I only had one wish to Santa this Christmas. All I wanted was a Cop. I wanted Adelaide to win the hosting rights for next year’s climate conference.

Yes, I know the $2-billion cost would have been a monumental waste of taxpayers’ money. But the comic hypocrisy of the world’s elite flying in on private jets to lecture us about how we are climate criminals for wanting to drive a car or eat a steak could have been the final nail in the net zero coffin for Australia.

Just imagine Mike Cannon-Brookes missing another one of his company’s climate targets after flying in on a Bombardier Global 7500 from a Formula 1 race where he sponsors a team. Or, Twiggy Forrest’s hydrogen-fuelled superyacht having to anchor in the Great Australian Bight because it is too dangerous to dock at Port Adelaide. And then to top it off, Meghan Markle jetting in to lecture us about the perils of over-consumption.

Given that even net zero supporters estimate the cost of Australia getting to net zero at $9 trillion, if it helped end this monstrosity, the conference could well have been money well spent.

With my first Christmas wish dashed, I have not given up on my second wish that Australia gets a new energy minister in the new year.

The Prime Minister humiliated our Energy Minister in November by pulling out the rug from Australia’s bid to host next year’s climate summit, just as Chris Bowen was doing his best to make the case for it in Belem in Brazil.

The Prime Minister is now looking nervous on net zero. There is no doubt that his decision to jettison support for a $2-billion climate conference was because he is getting worried about defending his record on energy, which is a litany of failed promises and lost jobs.

Labor has had four years with no real challenge to their failing net zero agenda. That all changed this November when the Liberal and Nationals parties decided to oppose net zero. Suddenly, we have a real policy fight, and the Liberal and Nationals have a fighting chance of winning again.

The backflip on hosting Cop 31 was repeated a few days later when the government backed down on plans to lower speed limits on unsigned roads in rural areas. A few months earlier, the government had released a Regulatory Impact Assessment on whether speed limits should be reduced.

In that document, the government said that, ‘There is evidence to suggest that increased speed can increase fuel consumption and therefore increase CO2 emissions’ and that the government will ‘use the Australian Energy Regulator’s cost of carbon estimates’ (which hit a carbon tax of $179 per tonne) in its decision on whether to slow rural Australian drivers down.

The government, scared about our campaign that it had a plan for net zero speed limits, backed down again and dropped its plan on a Friday afternoon after a state and federal ministers meeting.

The idea of net zero has been on the back foot for a while, but it is in full-blown retreat now, as seen in the failure of the latest climate conference in Brazil. Once again, despite all the promises, nations have not agreed to phase out fossil fuels. Juan Gomez, a negotiator for Panama, said that the talks were ‘becoming a clown show’.

Whether or not that is true, these interminable climate talks deliver about as many useful conclusions on major policy topics as your average circus. This time the United States did not turn up and, almost in mockery, China asked developed countries to hit net zero ten years earlier, by 2040 – while it sets ever higher records for coal production. Indonesia has labelled the Paris Agreement ‘no longer relevant for Indonesia’. Indonesia’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change and Energy, Hashim Djojohadikusumo, said, ‘If the United States does not want to comply with the international agreement, why should a country like Indonesia comply with it?’

Middle Eastern countries refused to agree to any text in the final agreement in Brazil to phase out fossil fuels. So once again, the climate delegates leave in acrimony with their plans to end the energy sources that built the modern world dashed.

All of this was predictable before the conference. More than two-thirds of countries had not even submitted new climate targets, even though they were due in September. It makes the notion that the Liberal and Nationals dropping net zero would put us in contravention of the Paris Agreement a joke.

But despite the failure, Chris Bowen decided to join the losers of the conference in signing a new agreement with just 24 countries for a ‘Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels’. These 24 nations represent less than 10 per cent of the world’s global economic output, and none of them are in the top 15 of our trading partners.

Bowen’s agreement calls on countries to align ‘with the recent Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, which confirmed that States have a legal obligation to protect the climate, including by addressing fossil fuel production, licensing and subsidies.’’

That radical international court opinion is at odds with the Australian government’s own submission to the court, which said that, ‘Rather than prescribing particular action to control or reduce emissions, or imposing particular mitigation targets, these provisions [of the Paris Agreement] accord States discretion as to how they give effect to their “highest possible ambition” to achieve the reductions of greenhouse gases necessary to attain the temperature goal.’

Chris Bowen is now, in effect, a rogue minister on his own international forays. He has now been appointed as a kind of ‘co-president’ to organise the next international climate conference.

The one thing that gives some solace is that given his abject failure to lower power prices as promised, he has no hope of getting countries to agree to end Australia’s second and third-largest exports (coal and gas) anytime soon.

There is probably more chance of Santa personally delivering my Christmas presents than that happening. So, come on Prime Minister, give the country a much-needed Christmas gift in the form of a new, full-time Energy Minister for 2026.