John Howard recently resurrected old ghosts from the past that once inculcated misguided fears about moving too quickly on response to climate change. The two watchwords are “affordability” and “reliability”.

We may all remember well during the 2019 election campaign the journalist who screamed down the street after Bill Shorten, “What’s it going to cost, Mr. Shorten?”. The Labor leader was caught flat-footed because he hadn’t recently read reputable economist Warwick McKibben’s response to that very question. He estimated that it would cost just one per cent of GDP.

The question should have been, “What will climate inaction cost?” We have already seen in a series of weather events clustered between 2011 and 2022, the enormous cost of cleaning up after intense storms and raging fires. Insurance costs have gone through the roof as the government tries to give greater certainty to business as it works feverishly towards reaching acceptable emission targets in the near and medium future.

The Liberals need to realise that the ideology has no role to play anymore as more and more countries move away from fossil fuels. They have already had their electoral innards gouged out in metropolitan areas and to continue down a trodden path only pursued by a few Nationals will ensure they remain in opposition for the foreseeable future. As Oscar Wilde once said, “Some know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.”

We need a little more balance and perspective when it comes to Australia-Israel relations. There are those who are turning it into a political domestic football just as Peter Dutton did before the last election.

Australia’s Jewish community leaders have been far more strident in their criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu than they have been in their language towards Anthony Albanese. In a letter to Netanyahu, the executive council of Australian Jewry president said that his comments about Albanese were “inflammatory and provocative, and demonstrated a woeful lack of understanding of social and political conditions in Australia.”

To be fair in a letter to Albanese last week, the president berated him for being “excessive and gratuitously insulting” by saying that Netanyahu was in denial about the sufferings of the Palestinians in Gaza. But on Netanyahu’s latest ad hominem attack, he asserted that the Israeli leader was playing right into the hands of opponents of Israel and antisemites to the detriment of the Australian Jewish community.

Meanwhile Sky-after-dark, which unashamedly backs the Coalition, continues to place the onus of the war-of-words on Albanese and foment division between the two nations. The Australian people saw right through this cheap political point-scoring at the last election. When will they ever learn?