After clawing his way back in the polls by shifting the national conversation from an unpopular budget over to terrorism, Prime Minister Tony Abbott this week uttered five words that would drag a rather less politically favourable issue into the spotlight: “Coal is good for humanity.”

Speaking on Monday at the opening of the $3.9 billion Caval Ridge Mine in central Queensland, Abbott spruiked the economic benefits coal was delivering not just to Australia, but to the world.

It wasn’t a one-off. On Tuesday, the PM again indulged in resources sector activism by lambasting the Australian National University’s “stupid decision” to sell off its shares in seven companies for environmental reasons.

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Treasurer Joe Hockey, Education Minister Christopher Pyne and Assistant Infrastructure Minister Jamie Briggs had already hit out at the ANU move, which will see $16 million worth of investment stripped from Iluka Resources, Independence Group, Newcrest Mining, Sandfire Resources, Oil Search, Santos and Sirius Resources.

In response, left-leaning think tank the Australia Institute issued an open letter urging Abbott to call off the government-wide attack on the ANU’s investment decisions, a document signed by more than 50 prominent Australians and ethical investors, including former PM Malcolm Fraser, former Liberal party leader John Hewson, and Wotif founder Graeme Wood.

“It is every investor’s right to make their own investment decisions without bullying from vested interests and government ministers,” the letter states.

“It is ANU’s obligation to invest responsibly, which includes thinking about their environmental social standards, how they impact on financial returns and how they reflect on the character of the institution.”

If it wasn’t bad enough that the attention of Australians were now firmly fixed in on the government’s environmental credentials rather than its vastly more popular approach to national security, on Tuesday Hockey seemingly invited scrutiny on an international level, via a fiery interview on the BBC’s Hard Talk program.

Prompted by our PM’s positioning of coal as a vital part of the world’s future energy mix, BBC host Stephen Sackur put to Hockey that Australia is one of the dirtiest greenhouse gas emitting countries in the OECD.

Rather than sidestepping a fairly uncontroversial observation – Australia is in fact the highest emitter in the OECD per capita – Hockey met Sackur head on, describing his assertion as “absolutely ridiculous”.

“We’ve got a small population and very large land mass and we are an exporter of energy, so that measurement is a falsehood in a sense because it does not properly reflect exactly what our economy is,” he said.

“Australia is a significant exporter of energy and, in fact, when it comes to coal, we produce some of the cleanest coal, if that term can be used, the cleanest coal in the world.”

All this Antipodean love for the black stuff made such an impression in Britain that when Australian author Richard Flanagan was interviewed by the BBC following his Man Booker prize win for ‘The Long Road To The North’ – a book about the Burma Railway death march, not the environment – he was asked to explain fossil fuel politics in his home country.

Flanagan didn’t mince words in his response.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said.

“We can grow our economy but we can do so much for our extraordinary environment.

“There are so many things and, to be frank, I’m ashamed to be Australian when you bring this up.”

What remains to be seen is whether Mr Abbott and his frontbench continue to bring it up as well, or if they figure it might just be time to change the subject.