Vikki Campion: Why the piss-up should not be on us in 2026
On the other side of the world, billionaires have parked their private jets to see their friends for COP29. If it’s up to our government, the 2026 holiday for COP31 will be here – on the taxpayer’s dollar, writes Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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On the other side of the world, billionaires have parked their private jets to see their friends in Baku, Azerbaijan, for COP29, and are pondering where their next junket will be.
Next year will be carnivalesque at Belem, Brazil. If it’s up to our government and one Aussie premier hosting a piss-up for them in Azerbaijan next Wednesday, the 2026 holiday for COP31 is right here, on the taxpayer’s dollar.
Since we signed up for net zero 2050 in Glasgow at COP26, hasn’t life only improved on Average St, Australia? Hasn’t beaming environmental radiance made paying for a roof over your head, refrigeration and a full stomach so much easier?
No, the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties only hurts those gullible countries that take it seriously, like us. The climate privilege of the West now includes a demand for $1.8 trillion a year to be paid to developing countries such as China.
The result here is tent cities, that big hole that used to be manufacturing, our banks acting as new-age chapels of carbon chastity, refusing to finance small business involved in coal, millions of hectares of prime agricultural land industrialised for wind and solar that will never be as productive again, more expensive groceries, all for the attempt to change the weather via 0.04 of 1 per cent of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The result overseas, where they are not as gullible as us, is a world where the biggest emitting countries keep pledging and emitting more, where Russia emits more than the whole of NATO, and where nearly 60 per cent of the world’s emissions come from countries with no intention of reducing emissions, especially since the US pulls out of Paris after seeing the light on this grifting Olympics that even over-exploited former child activist Greta Thunberg calls “greenwashing”.
COP, or Conference of the Parties, should stand for “Cost of the Party”, because that’s what the Australian taxpayers struggling with their power bill will have to pick up if this Adelaide host bid is accepted.
I’m not against billionaires taking their private jets to Adelaide for COP31 as long as they are willing to jump on a chopper and get chauffeured to see the reality of their decision-making around Australia.
Take a bus to our new address-less homes under canvas, whose tenants go north, not for the surf but the warmth that they cannot afford under a roof thanks to ridiculous policies put forward by the COP.
Take a bus to the mountain towns where the pensioners will suffer winter without wood-fired heaters thanks to COP policies urging them to be banned.
Come and meet the farmers who feed you, whose places have no buffer from pollutants of their new subsidised neighbours’ foreign-owned solar and wind.
In interviews spruiking his bid for Adelaide COP31 this week, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas heralded “global co-ordination ... to advance decarbonisation is critical to our natural world and how we pass it on to our kids”.
If you believe that, why don’t you underwrite the decommissioning and rehabilitation of the land under which the wind and solar factories sit?
No government, federal or state, has put their money where its mouth is on returning the land to its “natural state to pass on to our kids”.
Participation in COPs is restricted to approved delegates, accredited media members and admitted observer organisations, i.e., not you.
The question is, how many billionaires can be lured to the graces of Adelaide Convention Centre?
This is not a sledge on South Australia but on who it is trying to attract.
The COP greasers will only show up for the five-star experience.
That’s why the Nairobi COP could attract only 6000 attendees but Bali, a year later, the prestige holiday hub of five-star hotels and butler service, attracted 11,000.
When worrying about carbon, it’s better to do it on the beach with a cocktail and a masseur.
Put it in Dubai, and the attendance soars to more than 83,000; apparently, if you haven’t been shopping in Dubai wrapping diamonds in your carbon concerns, you just haven’t sacrificed enough for the environment.
The highest attendance was Copenhagen, Paris and Dubai – and what do they have in common? Shopping.
COP19 in Warsaw struggled to get the numbers, maybe because, as Encyclopedia Britannica describes: “Warsaw is notable among Europe’s capital cities not for its size, its age, or its beauty but for its indestructibility”.
Why couldn’t the so-called environmentalists fall in love with that?
Already, the South Australian taxpayer is subsiding billionaires at Baku, where more than 65,000 delegates have registered to attend the COP29 climate summit, “hosting a unique networking reception” next Friday. Don’t you love these euphemistic terms for a piss-up?
Adelaide may hardly be famous for shopping, but it does have wine and luxury estates.
The feasibility study has been quiet on how much of the conference will be offsite, away from the Convention Centre and deep in the Barossa Valley, Clare Valley, Coonawarra, and Adelaide Hills.
Fly the COP circus here. Get them on the Penfolds Grange.
It will expose to Australians first-hand the gaping divide between the jetsetting billionaire grifting class whooping it up on the national credit card and those caught in the housing and cost-of-living debt cycle who cannot afford to go anywhere.
NOT SO OARSOME: RATEPAYERS TO COVER COAL PROTESTERS’ INDEMNITY
Newcastle ratepayers are now on the hook for the nation’s climate activists, who are very good at driving to Newcastle but not very good at staying upright in plastic canoes in the ocean.
On the back of their waterwise display last year, where makeshift vessels collapsed, and police had to rescue a bevy of activists from drowning as they protested coal ships, the NSW Supreme Court blocked them from disrupting Newcastle Port in an planned protest. Justice Desmond Fagan, in his judgment, found: “The risk of injury among such a congested assembly of small craft is obvious.”
Clearly not obvious to the Newcastle Lord Mayor and the council, who put ratepayers on the hook for their public-liability indemnity.
Rising Tide waited just weeks before their wool-knit beanie paddle jamboree featuring Peter Garrett was scheduled before popping in paperwork to council for a protest of 10,000. Did Lord Mayor Dr Ross Kerridge admonish the tardy drown-activists for failing to fill out a timely form to go to a full meeting of council? No.
He and the council used legislated powers to exercise “the policymaking functions of the governing body of the council between meetings” to allow the protest to go on, as it still claims online, “stopping coal leaving the world’s largest coal port for an unprecedented 50 hours”.
It is confounding that the Lord Mayor, whose council encompasses the biggest coal port in the world, seemingly has no grasp of Australia’s terms of trade.
How do the whims of one council overrule the highest court of NSW?
The City of Newcastle also secured indemnity for $20m against any liability claims connected with Rising Tide’s use of the area. In a list of undertakings, the activists assured Dr Kerridge they would be on their best behaviour because they had held a webinar attended by 317 of 10,000 expected attendees. Yet they are still advertising it as a protest, even when it is banned.
And even on Friday, on its 2024 events guide, Rising Tide’s FAQ’s ask: “Do you need to be an experienced kayaker? No! The sit-on-top kayaks are extremely sturdy and don’t require prior kayaking experience.”
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