Today Fairfax, News Corp and KPMG are co-hosting the National Reform Summit, designed to put pressure on the major parties to undertake real economic reform.

“For too long, our politicians have been engaged in bitter personal conflicts, across different parties and within them,” the organisers write. “They have been forgetting that what the people of Australia want and expect is to see our country being well run.”

Agreed.

But we couldn’t help but baulk at the fact that News Corp is co-sponsoring this event — and that climate change appears to have been completely left off the agenda. This is an organisation that has run a multi-newspaper scare campaign against any government or opposition that dares to tackle the biggest reform that needs to be undertaken in our lifetime: economic reform to curb carbon emissions.

As Crikey has written before, an emissions trading scheme — which encourages businesses to work out their own most efficient way to meet their carbon abatement responsibilities and rewards ones that innovate and invest by allowing a trade in emissions permits — is the best, most economically rational way to address the challenge of curbing emissions.

Yet how did News Corp report in their two most well-read papers on Bill Shorten’s plan to take an ETS to the next election?

Here’s how:

Sensible debate, eh, News Corp? You first.