier this year the world’s largest reinsurer, Munich Re, warned that the cost of insurance in areas likely to be affected by the impact of climate change – whether it be flooding, bushfire or increased hurricanes and cyclones – would cause them to have to increase their risk prices, which in turn could mean that “some people on low and average incomes in some regions will no longer be able to buy insurance”.

I can understand the government wanting to reassure people that there is still coral to see on the reef. But let’s not treat those same people like idiots.

Major businesses and institutions know the science is real and are acting accordingly. The people who live in the Pacific islands know only too well the reality of the science.

And yet our government, hand-in-hand with the editorial policies of major conservative media, remains wilfully ignorant.

After more than a decade we may expect such ignorance, but we must never accept it.

• Greg Jericho writes on economics for Guardian Australia

• This article was amended on 19 August to clarify that Gay Debelle gave the speech at the 14th Annual Risk Australia conference.