In case you were wondering, Australia still loves coal.

Or so it would appear from an astonishing outburst from Senator Ian Macdonald yesterday.

“The children of Australia have been brainwashed into thinking if you turn off a light in Australia, somehow that is going to stop climate change,” the Queensland senator told parliament on Wednesday.

“This is a puerile debate in its extreme. We have to bring some sense into the debate.”

Thank goodness we have Senator Macdonald to set those childishly silly scientists straight.

“As I repeatedly say, Australia was once covered in ice,” he said. “Of course the climate changes.”

But he challenged the theory that humans were contributing to this. “This new theory, I refer to it often as a fad or a farce or a hoax, that suddenly since man started the industrial age, a change of climate has happened is just farcical and fanciful.”

Even Tony wouldn’t go that far. Do the deniers feel so empowered under Malcolm that we are back to ‘climate change is crap’?

The argument that mining fossil fuels provide jobs and taxes is the same argument that the smoking lobby uses – ignore the fatal consequences and show me the money, the science isn’t conclusive, yada yada yada.

Macdonald used the old argument that because our total emissions are comparatively small (even though they are the highest per capita in the world), that any action we might take would be “nonsensical”, and who better placed to judge nonsense than him. Macdonald conveniently ignores the emissions caused by our exports – not our fault, not our problem.

We may be the little guy in this tug o’ war but it is us that will be dragged into the mud first if we lose.

Turnbull has to rein the deniers in now or face the disapprobation of the world and, hopefully, the citizens of Australia.

Australia must do its bit on climate change, and every one of us must raise our voices to make sure our government listens.