From the subject of prime ministerial launches promising solutions for the moral challenge of a generation, to a lonely minister holding an afternoon press conference in the shadow of the nation's most revered public holiday: climate change policy has fallen so far in Australia's political life that the government gives a good impression of hoping we ignore it.

In this case, the low-key treatment probably makes sense.

Whatever the faults of the Labor-Greens-independents' carbon price scheme, it is designed to play Australia's part in a global push to cut carbon dioxide emissions out to the middle of the century.

The Coalition's "direct action" policy, by contrast, looks like a solution to a different problem - something shorter term, of much less magnitude and inherently political.