Washington: Former prime minister Tony Abbott has downplayed the contribution of climate change to the Australian bushfire crisis, telling a US audience he believes the link between extreme weather events and carbon emissions has become akin to a religious dogma for many people.

"His style sometimes grates but he has been a very good president," said Tony Abbott of Donald Trump.

In a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, Abbott also heaped praise on US President Donald Trump, essentially endorsing him for a second term in the White House.

"I'm not one of those people who sees the current bushfires as confirmation of all we've ever feared about the changing climate," he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Washington on Tuesday (Wednesday Australian time).

"I see the current bushfires as the sort of thing that we are always going to be prone to in a country such as ours - a land of droughts and flooding rains as the poet [Dorothea Mackellar] said all those years back."