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Australia has lost to the Turks.
We won’t add “again” or mention Gallipoli. Naturally.
Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen went to Brazil thinking he’d triumph over Turkey, until Anthony Albanese conceded.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
But it’s incumbent on us, for the purposes of accuracy, to point out that if Australia hadn’t bowed to the Turks, the Germans would have won the whole show.
We are talking about COP31, of course.
Should you be averse to snappy acronyms, COP31 is (deep breath, try not to expel too much carbon dioxide) the 31st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Australia had expected to hold this peak hot-air festival in Adelaide in November next year, and spent years and large amounts of cash marshalling international support.
But Turkey dug in, insisting it should host COP31 at its coastal resort city of Antalya.
Australia, of course, learned long ago – 110 years, to be precise – the perils of driving an assault on a Turkish coastal position.
Sure enough, on the virtual eve of a showdown, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – vastly more cautious than, say, Churchill of the Dardanelles – made clear Australia wouldn’t be storming any beaches over COP31, however many allies stood with Australia.
He said on Tuesday that Australia wouldn’t veto Turkey’s insistence on hosting the conference if the other country was “chosen”. But as it turned out, Turkey couldn’t be chosen unless Australia did the choosing.
It was the hoisting of a white flag, leaving Australia’s allies confused and the bid for Adelaide all but under water.
Had Albanese got around to studying the Byzantine rules of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change?
Under these so-called “consensus” hosting rules, if neither Australia nor Turkey was willing to concede, the conference would have gone to Bonn, in Germany.
No matter that the Germans didn’t actually want this particular victory. But hey, you want logic? This is the United Nations.
That left Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, looking as stranded as a shipwrecked sailor on a half-submerged rock.
More precisely, he was stranded at COP30 in Belem, Brazil, where he had surely expected he would announce with much flourish that Australia had delivered the Turks a sound defeat.
He had been sounding positively gung-ho as recently as the weekend.
“The situation remains that Australia has the overwhelming support of the world to host COP31,” Bowen said.
Instead, he was reduced on Thursday to a harried doorstop to announce that Turkey had, in fact, done us in the eye.
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Ah, but he’d pulled off a major concession, he declared.
Turkey may be the host, and thus by protocol the president of COP31, but he, Chris Bowen of Australia, would be president of negotiations. In Antalya, regrettably.
This, it seems, was the deal that ensured Australia ended up actually supporting Turkey’s bid, coupled with a plan to hold a series of pre-COP events in South Pacific islands.
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