Turkey refused to budge, so Australia caved. Why is Albanese still calling it a win?

Australia has ditched its bid to host the United Nations COP global climate conference, ceding rights to the prestigious event to Turkey after a three-year contest on the proviso that Pacific nations will still play a key role.

Under an unprecedented arrangement, Australia’s Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen will lead negotiations at the event and Turkey will hold the COP presidency as the host, while the Pacific will host a pre-COP gathering intended to lure pledges for a fund to help the region build its climate change resilience.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese played up the deal as “outstanding”, while Bowen, who has for years been leading Australia’s effort to host the event in South Australia, promised Pacific nations would still play a key role at the conference that will be held in the coastal city of Antalya.

“I know some people would be disappointed in that outcome,” Bowen said at a five-minute press conference after news of the deal broke, but he argued they would have been more disappointed if the event had defaulted to the German city of Bonn, with no special role carved out for Pacific leaders.

“Significant concession is what’s required when you are trying to find consensus,” he said in Belem, Brazil.

“Obviously, it would be great if Australia could have it all. But we can’t have it all. This process works on consensus.”

When the deal is formally signed off on Friday, Bowen will take on the job of running high-end negotiations on climate targets and other commitments, while continuing to oversee Australia’s renewables rollout, energy supply challenges and other ministerial duties.

Despite widespread support for Australia to host the summit, under UN rules, if even one nation objected to Australia’s hosting bid – as Turkey steadfastly did – the summit could have defaulted to Germany, which did not want it.

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.

“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 Rabuka.

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.

Former Tuvalu 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.”

Foreign Minister Penny Wong noted at a press conference in New Delhi that she had been saying for a number of weeks that “the first priority had been how do we elevate Pacific voices? How do we bring leaders and officials to the Pacific? How do we make sure that the issues that the Pacific care about are on the COP agenda? And the sort of compromise that is being worked through does that precisely.”

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 phase-out.

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.

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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