If the Turnbull government had been elected in 2013, there can be no doubt that illegal immigration would now be near EU proportions and the CO2 tax would have morphed into an ETS, running down industry and indeed the nation. Yet Australian coal would continue to produce CO2 with impunity provided it were burnt offshore. In return for taking the prime ministership, Turnbull had to promise to keep Abbott’s achievements. But subtle changes are being made in anticipation of two events. One is the mandate of heaven which will descend upon Mr Turnbull after the likely election victory that the Liberal polling prior to Canning indicated would have been Abbott’s. The second is the Parisian CO2 emissions extravaganza set to impose a pattern of onerous legal obligations to reduce such emissions. This is despite global warming being long stalled and arguments we’re on the cusp of global cooling. Only a few countries, such as Australia, actually take such obligations seriously. But as the price of their essentially paper promises, canny Third World governments are insisting on over $100 billion ‘compensation’. As with most foreign aid, consultants and various oligarchs will prosper. And as with the tsunami which ravaged Indonesia, most resource rich non-Western governments will keep their money bags firmly closed.

The Turnbull government is distancing itself from anything questioning global warming orthodoxy.

First the enquiry into the questionable ‘homogenisation’ of past recorded temperatures is no more. A grant for a research centre headed by the internationally distinguished Bjorn Lomborg −neither a ‘denier’ nor a ‘sceptic’ − has been withdrawn. His mortal sin is he dares ask the heretical question: ‘What are the most effective policy responses to CO2 emissions?’

Not only is the science closed, Senator Wong, so is the solution. Pointing out that by 2040, the cost of all governments’ sevenfold increases in solar and wind energy will be $US2.5 trillion, he says the UN model predicts the temperature will fall by… 0.0175C. Now all Lomborg does is to suggest better ways to spend this.The centre was eventually to have been at Flinders University, where the Vice Chancellor showed courage in the face of a modern version of the Witches of Salem which has emerged among various student representatives and self-selected concerned academics. Now the Turnbull government has joined the barbarians, deciding Australians must hear nothing about better ways to spend the billions of dollars of their money which the government is pouring down the drain.

The 25-year-old Assistant Minister for Innovation, Wyatt Roy, has solemnly declared that ‘we need to change how we do business in this country’. We need a cultural change, he says, with the next generation of Australians taking a bit of a risk and starting their own business. Elected to parliament at the age of 20 with the endorsement of the then leaders Tony Abbott and Warren Truss, Roy did not complete his education and appears to have no business experience. He has however obtained excellent experience in plotting secretly against his prime minister. Presumably the cultural change will be Machiavellian.

In the meantime, Christopher Pyne has been made Pyne’s über minister. He says Malcolm Turnbull has already told him to release his ‘inner revolutionary’, no doubt that same revolutionary which allowed him to plot so successfully and secretly against his own prime minister. The ever indulgent Turnbull has even told Pyne not to worry about how to pay for the big ideas. So he’ll be doing what no sensible government ever does, picking winners in the Turnbullian tradition. Like replacing incandescent globes with mercury and turning irrigation water over to the speculators, an ideological obsession which is now so seriously damaging our agriculture. Or keeping and blowing out Labor’s NBN folly instead of turning it over to where it so obviously belongs, the private sector. Christopher Pyne became notorious as manager of opposition business by rising like some perpetual jack-in-the-box making vacuous and disruptive points of order. As education minister he proposed the deregulation of the command economy which is higher education. Prices were to be covered by taxpayer subsidies and HECS loans, a proposal redolent of the Fanny Mae Freddie Mac fiasco which almost brought down the financial system. The PM’s right, minister, don’t worry about the money− you never did.

As a former Sydney Grammar student and Rhodes scholar, Malcolm Turnbull has had a good education. This makes it more surprising that he sometimes makes some significantly ill-informed statements on major occasions. In 2007 he damned the 1788 settlement as a ‘gulag’. But if he had bothered to look at the very first civil law case decided in 1789, he would have realised that this was brought successfully by two convicts against one of the ship captains in the First Fleet. When, pray, did that ever happen in the long history of the Soviet gulag or anything equivalent? When Phillip set foot on Australian soil, he brought the rule of law.

On the terrorist murder at Parramatta he even claimed there’s a Golden Rule which every religion, every faith and every moral doctrine understands: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. A Christian principle, this has nothing to do with Islam, which is hardly the religion of peace politicians keep claiming it is. When Minister Sussan Ley said this on Q&A, a renowned international expert on comparative religion quietly and calmly waited for a few minutes and then pointed out that this is ‘just not true’. Islamic texts, unlike the teachings of Jesus set out in the New Testament, provide for the legitimisation of violence. Peace is only achieved when all are subjugated under Sharia law. So today Christians are the subject of the most appalling persecution across the Muslim world.

In the context of this, and with Christianphobia rampant throughout the Middle East, the Abbott government determined that the intake of Syrian refugees must come from persecuted communities.

The Turnbull government must be kept to account on this. To say this will require someone of the courage of, say, Senator Bernardi is to risk a tsunami of tweets, but sometimes, you have to accept the consequences.