It would be tempting to laugh at Tony Abbott’s feelings about how carbon dioxide is secretly good for humanity, and his insights into the goat sacrificing habits of primitives subduing volcano gods – except it isn’t that funny.



The London outing is more strange and sad, and the strangeness and the sadness manifests itself on multiple fronts.

Let’s start with strange.

The bloke who hobnobbed with the climate sceptics at Global Warming Policy Foundation is the same bloke who took a decision as prime minister to sign Australia up to the Paris international climate agreement.

He’s also the same bloke who produced a set of initiatives in government which was badged as a policy to incentivise emissions reductions.

That policy still exists and it’s called Direct Action.

He’s also the same bloke who kept Australia’s renewable energy target, while abolishing the mechanism designed to give the market certainty to make future investments in baseload power generation.

Abbott has a whole lot of feelings, and some loyal media megaphones to help him spread his singular insights, but these are basic facts he can’t escape.

Abbott’s record in government points to him being a “warmist” (as Andrew Bolt is fond of characterising the modest band of weirdos who don’t think they know better than the world’s most eminent climate scientists).

London’s hardcore climate sceptics, frankly, should have laughed him out of the room.

Now let’s get to sad. Abbott’s climate frolic isn’t about a substantive issue. It’s about politics, because Australians haven’t had quite enough of politics, right?

Abbott wants to cause a ruckus. He wants to make enough ruckus to constrain Malcolm Turnbull from producing a sensible energy policy.

The lightbulb moment he’s trying to manufacture for colleagues is simple: the Abbott rationale is we can win the next election like I won the election in 2013 – by belting Labor on climate and energy policy.

The country, the national interest, actually needs the major parties to come to terms and settle the climate wars which have generated the current problems we are all experiencing in the energy market, and settle them in sensible fashion.

But politicians behind in the polls like to win elections.

Put simply, Abbott’s pitch is an appeal to baser instincts – a pitch that prolonged polarisation serves the Coalition’s immediate interests.

The former prime minister has also positioned himself in the public domain as a critical player in Turnbull’s ultimate settlement of energy policy, when the truth is all the heavy lifting on the new policy is happening completely outside Abbott’s orbit.

The actual decision makers in the government are heads down bums up on the new investment framework, swerving around the many obstacles, trying to land something vaguely credible, which doesn’t blow up the Coalition.

That’s the objective. Whether the government can produce something credible, given one of the core objectives has to be not blowing up the Coalition, is at this point seriously moot.

Meanwhile, Abbott’s persistent wrecking tactics allow Labor to claim with a veneer of truth and credibility that the former prime minister is driving the government’s energy policy rather than Turnbull – elevating his status from fringe agitprop activist to centre-stage.

In politics that sort of caper is called frontrunning, but I struggle for a word to adequately characterise that behaviour.

Perhaps we can just keep it nice, and say cynical?