Tony Abbott has the politicians, the commentariat and other elites very worried, and not just about energy.They know that what he is saying is exactly what so many Australians, including traditional Labor voters, want to hear.

When the election is close and if the polls remain locked into a Labor victory,  just watch Alan Jones’s ‘bedwetters’ choose between going over the cliff with Malcolm or saving their seats and their skins. Tony has the trifecta: a popular but not populist agenda, by far their best campaigner and the easy winner of the ‘beer test’, so accurate in US presidential elections. In trying to isolate Abbott, the elites have shown themselves to be either incompetent or bald-faced liars with every galah in every pet shop across the country  chanting endlessly: ‘It was Abbott who signed us up to Paris.’

Had he signed the Accord, as any law student would know, we would still not have been legally committed. That only happens on ratification, which unlike the US, is an executive act.

But to set the record straight, Tony Abbott did not sign the Accord. The Turnbull government did. Instead of just sending an email, they sent Greg Hunt to a  mass signing ceremony in New York on 22 April 2016. Hunt claimed, ridiculously, that this useless and wasteful event was ‘the best outcome on the first day of any treaty in human history’. Presumably, this was to justify the enormous cost and the massive CO2 emissions of the jet-setters.

The point is, the Abbott-haters couldn’t be bothered to check the facts or they were lying — Abbott did not sign us up to Paris. He could not have; the Paris Conference only opened almost three months after he was stabbed in the back.

We only became legally committed to Paris on 11 November, 2016 when the Turnbull government ratified it.

In doing that the Turnbull government  demonstrated a degree of incompetence and a lack of concern for the nation rare in the annals of Australia. This was just after Donald Trump was elected,  and had famously promised to pull out of the Paris Agreement. The Turnbull government would have known that if he did, at least 50 per cent of the world’s CO2 emitters would then be in no way committed to reducing emissions, with many, if not most, of the others unlikely to fulfil their obligations.

So did the ministers assume that Trump was like most politicians and wouldn’t honour his promises? Surely they should have waited to see what he did.

But they didn’t. You see, Foreign Minister Bishop and Energy Minister Frydenberg were scheduled to make a hardship flight to yet another global warming bash in that exotic Moroccan city, Marrakech. Can you imagine the applause when Julie and Josh told them we had ratified?

Unfortunately for them, Trump has since turned Paris into a complete dead letter.

The politicians all know that even if we closed down all of our CO2 emissions, the world’s climate would hardly be affected. They  know— if they don’t they shouldn’t be there— that the various computer projections have wildly overestimated the mild global warming trends which have stopped for decades and which may well reverse into global cooling.

They all know, or should know, that extreme weather events have been as they always have been, the result of natural variability.

And  despite their continuous condemnation of ordinary Australians’ emissions, the politicians indulge themselves in building scandalously massive CO2 footprints through totally unnecessary travel and luxurious living in such places as Marrakesh and New York.

Yet they are determined to make energy generally and electricity particularly both unreliable and extremely expensive for their fellow Australians, thus destroying much of our industry and agriculture, ending jobs and increasing hardship for the poor. On this and on the rest of their key policies, the LINOs (Liberals In Name Only), Labor and the Greens politicians are determined to turn us into, if not the Venezuela, the Argentina of the South Seas.

In a just world, the politicians would not be able to do so much damage to Australia with impunity, sailing off into an early golden sunset of lobbying and jobs for the boys and girls. They’d be impeached and have to pay for their mismanagement.

We need significant change to the governance of this country. The solution is to do what our ancestors did to achieve federation when better politicians then still failed to achieve that. Under the Corowa Plan we elected a convention of unpaid delegates to design a constitution for the people to decide on.

We are overdue in doing that again so we can vote on  proposals to make the politicians —and the High Court — fully accountable.

Until then the politicians will contine to make a mess of government. Take the ‘solution’ just announced for the GST debacle. Treasurer Morrison began by mis-representing the problem, claiming the GST was introduced to give states stable revenue rather than relying on federal grants. The GST was a band-aid to cover the mess a centralising activist High Court created by deciding the states’ direct taxes were unconstitutional.

The states should have received what they collected. Instead a socialist principle was introduced to punish the efficient and reward the indolent, disguised with impenetrable verbiage as  ‘horizontal fiscal equalisation’.

In addition the states were landed with Canberra’s responsibility for plugging the budgets of their two profligate territories. So for each dollar collected in 2017, WA received 38c, the ACT $1.28, inexplicably, next door NSW 99c and the NT a massive $5.28.

Morrison opted for a lazy solution: put three more band-aids onto the band-aid that is the GST – top-ups, a safety net of 75c fully phased in in the never-never and borrowing over $7b of even more debt.

A real solution would be to return to federalist principles as the founders intended. Just doing that would significantly reduce the massive sums politicians pour down the drain in waste and duplication. Another reason to elect a convention.