Illustration: John Shakespeare
Julia Gillard spent the past three years implementing a climate change policy she neither wanted nor believed in. The carbon tax was not her idea. She was doing the bidding of the Greens and independents as a condition of winning their support to form government.
And Tony Abbott was loving it. A business leader asked Abbott to reconsider his policy on climate change a little over a year ago. Would he support an emissions trading scheme so that companies could get on with the job of investing?
''I've got Gillard on the ropes and there's no way I'm going to let her off now,'' came the reply.
This Punch and Judy show that dominated Australian politics had a number of effects. One was to distract the country from developments in the physical world.
How else do we explain the fact that Australia barely even noticed key events, such as the annual report on climate change by the World Meteorological Organisation 13 days ago?
Here's how Britain's Financial Times began its news account: ''The first 10 years of this century were the hottest in 160 years and filled with more broken temperature records than any other decade as global warming continued to accelerate, the UN's top weather agency has reported.''
In its report, the WMO said that the decade to 2010 ''was the warmest for both hemispheres and for both land and ocean surface temperatures'' since the start of modern measurement in 1850.
''The record warmth was accompanied by a rapid decline in Arctic sea ice, and accelerating loss of net mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and from the world's glaciers.
''As a result of this widespread melting and the thermal expansion of sea water, global mean sea levels rose about three millimetres per year, about double the observed 20th-century trend of 1.6 mm per year. Global sea level averaged over the decade was about 20 centimetres higher than that of 1880.''
This report barely registered in Australia. Of the major daily newspapers, only The Age carried a substantive story, and even that was relegated to page 21. The Herald Sun in Melbourne carried a news brief on page 32. The only paper to run a long article on it was The Australian, which carried an 800-word opinion piece devoted to trying to dismiss its validity, written by a climate change sceptic. This is just one example of how Australia has somehow managed to lose sight of perhaps the most important single event of our time.
If you put some of the scenes of climate change distress from around the world into a movie, it'd be a blockbuster. The government of the tiny Pacific island state of Kiribati has declared a policy of orderly evacuation called ''migration with dignity'' as rising seas eat the low-lying country's habitable land; the government of India struggles to cope with almost 9 million people fleeing increasingly intense flooding.
But it happens in the real world, and we pay little heed, or, worse, pretend it's not real. The concentration of carbon in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million two months ago.
This is the highest it's been for millions of years, according to ice core samples.
The people and institutions telling us what's happening, such as the WMO, are not just a handful of cranky socialists or enviro-nazis.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a respected research body funded by the federal government, issued a report in March pointing out that the defence implications of climate change were emerging much sooner than imagined: ''The 2009 Defence white paper dismissed climate change as an issue for future generations, judging that the strategic consequences wouldn't be felt before 2030. But that's no longer the case. The downstream implications of climate change are forcing Defence to become involved in mitigation and response tasks right now. Defence's workload will increase, so we need a new approach.''
Regional impacts, wrote Anthony Press, Anthony Bergin and Eliza Garnsey, ''include possible population displacement due to the effects of climate and increased conflict over resources.''
The International Energy Agency was set up by the governments of the rich countries to monitor global energy trends after the oil shocks of the 1970s.
Its chief economist, Fatih Birol, said last month he was ''very worried about the emissions trends.'' The chance of holding the global average temperature rise to the 2 degrees limit beyond which dangerous climate change is thought to occur still remained, he said, ''but it is not very great. It is becoming extremely challenging.'' He urged ''a change in political mood''.
The heartening news is that the political mood is indeed showing some signs of change. When the global climate negotiations at Copenhagen collapsed in 2009, the ugly spat between the world's two biggest carbon emitters, the US and China, was at the centre of the discord.
But in recent weeks the US and China have jointly announced new measures to reduce emissions. They are piecemeal and inadequate, but they represent a fundamental shift in political mood.
The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, was sufficiently encouraged to declare that ''the world is starting to get serious about climate change. It is happening for one major reason: leadership.''
Australia already has a carbon tax, and emissions from the energy industry are falling. Hasn't Australia done enough already? Overall carbon emissions have stopped rising, but they're not falling, either.
The change of prime minister gives Australia an opportunity to reconsider.
Ultimately, Abbott's plan to use the carbon tax against Gillard succeeded, with indispensable help from Kevin Rudd. It may have succeeded too well for Abbott's comfort as Labor resurges under Rudd.
Polling to be released by the Climate Institute on Tuesday shows what its director, John Connor, calls the people's ''climate ambition emerging from the shadow of the carbon lie''.
Australia ''retreated into its shell'' as Gillard and Abbott slugged it out over the carbon tax. On Tuesday the country emerges to see what the Rudd government can do with Australia's second chance.
Peter Hartcher is the international editor.
Ben Cubby writes here