Mr Abbott signed Australia up to the Paris agreement in 2015. But after losing the prime ministership to Mr Turnbull, he said the nation should follow the lead of United States president Donald Trump and withdraw from the deal. Mr Abbott has held Warringah since 1994 and was returned in 2016 with a margin of more than 11 per cent. However polls have shown his position is under threat from Ms Steggall, a former Olympic skier turned lawyer, who has the backing of several climate action lobby groups including GetUp!. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has backflipped and now says Australia should stay in the Paris climate accord Credit:Jessica Hromas Speaking at the Sky News candidate forum on Friday, Mr Abbott said he believed until recently that pulling out of the Paris treaty was “the only way to break the emission obsession”, but “circumstances have changed”. “I think the government has lost its emissions obsession now that Angus Taylor is the energy minister. So I don’t think it is now necessary but I certainly think it’s important we get more baseload power into the system as quickly as possible,” he said.

Loading “I’m not calling for us to pull out [of Paris] … We’ve got a new Prime Minister and a new energy minister. “We had an emissions obsession that needed to be broken, and it has now changed.” Mr Abbott said he still believed Australia should not prioritise meeting emissions targets ahead of “bringing power prices down and ensuring we have reliability”. But he insisted that coal-fired power remained "the cheapest form of power”.

The CSIRO and the Australian Energy Market Operator said in December that existing coal plants are one of the lowest cost forms of power but new wind and solar farms will soon be cheaper, even without a carbon price. Mr Abbott was responding to comments by Ms Steggall that hydro-storage power – such as Mr Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 legacy project - was “cheaper than new coal-fired power stations”. Former Winter Olympian Zali Steggall is challenging Tony Abbott. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer Mr Turnbull, who is presently in London, took to Twitter to challenge Mr Abbott’s claims that coal-fired power was the lowest cost form of energy. “But it isn’t. Today the cheapest form of new dispatchable or base load energy is renewables plus storage,” he wrote.

“We are now able to have lower emissions and lower prices but we need to plan it using engineering [and] economics rather than ideology and innumerate idiocy.” In a second tweet, Mr Turnbull said the fossil fuel lobby "and their apologists" had tried to stop the Snowy expansion "because it delivers the massive storage which does make renewables reliable and this enable[s] our progress to lower emissions and lower energy prices". Climate change will be a headline issue at the May federal election, amid high voter concern over rising global temperatures, bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef and more frequent heatwaves and natural disasters. Tony Abbott and Zali Steggall at the Tourism and Transport Forum. Credit:AAP The Morrison government has pledged to reduce national emissions by 26 per cent by 2030, based on 2005 levels - in line with Australia's target under the Paris deal.