With significant resistance to the scheme being passed before the outcome from Copenhagen was known, the Opposition – which is still recovering from its disastrous split over the issue - says it was right to vote down legislation to deal with climate change because there is now nothing binding the Government to have it.

Opposition leader, Tony Abbott, said Copenhagen was "a very Kevin Rudd kind of agreement".

"It's been much more talk than action," Mr Abbott said.

"Now, I guess good intentions are better than nothing and it's good that there has been an abundance of intention but there has certainly been no binding agreement and it entirely vindicates the Opposition’s rejection of Kevin Rudd’s great big new tax when the Parliament was sitting earlier this month.

"Mr Rudd was very unwise to try and rush Australia in to an ill-considered and premature emissions tax and I hope that he will now entirely reconsider his climate change policy because pretty obviously the best way to go is direct action to tackle climate change rather than a great big new tax that will hurt our exporters without actually doing anything to help the environment."

Mr Abbott said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd needed to go back to the drawing board and accept that he’d got it wrong on climate change, and wrong on his ability to get international agreements for the kind of policies that he liked.

Nationals leader, Warren Truss, said the "spectacular failure" of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference was a "clear endorsement of The Nationals unequivocal rejection of Labor’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme".

"The Rudd Labor Government has insisted for two years that its CPRS had to be passed by the Australian Parliament before Copenhagen," Mr Truss said.

"However, the CPRS was never an issue during the Copenhagen talkfest, and no-one even suggested that a CPRS was the solution to climate change.