“In his penultimate blog for the year, Abbott’s parliamentary secretary Senator Cory Bernardi summed up his 2011 in a way which would appear to sit uncomfortably with Coalition policy.

”Emissions have continued to rise, the few dams we have are full again, the Earth has stopped warming and the deceivers in the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) alarmist industry are increasingly exposed for what they are. By my count, it’s a happy ending to the apocalypse scenario and I think it would make an excellent movie. I even have a title in mind. Perhaps it could be called An Inconvenient Truth,” he wrote.”

In other words, while the LNP still has the 5% cuts thing as policy, Mr Abbott’s main advisor is clearly a sceptic with definite dry sense of humour.