A few days ago, drowned out by election rhetoric on axing carbon pricing, axing carbon pricing and axing the carbon tax, Australia recorded its hottest 12-month period on record.

This came hot on the heels (pun intended) of the hottest summer ever recorded in Australia, which featured the most widespread extreme heat wave the country's Bureau of Meteorology and the country's rural firefighters had ever had the pleasure to document or fight.

One study in a leading journal found that human emissions of greenhouse gases had increased the chances of that heat wave occurring by as much as five times.

Also earlier this year, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit 400 parts per million for the first time in millions of years. The speed at which we're pumping this stuff into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels takes a remarkable analogy to fully understand.

"Such a growth rate of atmospheric greenhouse gases is extremely rare in geological history," writes the Australian National University's Dr Andrew Glikson, an expert in ancient climates. "The only analogue is the excavation of billions of tons of carbon from carbonate and shale formation hit by asteroids, such as the K-T impact 65 million years ago and massive global volcanic eruptions."

In three weeks, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its latest major summary of the science of climate change.

It's been five years since the last summary, but the widely reported leaked draft (which I also happen to have a copy of) suggests the IPCC will say pretty much what it said last time, only with more certainty.

We should all know the impacts by now - sea levels are rising, the planet is gaining heat, the Earth's major ice sheets are melting and the oceans are becoming more acidic.

Yet despite all this and more, climate change never got past first base during Australia's mercilessly long election campaign, which mercifully ends on Saturday.

Beyond the occasional one-line platitude, the fundamental challenge of cutting our fossil fuel use and being part of a global effort to cut the risk of impacts such as destabilising societies was, well, just a bit meh.

The Coalition, led by its conservative Liberal leader Tony Abbott, uttered the phrase "axe the carbon tax" with almost as much regularity as the breaking of temperature records. Yet the actual reason for the policies - averting dangerous climate change - was rarely mentioned.

Axing the carbon price legislation, we were repeatedly told, would help ease "cost of living" pressures. Just don't mention how the legislation includes measures to compensate the vast majority of taxpayers for any modest price rises.

In an attempt to take the heat out of the politics, Labor leader and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced he would end the fixed-price period of the carbon legislation one year earlier than planned.

This would mean that Australia's carbon price would be set by the market and linked to the European carbon price. Instead of polluters paying $24.50 for emitting a tonne of greenhouse gases in 2014/15, they would instead pay more like $6.

This move would ease the cost of living pressures, said Rudd, apparently forgetting a key chunk of his party's own policy.

The Coalition has struggled to explain its own "Direct Action Plan" to cut Australia's emissions by five per cent by 2020.

The Coalition's plan will spend a maximum of $3.2 billion on projects to cut emissions, which it hopes will deliver the required cuts.

If implemented, the policy asks the taxpayer to bear the burden of pricing greenhouse gas pollution rather than the corporations doing the polluting.

Two studies have found Direct Action will likely fall several billion dollars short of being able to deliver the promised cuts, but Abbott has ruled out spending more.

Direct Action runs a very real risk of becoming either a giant budget black hole or a policy that fails to deliver the five per cent cut.

How easy it will be for Abbott to repeal the current carbon rice legislation will depend on who holds the balance of power in the Senate. The Greens hope it will be them.

But Australia's biggest contribution to the global climate change problem – that is its burgeoning ambition to lead the world in coal and gas exports – continues to be entirely ignored by both Labor and the Coalition. The scene of this export boom is the Queensland coast and the imperiled Great Barrier Reef.

While both parties released policies they claimed would protect the reef, the Australian Marine Conservation Society has pointed out that neither policy (Labor or the Coalition) dared tackle the reef's key enemy – the ongoing and planned industrialisation and dredging along the coastline to make way for coal and gas export facilities which will, in turn, drive climate change.

When Australians vote on Saturday, they might ask themselves whose policies they're actually voting for.

As I reported over on DeSmogBlog back in March, the climate sceptics at Australia's free-market "think tank" the Institute of Public Affairs released a document suggesting virtually every climate change function in Federal Government agencies should be cut or axed entirely.

If Tony Abbott wins government, as is expected, then his current policy platform on climate change will see the IPA tick-off many of its suggestions.

The IPA, which has long-standing connections to the Liberal party, does not reveal its funders but has been a central organisation in spreading misinformation on climate change science while fighting any proposals to regulate emissions.

In April, Tony Abbott and News Corporation executive chairman Rupert Murdoch both addressed the IPA's 70th anniversary dinner. Abbott was pictured kneeling down at Murdoch's shoulder.

"Rupert Murdoch is a corporate citizen of many countries, but above all else, he's one of us," Abbott told the audience.

He went on: "In the Garden of Eden that Adam and Eve could do almost as they pleased but freedom turned out to have its limits and its abuses, as this foundational story makes only too clear. Yet without freedom we can hardly be human; hardly be worthy of creation in the image of God."

Exercising this freedom, a few months later Murdoch's newspapers went strong and hard on their front pages in favour of Abbott while attacking Rudd.

"Australia Needs Tony," read one News Corp. Australia front page.

On Twitter, Murdoch wrote: "Conviction politicians hard to find anywhere. Australia's Tony Abbott rare exception. Opponent Rudd all over the place convincing nobody."

Both the Coalition and Labor have adopted another IPA "idea" to lower taxes and regulations in the north of the Australia to encourage the likes of Asia's richest woman Gina Rinehart to dig more mines.

I mention Rinehart because in fact, her lobby group Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision conceived this policy.

ANDEV has been campaigning on the issue since April 2010 and the IPA has confirmed that it was paid to partner with ANDEV to further push the proposals. Now it has bi-partisan support.

But whatever happens beyond Saturday, it's worth thinking about how Australia will be seen in the next round of United Nations climate change negotiations – that's Poland in November, Lima in 2014 and then the key meeting in Paris in 2015.

Failing to tackle rising emissions from mining and burning coal and gas should see Australia marked as a hypocrite.

If Australia is led by a Government doing nothing meaningful to tackle fossil fuel burning on its own shores while backing an export boom, then who knows how the country will be branded?