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In the intense two-hour meeting that followed, Wong unveiled the Government's latest climate change policy. Fresh from a high-level climate summit in Washington, Wong was attempting to resuscitate the policy that had bled public and political support since it was unveiled in December.

Much in the new deal still troubled some of Wong's audience, but there was an alluring offer too. She appeared willing to put on the table the element they had been demanding for months. She suggested the Government would propose a higher target for reducing Australian greenhouse gas pollution, in an effort for an ambitious global climate change agreement at UN talks in Copenhagen in December. It would aim over the next decade to cut Australian emissions to a point equal to 25 per cent less than emissions in 2000. Previously the Government - Wong and the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, in particular - had insisted the 2020 target would be no more than 15 per cent.

However, the about-turn was highly conditional. It would depend utterly on other countries, China and India included, making serious commitments at Copenhagen. It was also packaged with more concessions for big polluting companies and a delayed start to the Government's central anti-greenhouse plan - the emissions trading scheme, designed to put a price on carbon pollution.

So bogged had the scheme become in political horse-trading, few MPs - let alone the public - bothered to follow the mind-numbing negotiations.

The Government strategy was twofold. As Rudd outlined that morning, it was designed to win back public support for Labor's climate policy by holding out the prospect that Australia was now supporting a global agreement aimed at avoiding dangerous change. Just as importantly, it was designed to put the Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, under business pressure to pass the emissions trading scheme in the Senate. Turnbull, presiding over a deeply divided Coalition policy on climate change, was Rudd's target.

Labor insiders, meanwhile, told the Herald they believed there was little prospect of an ambitious deal at Copenhagen, rendering the target a dead duck.

By week's end Wong's hopes of a Senate win were rapidly evaporating and Australia's national climate change policy again appeared on the brink of collapse. Despite scientific warnings that Australia should support a strong 2020 target and aim for an ambitious global climate deal in Copenhagen, politicians, business and the environment movement remain deeply divided on how to achieve this.

Undeterred, Wong this week submitted Australia's formal submission to the UN negotiations, putting Australia's 25 per cent offer on the international table. She and Rudd said Barack Obama's support for a breakthrough at Copenhagen had "injected a great deal of momentum" into the global negotiations, raising hopes for an ambitious agreement.

Both said many times this week that an ambitious deal would be "very difficult" to achieve, but they have formally acknowledged at home and abroad that Australia must back bigger cuts to its emissions to achieve a global agreement capable, in Rudd's words, of saving the Great Barrier Reef. Those hopes rest heavily with Obama and the Chinese President, Hu Jintao. But Wong is concerned that unless the Senate passes her legislation before the Copenhagen meeting Australia's negotiating credibility will be undermined.