In the second-season premiere, John Connor defied his mother, Sarah, and his uncle, Derek Reese, by reactivating the cyborg Cameron, even though her programming had become unstable. Episode two introduced Leven Rambin as Riley, a girl from John’s high school. John again defied Sarah to develop a relationship with Riley.

The Rudd Government has also been careful not to tie itself too closely to its climate advisor, Ross Garnaut. However, Garnaut’s proposed targets should be attractive to the Government, and would allow it to say to the voters that it was doing something but to argue to business that it was not imposing excessive burdens.

The long-awaited Treasury modelling partly unveiled yesterday in Professor Garnaut’s interim report on emissions trading revealed that a 10per cent emissions cut - within a global agreement - would come at a surprisingly low cost for Australia, about 0.1 per cent of GDP a year or a 1.1 per cent reduction in growth by 2020.