PAUL Keating, while treasurer, once said the galahs in every pet shop were repeating "micro economic reform".
Now their descendants would be squawking "climate change".
The world's "leaders" met in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Kyoto in 1997, Bali in 2007, Copenhagen in 2009, Paris in 2015 and Bonn in 2019.
Most agreed someone should do something to address the IPCC scientists' predictions about "global warming", since modified to "climate change" as the computer models have proved to be hopelessly wrong.
No democratic leaders at the meetings knew what to do - and remain in power. Population control and dam building are thinking confined to China.
Meanwhile manufacturers of wind turbines and solar panels have had a field day with government subsidies on "renewables".
A brainwashed media ignores the fact that wind and solar power is yet to reach 1 per cent of the world's electricity generation and, on International Energy Agency estimates, can't reach 4pc by 2040.
The fact that electricity generation accounts for less than 30pc of the supposedly dangerous CO2 omissions is also ignored.
Our moving feast of "leaders" have addressed bugger all of bugger all over the past 27 years.
Meanwhile the scientific community is dividing on its previous predictions.
Marc Morano in his "Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change" has compiled the arguments of increasingly uneasy scientists and concluded the whole saga is political, not scientific.
One should remember the US cattle stampedes - it was the majority that went over the cliffs.
The great Italian thinker and writer of the early 1900's, Guglielmo Ferrero, wrote: "The men of the nineteenth century thought they knew everything, and they knew nothing."
The leaders of the 21st, century are carrying on the tradition.
In 2009 I was accosted by a cattle councillor who said "you didn't approve of cattle councillors going to Copenhagen with Kevin Rudd". I replied: "No, it was your returning to Australia that worried me."
Ten years on my concern is justified.
The bunch at the National Farmers Federation House has lost touch with reality as it claims carbon neutrality for agriculture, sustainability, and $100 billion annual export income for Australian agriculture by 2030.
The NFF hasn't noted the ongoing fall in domestic beef consumption, the takeover of pork by subsidised European imports, the annihilation, by the US, on both price and volume of our beef exports to high-value Japanese markets, South Korean and EEC markets.
Our shrinking potential as drought decimates our herd and grain production isn't noted. The NFF's latest Red Meat Advisory Council plan for the meat industry parasite structure is a classic example of academia gone mad under Parkinson's Law.
The NFF's suggested rearrangement of the deckchairs on our Titanic brings to mind the story of the US passenger telling the drink steward on the ill-fated ship: "I did ask for ice in my bourbon, but this is ridiculous".
- John Carter
