What is it uniquely that you think Australia and the Pacific Islands could bring as hosts of the conference?

There's a few things.

One, I should say that here we're just south of the equator by only a few millimeters.

But essentially, other than here, there has been no COP in the southern hemisphere since Lima in 2014.

Yeah.

So everyone that works here knows that one of the fundamental principles of the UN system is equitable geographic distribution or representation and really we're starting to get into a situation where the COP is not geographically representative of the kind of global effort and also doesn't take into account different circumstances.

So for example, here in Brazil, very focused on forests and a real recognition that an Australia slash Pacific hosted COP next year would focus very much on the nexus between oceans and climate, but also the very intensive energy transition that's underway both in the pacific islands and they have declared a vision to achieve 100 renewables for the whole region all of the pacific island states by 2035 and then a great success story over recent years in australia with the electrification and massive uptake of renewables on the main electricity grid which has gone from less than 20 up to 45 percent and headed towards 80% by 2030.

But it certainly, and we ran into Dean again, who helped us understand this, but it certainly helped bring the COP31 host question to a head.

Can I kick off by just asking you, I mean, obviously we're speculating about the general dynamics kind of informing the election?

So I think it's fair to say that the kind of number one top tier issue for the election is the cost of living.

So if you take a kind of general basket of goods over the last five years or so, there's been around a 25% increase in the cost of things, and that's having an impact on families and kind of middle class households.

And And so that's a really big focus of the electoral debate.

But what was quite interesting is going back kind of five or six weeks ago, just as the two major parties got into their stride preparing for the campaign proper, there just was an attempt, I thought, to keep climate and energy policy a little bit under the radar, given that there was such a big climate and energy outcome at the last election in 2022, which really saw the reinforcement and the establishment of a whole set of very foundational climate policies.

And I suppose the government just wants to get ahead of that and not return to the climate wars that we've seen over 15 years prior.

And just as the campaign was about to get off on the right foot, we had a cyclone come in on the east coast and hit Australia somewhere between northern New South Wales and Brisbane.

So look, the impact of the election, whoever wins, you know, whether it's Albanese or whether it's Dutton, how's that going to fundamentally impact climate in Australia? Yeah.