Kenneth Davidson Senior columnist at The Age

September 30, 2013

The latest climate change report is the most scrutinised document in the history of science, according to one expert who helped write it.

As Tony Abbott said ad nauseam during the campaign, the 2013 federal election was about three things: the onerous level of public debt, stopping the boats and abolition of the carbon tax.

Compared to Britain, and indeed most European countries, Australia has a climate denial government.

Ignored until after the election was the question of whether the moderate level of debt was a major factor in Australia avoiding the recessionary consequences of the global financial crisis. Then the new government (and its media apologists) segued effortlessly and without explanation into arguing that the deficit wasn't a life-and-death issue after all. In fact, the budget couldn't be brought back quickly into balance without risking undermining the still soft recovery.

'As Prime Minister, Abbott has demonstrated his contempt for climate science by an immediate wholesale assault on the climate change infrastructure left by the previous government.' Photo: Nic Walker

All the information needed to make that judgment was publicly available by the beginning of 2013. But to recognise the economic reality would have involved a different election narrative: that there was room for expansionary budgetary policies. There was no debt crisis. But the truth didn't fit the narrative that Abbott constructed to win the election: that the Labor government was incompetent and illegitimate.

On the matter of stop the boats, it is important to remember that one area where political leadership counts in Australia is how issues involving race are framed. This was shown by the leadership shown by Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam in response to the first wave of boat people after the Allied defeat in the Vietnam war. Their leadership has proved to be of long-term advantage to Australia.

By contrast, the latent xenophobic fear and resentment of the latest wave of boat people - fanned by both major parties during the 2013 election - will have long-term costs in terms of social solidarity, national self-respect and economic opportunities forgone, as well as damaging relations with Indonesia.

But this election campaign entered darker territory. On my reading of history, this was the first post-enlightenment election in which a core policy was based on denial of fundamental laws of science.

Edward Davey, the British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, is quoted in Pushing our Luck - Ideas for Australian Progress, published by the Centre for Policy Development, as saying: ''Two hundred years of good science - teasing out uncertainties, considering risk - has laid the foundation for what we now understand. It screams out from decade upon decade of research. The basic physics of climate change is irrefutable [and] human activity is significantly contributing to the warming of our planet.''

The Centre for Policy Development notes there is bipartisan agreement between Britain's Conservative-led coalition government and the Labour opposition that global warming is both a serious challenge (Britain is committed to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, from 1990 levels, of 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050) and a major economic opportunity. (Prime Minister David Cameron said this year that: ''It is the countries that prioritise green energy that will secure the biggest share of the jobs and growth in a low carbon sector set to be worth $4 trillion by 2015.'')

In contrast, Abbott went into the 2013 Australian election falsely implying that living standards were falling and that a major component in rising electricity prices was the carbon tax. He said the effect of policy action on climate change was ''to put at risk our manufacturing industry, to penalise struggling families, to make a tough situation worse for millions of families around Australia''.

By comparison to Britain, and indeed most European countries, Australia has a climate denial government. Abbott is on the record as saying ''the science isn't settled'', the world is ''cooling'', and ''whether the carbon dioxide is quite the environmental villain that some people make it out to be is not yet proven''.

As Prime Minister, Abbott has demonstrated his contempt for climate science by an immediate wholesale assault on the climate change infrastructure left by the previous government - closing the Climate Commission, instructing the Environment Department to prepare legislation to scrap the Climate Change Authority (which was independently responsible for allocating $2 billion a year for programs designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions), and sacking two department heads who had been involved in development of the emissions trading scheme.

Worse, Abbott has appointed the former head of the ABC and the Australian Stock Exchange, Maurice Newman, as chairman of the government's Business Advisory Council. Newman recently complained (in The Australian Financial Review on September 17) about the former government's cavalier attitude to the carbon tax ''and related climate myths''. He went on to say: ''The money spent on agencies and subsidies pursuing these myths was wasted. Their legacy continues to undermine Australia's international competitiveness.''

Rubbish. Action by the previous government to impose a price on carbon was a small step to improve Australia's long-term viability as a wealthy country. Dismantling these measures is a futile defence of early 20th-century industrial capitalism.

Australia cannot make the transition to a low-carbon, post-industrial state when we have a governing elite that is hostile to established science and therefore prepared to back Abbott's ideological obsessions.

As David Spratt, the co-author of Climate Code Red - the case for emergency action, has pointed out, Abbott successfully used the politics of fear to win the 2013 election. ''The challenge for the opposition is to construct a narrative that recognises this apprehension and fear and provides a clear path to climate safety so that Howard's battlers become safe climate champions,'' Spratt says.

It's a difficult but essential task.

Kenneth Davidson is a senior columnist for The Age.