Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has dramatically thrown out the Liberal Party's policy on climate change and committed the first bungle of his leadership.
He has ruled out support for an emissions trading scheme (ETS) or a pollution tax - gutting the policy adopted by former prime minister John Howard and the man he deposed, Malcolm Turnbull.
Mr Abbott has backed bipartisan emissions targets, but he won't yet say how they could be achieved if he was elected to government.
Further, he has given no guarantees he will abide by any international agreement that comes out of climate change talks in Copenhagen.
The harder policy stance came after the first apparent policy bungle of his leadership, when he was forced to clarify exactly which targets he was standing by.
"The five per cent is an unconditional target, and that's what we are committed to," he told reporters in Canberra on Wednesday.
Asked to publicly back the higher end of the range - a 25 per cent reduction on carbon emissions if the world agrees on a deal - he said: "I'm just not going to go into that kind of specificity at this stage".
Hours later, his office had to reconfirm the coalition's support for the bipartisan target range.
But there's no doubt Mr Abbott, whose rise as leader of the federal opposition came on the back of his condemnation of the government's ETS, has abandoned his party's former position.
The coalition is no longer committed to the introduction of an ETS in Australia - the stance adopted under Mr Howard and Mr Turnbull.
This means the coalition is almost certain to vote down the government's carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS), also known as the ETS, when it is re-introduced into parliament next year in a third attempt to pass it into law.
"We won't have an ETS as part of our policy going to the next election, and we won't be having a tax as part of our policy going to the next election," Mr Abbott said.
"There's no doubt we've changed our policy on this.
"We have changed our policy on this, and we've changed our policy in response to what I think is a growing demand from the Australian people to see a contest in this area."
The government is worried Mr Abbott, who quoted experts when labelling emissions trading schemes "rubbish policy" and scams, could undo all its good work towards building a bipartisan position.
It has urged the coalition to explain how it plans to tackle global warming.
Mr Abbott's only guarantee after Copenhagen is that the coalition "won't be rushing to do anything that will put us at a competitive disadvantage vis-à-vis the rest of the world".
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