Dear Tony, your change of heart on Paris treaty is as insincere as it is desperate

Dear Tony. We need to talk about your flip flopping. It’s just not reasonable to have every single position on an issue and present yourself to voters as a conviction politician. These two conditions are, fundamentally, irreconcilable.

 Former prime minister Tony Abbott has changed his mind
 on climate change. Again. He says we no longer need to pull
out of the Paris treaty.

Let’s lay this out.

When Tony Abbott was prime minister, he took the decision to sign Australia up to the Paris climate treaty. When Malcolm Turnbull took over the Liberal leadership, Turnbull went on to ratify the agreement.

In 2015, when Abbott signed Australia up to Paris, he said we were making a “definite commitment” to a 26% reduction in emissions and “with the circumstances that we think will apply ... we can go up to 28%”.

When that position became inconvenient, because he was waging war on Turnbull during the vicious internal proxy war over the national energy guarantee, Abbott then declared he didn’t anticipate, as prime minister, “how the aspirational targets we agreed to at Paris would, in different hands, become binding commitments”.

Read the story from The Guardian by Katharine Murphy - “Dear Tony, your change of heart on Paris treaty is as insincere as it is desperate.”