Tony Abbott keeps raising the bar of stupidity.

His speech last night at a timber industry dinner lauding timber workers as “the ultimate conservationists” brings home the gold medal.

Corinne Grant provides a wonderful take on this superb performance:

It’s pretty much standard for politicians to suck up to their audiences.

If they’re talking to mining magnates, they tell them they’re the backbone of Australia. If they’re talking to farmers, they tell them they’re the backbone of Australia.

If they’re talking to factory workers they tell them they’re the backbone of Australia (and then they tell them they earn too much).

But when Tony Abbott told a room full of loggers that they were the ‘ultimate conservationists’, even that audience must have been reaching for its sick bag.

Seriously, people who cut down trees are saving them? As what? IKEA furniture?

Just brilliant, Corinne.

But while this latest example (of what are affectionately called “Abbott’s brain f*rts”) has anyone with an IQ over 25 picking their jaws up off the floor, this medal-winning performance of stupidity has been matched with an equally brilliant display of hypocrisy.

In last night’s speech Abbott also announced that:

“We don’t support, as a government and as a Coalition, further lockouts of our forests,” Mr Abbott said. “We have quite enough National Parks, we have quite enough locked up forests already. In fact, in an important respect, we have too much locked up forest.”

Mr Abbott said his government was pushing ahead to delist a world heritage listing of 74,000 hectares of forest in Tasmania. “Mr Abbott said the area – which was protected under Tasmania’s forest peace deal – was not pristine forest and was too degraded to be considered a sanctuary“. (I guess they aren’t trees of calibre. Their ‘breeding’ shouldn’t be encouraged).

Tony Abbott’s hypocrisy is breathtaking. Do you remember this?

Tony Abbott believes he can fight climate change with a $3.2 billion plan to plant 20 million trees . . .

Mr Abbott said planting 20 million trees by 2020 at a cost of $5 a tree would create “urban forests” and green zones in regions and along highways.

To lull the Australian electorate into believing he had genuine concerns and a genuine plan for climate change he conjured up some fabulous idea of planting a tree on just about every square inch of spare piece of dirt. Cities, suburbs and sidewalks would no longer be concrete jungles. He would have promised urban forests in Alice Springs, Adelaide, Bendigo, Brisbane … everywhere. Everywhere, now, but Tasmania. This year they head to the polls so he declares to the axe-happy loggers that he would prefer to see Tasmanian trees chopped from the landscape.

Tony Abbott has that knack of being able to mix a classical brain fart in amongst some blatant political opportunism. He really has that rare ability to be incredibly stupid. In the same week we saw the Minister for the Environment promoting the green army Abbott talks about clearing heritage-listed forests. How does he do it? If I were the Minister for the Environment I’d be locking myself in a sound-proof room and screaming.

But hey, don’t we all feel like screaming?