South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas said that while he understood the outcome in an “obscene” UN process, the federal government should explain why its strategy changed to prioritising a continuing role for the Pacific, but not Adelaide.
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“Those are questions for the federal government to answer in terms of why they took the negotiating position they have,” he said.
Albanese, who raised eyebrows among climate campaigners when he did not visit Belem to push Australia’s bid, declared the outcome a win for Australia and the region.
The prime minister said Australia had finalised its offer to Turkey after consulting Pacific leaders, including Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape and Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rambuka.
The pre-COP31 meeting to be held at the Pacific Islands Forum was an “outstanding” result, he said.
“That will enable us to invite world leaders to make sure that the issues confronting this region, the very existence of island states such as Tuvalu and Kiribati, the issue of our oceans – all of those issues will be front and centre,” Albanese said.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the deal made for a pre-conference meeting in the Pacific was an “outstanding” result.Credit: Sam Mooy
Tuvalu’s former prime minister Bikenibeu Paeniu told AFP the decision demonstrated “the non-committal of Australia to climate justice”.
Each year, about 280 people from the tiny island nation can move to Australia under a special visa to escape the impact of rising sea levels.
“The Pacific countries should seriously remodel their relationship with Australia,” Paeniu said.
Papua New Guinea foreign minister Justin Tkatchenko also expressed his frustration to AFP, saying: “We are all not happy. And disappointed it’s ended up like this.”
At this year’s COP30 in Belem, 83 countries from the Pacific, Africa, Asia and Latin America jointly called for a road map to transition the globe from fossil fuels.
Greenpeace Australia Pacific chief executive David Ritter said Australia was a notable absence from the press conference calling for a phaseout.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley celebrated the bid’s failure, saying the loss would save the expense of hosting.
“The fact that this government even considered spending $2 billion of taxpayers’ money on this exercise just goes to show how their priorities are all wrong,” she said at a press conference in Melbourne.
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Greens leader Larissa Waters said the government did not actually want to host COP31, arguing it would have shone an unwelcome spotlight on Australia’s fossil fuel production.
Pacific Minister Pat Conroy described the outcome as a “good result” for Australia and the Pacific.
In a speech in Newcastle on Thursday night, Conroy blasted the Coalition for abandoning the goal of reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2050.
He described the decision as “the biggest surrender in national security credibility by conservative parties since Menzies advocated for doing a peace deal with Hitler 10 days after he invaded Poland, or when Menzies opposed the expansion of the Australian army before World War II”.
Shiva Gounden, the Pacific head of Greenpeace Australia Pacific, said it was disappointing that Australia had lost hosting rights, but the decision mattered less than a meaningful outcome from the talks.
“The Pacific’s fight for survival does not rise or fall on a single hosting decision,” he said.
With Bloomberg, Matthew Knott
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