Nature Has a Sense of Humour

Sometimes, nature delivers the punch-lines with super comic timing. Chris ‘Boofhead’ Bowen’s “Pre-COP” climate beano was already an embarrassing enough non-event, with almost none of the world leaders Bowen has been bragging about even showing. For the handful of flunkies, second-bananas and Antipodean has-beens who’d show up for the opening of a paper bag, so long as someone else pays for it and there’s a massive buffet, nature had a big, fat middle-finger prepared.

First it was the driving rain, then the blackouts. With exquisite comic timing, the lights chose to go out when Teal squillionaire Zali Steggall took to the stage to tilt her head and finger-wag the plebs.

We might have hoped the darkness would offer a brief respite from the performative hand-wringing of the climate set, but, alas, the show must go on. It is a peculiar sort of irony, is it not, that our self-appointed planetary saviours found themselves grappling with the very infrastructure that remains the bedrock of civilised life? As the air conditioning wheezed its last breath and the lights flickered into nothingness, one could almost hear the ghosts of coal-fired power stations chuckling in the periphery.

The outage on Tuesday, which government sources said lasted about 10 minutes, also affected air conditioning, with organisers having to open the doors to keep the room at a tolerable temperature. Other attendees in the room said the blackout went for about half an hour.

The official line from the government is, naturally, that this was a ‘brief’ and ‘routine’ occurrence: a mere local glitch, unrelated to the high-minded gathering. It is quite the coincidence, however, that Fiji’s power grid has been struggling with a significant uptick in failures lately, as the nation grapples with the realities of its own energy policy. But let us not allow the inconvenient truth of an unreliable grid to dampen the enthusiasm of our travelling band of luminaries.

The entire enterprise has been described by Shadow Energy Minister Dan Tehan as a ‘slapstick comedy’. Others have wondered whether it was an attempted repeat of James Hansen’s 1988 trickery, where he secretly turned off the aircon in a closed-room Congressional testimony in the middle of the Washington summer, to make his apocalyptic global warming hysteria sound more plausible. But this is Boofhead we’re talking about. Such chicanery is surely beyond the mediocre intellectual limits of such a would-be Machiavelli.

Meanwhile, our Minister for Climate and Energy – or more accurately, the Minister for Grandiose Climate Delusions – has presided over a circus that has seen the goalposts moved so many times they must surely be worn down to the studs.

As the ABC reported in July, foreign diplomats were privately lampooning Bowen for building up pre-COP as the main show, one observing they “were worried the event was heading towards a ‘disaster’ because Australia had spent months insisting that only leaders attend the gathering in Tuvalu”.

What began as a promise to bring the world’s most powerful heads of state to the Pacific has devolved into a ‘participation prize’ event for the second-raters and hangers-on. When the apex predators like Trump or Xi didn’t come calling, the government scrambled to invite anyone with a title and a pulse. We were promised a gathering of giants – we ended up with the equivalent of an airport arrivals lounge where the only people waiting are two lost tourists from Mauritius and Timor-Leste.

Taking a cue from his boss, Bowen, caught between the reality of his empty dance card and his earlier boastful claims, has turned to linguistic contortions and outright denials. He claims he never meant he would bring ‘world leaders’ to Tuvalu, but rather that he simply wanted to ‘bring the world’ to Tuvalu. It is a distinction that only an Albanese government minister could attempt with a straight face.

As for the optics, they have been nothing short of a tropical fiasco. The reports of our own prime minister and his sidekick Boofhead refusing the traditional head garlands – a gesture of respect that seems to have eluded them – only adds to the sense of a detached, metropolitan elite parachuting into the Pacific to lecture the locals before retreating to the comfort of a five-star resort. Maybe Albo didn’t want to look ridiculous, except that it’s far too late for that.

The distance between the hype and reality of this debacle is so great it could span the Pacific. Take for example the media exultation in August last year when Bowen was acting as if his plan to host COP31 was in the bag.

The tragedy is that the taxpayer continues to fund these jet-setting junkets, and while the nation is humiliated standing on the world stage. The only consolation is that the world didn’t even bother watching.