This makes Malcolm Turnbull, the suddenly-ex-leader of Australia’s Liberal party, the first major political victim of the Climategate furore. And his replacement Tony Abbott, the first politician to reap the benefits of the world’s growing scepticism towards ManBearPig. Of the three candidates, he was the only one committed to delaying the Australian government’s proposed Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

The trouble began last week when Australia’s opposition Liberal party began haemorrhaging frontbenchers, all of them preferring to lose their jobs than be railroaded by their leader into voting with the Government on Kevin Rudd’s new carbon tax.

Aussie blog hero Andrew Bolt has the blow-by-blow details. Particularly stirring is his description of how the Liberals’ newly elected leader Abbott – the Mad Monk as the libtard MSM is already calling him – takes the floor and tells like it is about the ETS (Australia’s equivalent to Cap And Trade).

Already the lines are potent – real fighting words from the Liberals at last: Rudd’s great green tax “is really an energy taxation scheme.” In fact, it is “a $120 billion tax on the Australian public, and that is just for starters.” Power prices will go up, for instance.  “We just can’t wave that through the Parliament.”

To the public, Rudd’s scheme is “a great big tax to create a great big slush fund… run by a giant bureaucracy”. Already Rudd has overseen “a waste of money … worse than Whitlam”.

Too bloody right mate! (As they say in Australia where “bloody” isn’t a swear word s0 I’m allowed to use it as much as I like.)

Further useful background comes from Watts Up With That, with quotes from Abbott’s memoir Battlelines. Here is what he has to say about carbon taxes:

“Without binding universal arrangements, any effort by Australia (on emissions trading) could turn out to be a futile gesture, damaging local industry but making no appreciable dent in global emissions…. Another big problem with any Australian emissions reduction scheme is that it would not make a material difference to atmospheric carbon concentrations unless the big international polluters had similar schemes. Australia accounts for about 1 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. At recent rates of growth, China’s increase in emissions in about a year could match Australia’s entire carbon dioxide output. Without binding universal arrangements, any effort by Australia could turn out to be a futile gesture, damaging local industry but making no appreciable dent in global emissions.”

And here he is on climate alarmists:

“It’s hard to take climate alarmists all that seriously, though, when they’re as ferociously against the one proven technology that could reduce electricity emissions to zero, nuclear power, as they are in favour of urgent reduction in emissions. For many, reducing emissions is a means to achieving a political objective they could not otherwise gain.”

Sounds a very sensible fellow. We can only hope that other leaders of conservative opposition parties – not naming any names – are listening to him closely.

Update: Australians have been counting the bitter cost of their failure to implement Kyoto, according to Terry McCrann in Australia’s Herald Sun. Here he ruminates on the miseries they have suffered by not being more eco-friendly:

A reader with a droll sense of humour has come up with an inspired way to achieve the same environmental effect as Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull’s Emissions Trading Scheme, but without the cost.

Simple, a National Apology on Climate Change. Same effect on global emissions as an ETS, but with zero cost.

More humour came less intentionally from an online commentator who set out to detail “What ignoring Kyoto has cost us”.

Two things it appears. Living in smaller houses.

Damn, if only we’d adopted Kyoto we could have been living in British-style shoe-boxes. Sorry, ‘cosy’ cat-friendly accommodations. Cat-friendly? Well, you can’t swing …

Secondly, not being serious about Kyoto has condemned us to cheap electricity prices. At least 50 per cent below the rest of the world.

If we’d gone for wind farms, nuclear, solar, etc, we could have had more expensive power over the past dozen or more years.

ABC news reports that five frontbenchers from Australia’s opposition Liberal party have resigned their portfolios rather than follow their leader Malcolm Turnbull in voting with Kevin Rudd’s Government on a new Emissions Trading Scheme.

The Liberal Party is in turmoil with the resignations of five frontbenchers from their portfolios this afternoon in protest against the emissions trading scheme.

Tony Abbott, Sophie Mirabella, Tony Smith and Senators Nick Minchin and Eric Abetz have all quit their portfolios because they cannot vote for the legislation.

Senate whip Stephen Parry has also relinquished his position.

The ETS is Australia’s version of America’s proposed Cap and Trade and the EU’s various carbon reduction schemes: a way of taxing business on its CO2 output. As Professor Plimer pointed out when I interviewed him in the summer, this threatens to cause enormous economic damage in Australia’s industrial and mining heartlands, not least because both are massively dependent on Australia’s vast reserves of coal. It is correspondingly extremely unpopular with Aussie’s outside the pinko, libtard metropolitan fleshpots.

Though the ETS squeaked narrowly through Australia’s House of Representatives, its Senate is proving more robust – thanks not least to the widespread disgust by the many Senators who have read Professor Plimer’s book Heaven And Earth at the dishonesty and corruption of the AGW industry. If the Senate keeps rejecting the scheme, then the Australian government will be forced to dissolve.

For the rapidly increasing number of us who believe that AGW is little more than a scheme by bullying eco-fascists to deprive us of our liberty, by big government to spread its controlling tentacles into every aspect our lives, and scheming industrialists such as Al Gore to enrich themselves through carbon trading, this principled act by Australia’s Carbon Five is fantastic news.

Where they lead, the rest of the world’s politicians will eventually be forced to follow: their appalled electorates will make sure of it.

Australia’s Senate – the Government’s upper house – has just voted by 42 to 30 to defeat the cap and trade legislation bill proposed by their premier Kevin Rudd.

Why did those Senators reject Rudd’s scheme, despite their prolonged drought and their bush fires? Well some – the green ones – did so because they didn’t think its emissions cutting targets went far enough. But the majority did so – duh – because they didn’t want their coal-dependent heavy industry hamstrung by still more pointless taxation and regulation, their consumers fleeced and their economy ruined in the middle of a thwacking great global recession. And, in at least the case of Senator Steve Fielding, because they’d done their research and discovered that Anthropogenic Global Warming is a figment of Al Gore’s imagination.

Having consulted scientific experts including Ian Plimer [whom I interviewed in the Spectator a few weeks back and whose views are neatly summarised here] Sen Fielding was inspired to visit the US to assess at first hand what evidence the Obama administration was using to justify its radical Waxman Markey cap and trade measures. He was not impressed and issued a challenge, emailing graphs to one of the US president’s energy advisers showing that, despite rising CO2 levels the globe has not warmed in over a decade.

He concluded: “Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer… I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive….As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct.”

Or, as another Aussie senator, more succinctly put it when criticising Rudd’s climate change bill: “It is a dog of a plan.”

Where Australia leads, we can but hope and pray, the rest of the world will follow – especially Obama’s would-be Socialist One World Government (formerly known as the USA). While it’s true that Nancy Pelosi managed to railroad the Waxman Markey cap’n’porkbarrel’n’trade bill through the US House of Representatives, it looks set to have a much tougher ride in the Senate. Especially given the growing strength of feeling among US voters that cap n trade is no more than a massive scam which will enrich one or two green vested interests – Al Gore’s, for example – while impoverishing ordinary Americans to no useful purpose whatsoever.

Here, is what the latest Gallup polls say:

“The number of Americans who say the media have exaggerated global warming jumped to a record 41 percent in 2009, up from 35 percent a year ago. The most marked increase came among political independents, whose ranks of doubters swelled from 33 percent to 44 percent. Republican doubters grew from 59 percent to 66 percent, while Democratic skeptics stayed at around 20 percent.”

“What’s more, fewer Americans believe the effects of global warming have started to occur: 53 percent see signs of a hotter planet, down from 61 percent in 2008. Global warming placed last among eight environmental concerns Gallup asked respondents to rank, with water pollution landing the top spot.”

“Another recent Gallup study found that, for the first time in 25 years of polling, more Americans care about economic growth than the environment. Just 42 percent of people surveyed said the environment takes precedence over growth, while 51 percent asserted expansion carries more weight. That reverses results from 2008, when 49 percent of respondents said the environment was paramount and 42 percent said economic growth came first. In 1985, the poll’s first year, 61 percent placed a bigger priority on the environment, while 28 percent ranked economic growth highest.”