He has never been among the shy and retiring elements of the Turnbull government backbench.

But Cory Bernardi has sounded an ominous warning to his Liberal Party colleagues for 2017 - he's going "all in" to bring about the type of political change that American voters were thirsting for when they put Donald Trump in the White House.

Fresh from a three-month stint on secondment to the United Nations in New York, the outspoken senator said it was not by design that he landed straight back at the centre of Australia's political debate this week, howling down talk of a revived emissions trading scheme.

He described the ETS debacle as the government "chasing policies that ingratiate it with the Greens" and just plain "economic suicide".