‘Contrary to the breathless assertions that climate change is behind every weather event, in Australia, the floods are not bigger, the bushfires are not worse, the droughts are not deeper or longer, and the cyclones are not more severe than they were in the 1800s. Sometimes, they do more damage but that’s because there’s more to destroy, not because their intensity has increased.’

There was much to applaud in Tony Abbott’s speech in London to Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, but this simple undeniable truth sits at the very heart of the great climate change con job. Reality stubbornly refuses to do what the Left has so hysterically promised and foretold it will do.

No sooner had climate change guru Dr Tim Flannery uttered his fateful lines about the rain that falls not being enough to fill our dams, thereby spurring a plethora of panicked state governments into splurging squillions of taxpayer dollars on unrequired and subsequently moth-balled desalination plants, than the rains did indeed begin to fall. By the Warragamba Dam-load. Where the alarmists had longed to convince us we were in the throes of the ‘greatest moral challenge of our lifetimes’, Nature’s answer came in the guise of what Australians have for centuries recognised as simply ‘the end of the drought’.

Now, of course, every weather event, including average cyclones and storms, or typical coral activity, is re-packaged by the green Left as proof of ‘catastrophic climate change’ when, as anyone over the age of thirty-five with functioning memory cells knows, they are simply part and parcel of the rich tapestry of extreme climate that Australians have both struggled with, adapted to and been awed by for millennia.

Yet the public are led to believe, on an almost daily basis, that we are hurtling towards some unimaginable and inescapable apocalypse of the climate gods. Worse, as Mr Abbott pointed out with his apt metaphor of ‘primitive people who once killed goats to appease the volcano gods’, it is everyday families and small businesses who must make the greatest sacrifices to their jobs, household budgets and quality of lifestyle in order to appease the voracious climate change industry and the carpet-baggers who sponge off it.

Clearly, the Australian Left won’t rest until we have deconstructed our industrialised economy and impoverished our citizenry in order to placate the Great Renewables Investment Volcano.

Sadly, however, it is not just Labor and the Greens who fit under the ugly sub-heading of ‘the Australian Left’. So too do the Coalition under their current leadership and ideological direction.

In what amounts to the greatest ever surrender by an Australian non-Labor Prime Minister to the insidious and debilitating forces of socialism, Malcolm Turnbull this week capitulated lock, stock and two air-conditioning units to the climate change farce. As was reported in the Australian: ‘Under a $36 million program to be launched today by Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, thousands of households in NSW, Victoria and South Australia will also be invited to voluntarily cut their energy use in return for incentives such as rebates on power bills.’

In other words, in a desperate attempt to prevent Mr Turnbull from having to sweat his way through a long, hot summer of power-cuts, blackouts and horror headlines, the government (with your money) will bribe the poor, the elderly and the infirm to suffer heat exhaustion instead.

This is capitulation worthy of some Venezuelan-style tin-pot socialist state. In Australia, we are blessed with an abundance of the cheapest energy on the planet, yet we are now paying the highest electricity prices on earth.And, for obvious reasons, it is those least-well off, or those whose businesses are struggling, who pay the highest relative price. Moreover, the Chief Scientist himself admitted to the Senate that even the most herculean efforts by Australia would reduce global temperatures by ‘virtually nothing’.

It is now clear that the Coalition is committed to the climate change orthodoxy and its only solution to our energy crisis is tinkering at the margins with hotchpotch, eccentric and unproven schemes, whilst lashing out at all and sundry who question the fundamentals of the climate change narrative.

Mr Abbott’s speech in London is evidence that, unlike many of his hapless colleagues, the former prime minister has recognised that pandering in any shape or form, or to any degree, to the climate change mantra can only ever have one outcome: higher electricity prices and a negative impact on families and businesses.

A recent Essential poll has only 7 per cent of Australian voters overall viewing ‘catastrophic climate change’ as a threat to their personal safety. Only 3 per cent of Coalition voters, and only 9 per cent of Labor voters.

The next election will be won in a canter by the political party – and leader – that ditches the Paris Agreement, scraps all ‘clean’ energy targets, and cancels all renewables subsidies.