Malcolm Turnbull has called on Scott Morrison to step up his response to catastrophic bushfires fuelled by climate change, declaring that emergency management in Australia needs to be restructured because the threat is now a “national security issue”.

Before a speech to an energy conference on Tuesday where he is expected to lament that climate change has become “a political battlefield”, Turnbull told the ABC on Monday night the Morrison government had to provide hands-on leadership and coordinate a national response to a bushfire emergency, which has claimed six lives and destroyed more than 680 homes, and is expected to intensify in coming days as summer temperatures breach 40C.

“When Australians’ lives are at risk, when they are being threatened, when their families and their homes and their crops and properties and everything they hold dear is being put at threat – that’s a national security issue,” Turnbull said on Monday night.

“If it isn’t a national security issue, what is? The national government has to provide leadership. Obviously the federal government can’t do everything but the federal government’s job is to lead and this is an issue that needs leadership.”

The former prime minister said the management of bushfires in Australia was traditionally a matter for state and local governments, with the fire events managed by a largely volunteer workforce.

While paying tribute to the fire brigades working around the clock to manage the emergency, Turnbull said the current structure was no longer fit for purpose in an environment where global warming fundamentally changed the risk assessments; where the fires would get worse. “We can’t kid ourselves that we’re not going to face more and hotter fires. That’s the consequence of global warming.

Six people are dead and hundreds of homes have been lost. With more hot days ahead, is it time for a national crisis management plan? (1/2) #QandA pic.twitter.com/BjNiY2hewH — ABC Q&A (@QandA) December 9, 2019

“That is what you get if you have a hotter and drier climate, more fires and hotter fires. So we have to review the measures we’ve got to defend ourselves against fires and upgrade and improve them, because the challenge has changed. You can’t keep on responding in the same way you have in the past.”

Turnbull said Australians needed to understand the seriousness of the fires and the consequences of the changed environment. “These fires can be 1,000C. They will melt everything except steel.”

He recounted his experiences visiting the scene of the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria a decade ago. “We saw cars which had been caught up in the fire which people had been in, and there was nothing left except the steel,” he said. “The glass had melted and flowed down over the car, over what was left of the dashboard and the floor.

“The aluminium and the wheels had melted and it was left run out on the ground. That is what our firefighters and our communities in rural areas and areas around our cities are facing.”

Turnbull said when he was prime minister, and there were truck attacks launched in Europe by terrorists, he had thought it prudent to bring together state leaders, state police, local government and the private sector to develop a crowded places counterterrorism strategy to try to prevent copycat events in this country.

He said a similar adaptation was required for disaster management. “We can’t kid ourselves that we’re not going to face more and hotter fires. That’s the consequence of global warming.”

Turnbull continued to argue on Monday night, as he did in a broad-ranging interview with Guardian Australia late last month, that the Coalition struggled with the reality of climate change. He said the government roiled “because there is a group within the Liberal party and the National party who deny the reality of climate change”.

Asked if Morrison and other ministers had declined until recently to meet with a vocal group of retired fire chiefs because they styled themselves Emergency Leaders for Climate Action, Turnbull said he wasn’t there to “run the ruler over Scott Morrison’s appointments diary”. He said: “Whether you have the meeting or not, the bottom line is you’ve got to address the issue.

“We’ve got all the tools. What the problem is that people are treating, on the right, they are treating what should be a question of physics and science and economics and engineering as though it were an issue of religion and belief. And it’s nuts.”

Six people are dead and hundreds of homes have been lost. With more hot days ahead, is it time for a national crisis management plan? (2/2) #QandA pic.twitter.com/tmbdVc6WCG — ABC Q&A (@QandA) December 9, 2019

The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, appearing on the same program, echoed Turnbull’s critique. Albanese said he had written to Morrison three weeks ago calling for a national response. “He wrote back to me saying it wasn’t required, and that everything was in hand, and quite clearly it’s not.”

Albanese said greater coordination was needed because wildfires like the ones Australia is now experiencing did not recognise state boundaries. “At the moment, there is a single fire that is burning from the Hawkesbury right up to Singleton, a single fire.

“This is connected with climate change. To say that is to not dismiss the need to deal with the immediate, which is keeping people safe, keeping property safe, the immediate response, but we need to accept that we need adaptation, we need mitigation and we also need a long-term plan to deal with climate change, because you have areas that are burning that have not burnt before, because they’re drier, because of what’s been happening on this continent in recent times – this is an emergency. It’s affecting our security.”

Labor has called for an urgent Council of Australian Governments meeting to ensure Australia has the water-bombing aircraft, volunteer incentives and other measures necessary for the future but, speaking to the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, the government’s leader in the Senate, Mathias Cormann, said the government was already responding as needed.

“If and when additional support is required, then, of course, we would consider that, but right now as we speak, you know, we obviously planned for this bushfire season and we have put significant measures in place and we have put significant measures in place for the future too, to better address, you know, these sort of emergencies into the future,” Cormann said.

Turnbull on Tuesday will address an energy conference in Sydney, and is expected to argue that southern Australia will face more heatwaves, fires, floods and droughts in the coming decades, with “a huge impact on our water and food security, ecosystems, transport, health and tourism”.

“We in Australia, more than many if not most countries, are facing the actual lived experience of climate change, and yet the debate, particularly in Australia, is stuck – with many, particularly on the right of politics and the rightwing political media, refusing to acknowledge the science, instead stubbornly – and blindly – holding to their political positions.”