Snowflake will last for longer than PM's pledges

WOULD Prime Minister Kevin Rudd lie to the Australian people? The chief climate negotiator for China and the small African nations at Copenhagen think so.According to Lumumba Di-Aping, an African who lives in New York, the "message Kevin Rudd is giving to his people, his citizens, is a fabrication.

"It's puzzling in the sense that here is a prime minister who actually won the election because of his commitment to climate change." Welcome to the real world of Rudd Labor, sir, where commitments last as long as a Darwin snow flake. That the Copenhagen conference has turned into a quagmire is no surprise. With an agenda based on a concocted, manipulated consensus reliant on corrupted data, the global warming crowd could only flounder as their emotion-driven fictions evaporated. Al Gore underscored the lack of scientific credibility by telling the conference that the latest research showed the Arctic would be ice-free in five years. "These figures are fresh," he said. They sure were. Gore had made them up. In the real world it would be grossly irresponsible for Rudd and other national leaders to sign anything that commits the West to destroying their economies. Yesterday morning, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott delivered a blast of fresh thinking on climate change to a Sydney meeting of Liberal Party members. Abbott pointed out that as a local surf lifesaver and volunteer "firey", he had always been an enthusiastic supporter of responsible measures to improve the environment. His first big local campaign as an MP was to prevent Telstra from installing a mobile phone base station next to a kindergarten. Once in government, Abbott came into in conflict with former PM John Howard over Abbott's support for the burial of overhead cables - a source of alleged global warming gases, incidentally. His first big eco-initiative was the Green Corps, a scheme that gave thousands of young Australians six months of practical work in environmental restoration. The former university boxing champion is now out to KO the Rudd Government's emissions trading scheme which he says is "a great big tax to produce a giant political slush fund to generate endless wealth transfers to the Labor Party's favoured constituencies, supervised by a newly-minted carbon police". His argument against Rudd's wealth transfer program, bureaucracy and politicised hand-outs was compelling. And he didn't need to brand the Prime Minister as a liar. Those Rudd has been courting in Copenhagen had already done that.