There was really something quite ironically perverse about the way Brendan Nelson on Monday claimed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was using the return of troops from Iraq to distract attention from the Opposition’s focus on FuelWatch and the price of petrol.

After all, wasn’t Mr Nelson part of a government that marched us into Iraq on a false pretence, an invasion that has led not only to the deaths of close to one million people but also, according to experts, a trebling of the barrel price of oil.

Dr Mamdouh Salameh, an oil economist who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organisation, estimates that oil would be no higher than $US40 a barrel if the Iraq war had not occurred.

Quoted in the Independent on Sunday a week ago by reporter Geoffery Lean, Dr Salameh, who is the UK-based director of Oil Market Consultancy Service and an expert on Iraq oil, said Iraq was the only country with the capacity to substantially increase production.

Lean reported that Dr Salameh told a British all-party parliamentary group on peak oil last month "that Iraq had offered the United States a deal, three years before the war, that would have opened up 10 new giant oil fields on "generous" terms in return for the lifting of sanctions’’.

"This would certainly have prevented the steep rise of the oil price," he told the group.

“But the US had a different idea. It planned to occupy Iraq and annex its oil."

The piousness of Mr Nelson’s remarks to parliament would be laughable had this country not just emerged from a shameful period during which his government used the threat of illegal immigration and terrorism to distract from the real issues of the day and to justify the disgraceful abuse of the law.

That aside, Prime Minister Rudd’s fixation on FuelWatch as having any relevance to the enormous challenges that face the world as it adjusts to the realities of peak oil is disturbing.

Any short term effect FuelWatch may have on the pump price of petrol in Australia is irrelevant.

The Opposition’s demand that Mr Rudd somehow guarantee cheap petrol is as foolish as the government’s lack of initiatives in the face of the crisis at our doorstep.

With world oil production stagnating and skyrocketing demand from China and India, the problem every government has been warned about and has been aware of for the past two decades is upon us.

This is an energy-dependent world that has failed to encourage a reduction in use of fossil fuels, nor the development of technologies to replace them.

Fuel is not going to get cheaper. The world’s two most populous nations are developing an appetite for it equal to that of the old economic powers.

And even if the mess made in Iraq since 2002 could be resolved, bringing new fields on line, the fundamental problems won’t change.

The short-term policy settings the Prime Minister should be arguing before parliament need to recognise these realities.

How we can quickly reduce our national dependence on fuel should be the foremost issue occupying the minds’ of our national leaders.

The billions of dollars being committed to new roads in south east Queensland alone would be better spent on cheap, regular and accessible public transport.

A re-prioritising of road funding to public transport needs to be immediate and should be imaginative in its service delivery.

One simple symbolic gesture of intent could be the slashing of funding for the Commonwealth car fleet, replacing it instead with mini-buses to ferry members to parliament.

That is no fatuous suggestion.

There is a very real argument that rather than fiddling with ways to knock a couple of cents off the litre price, government should be artificially inflating it to dampen demand and to fund heavily-subsidised public transport and conversion to gas.

Instead subsidies are being cut not only for gas conversions but also for the delivery of solar energy to homes.

Our representatives need to be told the charade being played out in parliament is no longer acceptable.

The exchanges being traded across the floor lack the depth of a Grade Nine debate and are not about us, the issues that confront this nation or the futures of our children.

It is just about the grubby pursuit of power and the desire to hold onto it.

Will our leaders, from their cosseted positions of privilege and access, still be prattling on about the inconsequential as the pumps run dry and the economy grinds to a halt?

The electorate needs to get very angry very soon.