Swan: You shouldn't be putting words into my mouth, David.

Speers: Well, let me ask you then, is it a good way of getting people to drive less?

Swan: Well, what we're going to do is put together our emissions trading scheme, we've said that it should be as broad as possible, we'll publish the green paper, there'll be a lot of data and discussion of all these issues. When they're out there on the public record, I'm happy to have a much more detailed discussion with you, David, about all of those issues.

So now we know.

The trouble with all this soft-soaping is that it encourages the ignorant notion it's the government's job to solve all our problems. It hurts - fix it!

People don't get on with facing up to their problems because they imagine it just a matter of waiting for governments to act. And then the pollies wonder why the punters increasingly regard them as liars and cheats. Why their cynical behaviour breeds cynicism.

Despite the politicians' obfuscation, the plain truth is obvious: one way or another, petrol prices have got nowhere to go but up.

Prices will probably continue to fall back occasionally, but there doesn't seem much doubt that global demand for oil will continue to outpace the global supply of oil.

And that's just the half of it. The thing I find most disillusioning about the Rudd Government's performance is its weak-kneed pretence that the latest rise in oil prices is some kind of hideous natural disaster, brought upon us by a terrible god inflicting death and destruction on the innocent.

This is not a brave government. What it lacks the courage to admit is that the price rises global market forces have been inflicting on us are merely a foretaste of the price rises the Government plans to impose on us through the emissions trading scheme it will introduce in 2010.

The basic principle of such schemes is brutally simple: they force up the prices of fossil fuels so as to discourage us from using them. That's what Swan was refusing to admit in that interview.

It's possible, of course, the Government will lack the courage to include petrol in the trading scheme. But that would mean the price of electricity rose even more than otherwise. No coward's way out there. The necessary response to the present global rise in the price of petrol and to future price rises engineered in the cause of fighting climate change is the same: not so much driving less as using less petrol.

The first thing that means is moving to a more fuel-efficient car. But it also means making more use of public transport, bicycles and even shanks's pony.

Until recently, however, we've been doing just the reverse. Even as the price of petrol has risen by 45 per cent over the past five years, the price of new cars has fallen by 7 per cent (after allowing for the extra tricks each new model does), so we've been buying more of them.

In 2007, sales of sports utility vehicles were up 16 per cent, with sales of other cars up more than 6 per cent. Gas-guzzling sports utilities now account for about a quarter of total car sales. Including commercial vehicles, annual sales topped a record one million.

According to the CommSec car affordability index, it takes a worker on the average wage just over 32 weeks to buy a new Ford Falcon, the lowest reading in 24 years.

Over the four years to March 2007, the number of registered cars in Australia grew at the average rate of 2.5 per cent a year, taking the total to 11.5 million. Average fuel consumption improved only fractionally to 11.4 litres per 100 kilometres, but we now have 1.4 cars per household.

All that while petrol prices have been rising and politicians have been too lily-livered to warn us they have further to go. Only since the start of this year have rising petrol prices and interest rates obliged people to pull back.

New car sales are now falling and the quantity of petrol bought in the first three months of the year fell by more than 5 per cent.

And now we discover that people are piling into over-stretched public transport, catching our all-caring leaders quite off-guard.

Great leadership, chaps.