Illustration: Simon Letch. But the fuming over Adani​'s Carmichael troubles might be even more rash. The laws in question are John Howard's. The idea that environmental groups can test governmental decisions in court is a markedly uncontroversial one because it recognises that environmental damage affects the whole country and cannot be confined merely to local landowners; and that if environmental protection is left only to individual locals, no meaningful environmental protection will take place. Sure, there's some chance such laws could be abused. Which is why the public service did a thorough review on how they've been working. Turns out they're working fine. "These provisions have created no difficulties and should be maintained," it concluded. "The question is whether these provisions should be expanded further." Hence, from 5500 projects, the laws have been used 33 times. Successfully, twice. That's a success rate of 0.04 per cent. Rounded up. Now, consider the government's language. It talks of "vigilante litigation", "endless legal sabotage", "bullies in the green movement" and an environmentalist "war against economic development". It is, of course gigantically hyperbolic. In the case of "vigilante litigation" it is literally nonsensical – like "gluttonous starvation" or "rapid-fire sluggishness". But it's also visceral in a way that is instructive. It suggests this is something more than garden variety politicking. There's a genuine, long-standing disdain here that has much to tell us about the current state of ostensibly conservative party politics. Much like section 18C, the Carmichael mine case taps into a much greater political mythology. These are not, in the Coalition's view, isolated cases at all. Rather, they are symbols of a more fundamental, thoroughgoing onslaught. Whether it be racial and ethnic minorities, or environmentalists, all are taken to be special interests whose claims threaten the liberal order of things. To resist these forces is therefore not to fix some mere technical flaw in this or that legislation. It is to defend the barricades against the evils of an unchecked collectivism that sits in direct contrast to our established capitalist ethos.

Nine coal mines are planned for Queensland's Galilee Basin. Credit:Glenn Hunt That's why the Abbott government so consistently posits the environment and the economy as opposites, even as the governments of America, Britain, New Zealand, and (broadly) Europe, don't. For Abbott, the environment matters, but not at the expense of the economy, to which it is subordinate. Carbon pricing only ever costs jobs, rather than creates them. And, of course, environmental protection laws can only ever be "green tape": a regulatory yoke around the neck of business, and not a means of protecting valuable assets that return economic benefits in the long term. Implicit here: environmentalists, and environmentalism, are simply not to be trusted. Their very motives must be suspect. So, it's "war" and "sabotage" and "bullying" and nothing more genuine than that. Illustration Andrew Dyson The "new religion" of the "extreme left" is how former Coalition senator Nick Minchin put it: the cloak that masks its real agenda to "deindustralise the Western world". Environmentalism, then, becomes the new communism, designed to implement vast new bureaucracies that control the free market and implement the will of the unelected.

You can see the ideological residue of the Cold War, here. And on one level, that makes sense. That was an era from which notionally conservative parties emerged ideologically triumphant, and in which the world accordingly made perfect sense. But as the Abbott government's woes suggest, things aren't so triumphant now. That world that made so much sense makes appreciably less sense now. The Cold War … was an era from which notionally conservative parties emerged ideologically triumphant, and in which the world accordingly made perfect sense. But … things aren't so triumphant now. That world that made so much sense makes appreciably less sense now. Some conservative parties, such as the Tories in Britain, have made the ideological adjustment, embracing at least the idea of a conservative environmentalism. But in Australia, as for the Republicans in America, such adjustments are scant. We're apparently fixed on the same binaries even as we're faced with a world that increasingly defies them. That's why the government is compelled to overstate everything, from the amount of investment Adani is promising to the number of jobs the project is meant to create, to the scale of environmentalists' "very well orchestrated and highly funded campaign". It's why the issue must become the very idea of the law that requires a thorough environmental examination, rather than the government's failure in this case to follow it. And it's why the government, having swept to power opposing a carbon tax, somehow finds itself increasingly at odds with the electorate on renewable energy and, to a lesser extent, climate change. It seems determined to see environmentalist concerns as fringe and radical; as a valid object of war. But war has its osmosis. If you're not careful, you eventually become the very thing you thought you were fighting.

Waleed Aly is a Fairfax Media columnist and winner of the 2014 Walkley award for best columnist. He also lectures in politics at Monash University.