AUSTRALIAN politics has reached an unprecedented level of toxicity just when the need for leadership and consensus has never been greater.

Teenage sailor and young Australian of the Year Jessica Watson said it plain and simple last week in relation to climate change: “It’s time our leaders worked together to find solutions”.

That would be a novel approach.

But such pleas from the future are always bound to fall on the deaf ear of Australian politics where party interests are maintained at the expense of all else.

On the one hand we have a Prime Minister who can’t tell us what she stands for and on the other a federal opposition leader who can smell blood and senses only the certitude of his reckless ambition.

Intemperate language and a willingness to stoke the fires of ignorance being fanned by sector interests pursuing hard-edged policy outcomes that will be of no benefit to those they incite, should not be the making of Australia’s next Prime Minister.

Earlier this month former Climate commissioner Ross Garnaut and independent Tony Windsor flew to Spain with Beyond Zero Emissions CEO Matthew Wright to examine a range of carbon-neutral power generation options.

Those who rushed to listen to Christopher Monkton sprout his mining interests-sponsored nonsense at Noosa recently would have done better to have heard Quinn offer solutions three weeks later in Nambour.

Windsor, one of three independents whose support keeps Labor in power, used the annual winter parliamentary recess and his travel entitlements to good purpose.

He was informing himself of what was going on in the world around Canberra’s babble bubble.

He has brought that informed view back into a Parliament where power is wasted on the altar of self interest rather than to the service of the nation.

Abbott was craven outside the House on Monday as he fawned at Alan Jones in front of a dispirited gaggle of protestors.

Inside the House Anthony Albanese with his “crisis of no consequence” mockery of the underwhelming numbers on the lawn was both cowardly and pathetic in his unwillingness to deliver the taunt face to face.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to our own devices to face the ongoing global financial crisis, a contracting labour market and the reality of collapsing business cash flow.

Suddenly with the loss of 1000 jobs at Bluescope, the mining tax doesn’t sound such a bad idea. But forget policy debate – Canberra fiddles while Australia burns.