The only regular meeting of Australia’s Saltbush Club takes place most Thursday evenings at a golf club in Five Dock, in Sydney’s inner west. The group’s founding members – a collection of the country’s most prominent and avid global heating deniers – include Gina Rinehart, the former Queensland premier Campbell Newman, former Business Council of Australia head Hugh Morgan, and Coalition MP Colin Boyce.

At Five Dock, the crowd is mostly old and mostly white. They sometimes host contrarian speakers. But about six years ago, this gathering of climate sceptics decided to stop talking publicly about the climate.

“We resolved to temporarily pivot from the climate debate and launch the Energy Realists of Australia to talk to people about matters that really concern them, like the price and security of power, instead of science,” said Rafe Champion, another Saltbush founder and a stalwart of the Five Dock meetup.

The idea, Champion wrote on his blog last month, was to target people using “evidence that they can understand, unlike the finer points of climate science”.

As Australia heads to a federal election, the results of that pivot have been writ large in the campaign. Both major parties notionally support the net zero emissions target. But the coal and climate wars have been replaced in some places by vehement anti-renewables campaigns.

It was something to do with the European grid, powered in part by French nuclear power.

I really have no idea what point you think you are making.