It’s the biggest story of the day. Huge. Filling talkback, leading the news bulletins, dominating the public conversation. Kevin Rudd’s muted attempt to forge an Australian response to cataclysmic climate change? No. The future of troubled AFL star Ben Cousins. And there in a bad-hair nutshell is the Rudd Government’s real failure in this national discussion of how to salvage a liveable planet from a suddenly hostile, carbon-addled climate.

What happened yesterday was an inevitable act of pragmatic politics. The hypocrisy and abject failure lies in the gap between Rudd’s aggressive climate rhetoric and his meek, pusillanimous policy, a gap that could have been filled by active leadership from our Prime Minister and his party. If they truly believe that climate change is the elephant in all our rooms, then they had an obligation to provide the sort of national discussion and understanding that might have made the dramatic action required to save our planet and our children’s skins politically palatable. They didn’t. Kevin 07 failed to deliver climate change we can believe in. The unravelling environment became nothing more than just another what’s-in-it for me issue of personal pain or gain. The destructive individualism refined through a decade of the previous administration plays on, fuelled by a populist press and pandered to by a nervous government too eager to please, too anxious to take a risk.