Graham Readfearn theguardian.com, Tuesday 17 September

Tony Abbott's front bench team will not have a science minister – instead, science will come under the industry minister's portfolio. This doesn't bode well for climate change

Australia's prime minister-elect Tony Abbott announcing his incoming cabinet in Canberra on 16 September 2013. Photograph: Mark Graham/AFP/Getty

Climate change has become a political football in Australia in a game with few rules and, depending on your chosen sporting code, plenty of illegal spear tackling and studs-up challenges.

To continue with our sporting analogy, Australia’s prime minister elect Tony Abbott has just taken the climate change ball and locked it in a cupboard at the back of the official residence. And in the same cupboard, there’s a fancy-looking box with the word “science” written on it (there is some awesome stuff in there, including iPhones, advances in agriculture and the occasional medical breakthrough).

Abbott’s first cabinet, announced yesterday, has a front bench team comprised of ministers for defence, immigration and border protection, the arts, agriculture, health and sport and small business, among others. Yet there will be no minister for science. Abbott suggested to reporters this would come under the portfolio of Ian Macfarlane, who was yesterday named minister for industry. In opposition, Greg Hunt’s position was the shadow minister for climate action, environment and heritage. Abbott has taken his eraser to Hunt’s title, rubbing out the words “climate action” and “heritage”.

Science didn’t exactly stick out like a Higgs Boson in the previous government’s ministry either. Senator Kim Carr was officially the minister for innovation, industry, science and research in a department with a name so long it could be barely uttered in a single breath (OK – I exaggerate, it was the department of industry, innovation, climate change, science, research and tertiary education).

One Liberal MP disappointed with the lack of a science portfolio would be the member for Tangney, Dennis Jensen, who told the media last week he was the right person for the job-that-wasn’t. Jensen also had a few thoughts about climate change and my questions to him about his partial-endorsement of climate sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton remain unanswered.

Jensen won’t be alone in bemoaning the lack of an obvious portfolio for science. Around 68,000 “scientists and technologists” are also scratching their heads waiting for answers, according to Catriona Jackson, the chief executive of Science & Technology Australia, the body which represents them.

She said earlier: “Scientists around the nation are asking, where is the science minister?’” She told me the nation’s scientists would be “confused and disappointed” by the absence of an obvious ministerial position to represent a sector which, she said, was “at the heart of everything that government does”. She added that Abbott's plans for science will be clearer when the detailed administrative arrangements are released “any day now”, but we might presume Macfarlane’s portfolio will also include energy (another key word missing from the list of titles), giving the new industry minister a role very similar to that which he played under the government of John Howard.

Back in 2006, Macfarlane was named by academic, author and public intellectual Clive Hamilton as being amongst a “dirty dozen” of Australians characterised as the “greenhouse mafia” who had worked harder than any others to “prevent any effective action to reduce Australia’s burgeoning greenhouse gas emissions”. In an interview with the ABC in 2007, Macfarlane was pressed on his views about human-caused climate change and was unconvincing in his response.

Thankfully since then, the implications for policy makers from the science on human-caused climate change have become clearer (not that they weren’t clear back then). It’s happening, it’s us and we should take it really seriously. The fossil fuel industry will be hoping that Macfarlane’s views haven’t changed.

Hunt has always insisted that human-caused climate change is a serious issue. Now he just needs to go and ask the boss if he can get the ball out of the cupboard and do something meaningful with it. The signs are not good.

Australia, where is your science minister? | Graham Readfearn | Comment is free | theguardian.com