Australia, the Pacific, and the climate moment we cannot waste

This week the Pacific Islands Forum meets in Honiara, Solomon Islands. The timing is unique. Australia is preparing to set its 2035 emissions reduction target. Prime Minister Albanese is days away from meeting Türkiye President Erdogan in a bid to secure COP31 in partnership with the Pacific. Three threads – regional diplomacy, domestic ambition, and global credibility – are woven together in a way we rarely see.

Each alone would be significant. Together, they represent a timely test of Australia’s sincerity and capacity. The Pacific has long provided leadership on climate change. It has never lacked courage. But courage alone will not deliver the emissions reductions needed from developed economies, like Australia. For that, Australia must align its actions with its ambitious language.

A 2035 target that keeps the 1.5°C goal alive goes beyond symbolism. It must be the trajectory the world aims for over the next decade. A science-based target could either strengthen Australia’s case for a COP31 bid or weaken it. How does Australia convince the world that it can co-lead the most important climate meeting on Earth while setting a climate-destroying target and approving new coal and gas projects? How can Australia seriously claim a shared commitment to Pacific priorities while undermining the very commitments it fights to uphold?

Labor has been praised for shifting the climate debate beyond denialism. But ambition measured only against the wreckage left by Coalition governments is scarcely ambition at all. While regional leaders meet in Honiara to discuss how to collectively address the climate crisis, the Coalition is fighting over plans to scrap the net zero by 2050 target it set only a few years ago. Meanwhile, the government’s record remains poor, and marked by a radical disconnect between rhetoric and action. Emissions policy is still shaped by industry comfort, not planetary limits. Fossil fuel expansion continues as if global demand is an external law of nature, not a political choice.

Civil society must resist the temptation to confuse access with influence. Too often the movement softens its demands in the name of pragmatism, giving Labor a pass it has not earned. That approach fails strategically. It signals that there is little political cost to mediocrity. It leaves space for government talking points to stand as progress rather than positioning them for what they are — incremental moves in a rapidly worsening emergency.

The Coalition, meanwhile, is in no position to capitalise. Riven again by debate over abandoning net zero, it offers no credible alternative, no coherent critique, and no meaningful opposition. There is no risk that honest scrutiny of Labor’s weak environmental performance will somehow gift government to the Coalition. The risk is the opposite: that the absence of pressure locks in underachievement as the ceiling of political possibility.

Pacific nations are not powerless in this context. The International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion looms large. It will give legal strength to what has long been moral truth: that climate inaction violates fundamental obligations to vulnerable states and peoples. Australia cannot pretend this will not apply here. Our choices will be judged not only by history but by law.

The government knows this. It knows the credibility of the COP31 bid depends on the trust of the Pacific. It knows that a weak 2035 target will invite scepticism abroad and resentment at home. It knows that the Pacific will not be a silent partner in a showcase event that sells short its own survival.

So the question is not whether Australia will act, but whether it will act at the scale required. Will Labor set a target that aligns with a 1.5°C pathway, or one that hedges against political discomfort? Will it integrate climate diplomacy and domestic policy, or continue treating them as separate silos? Will it use this moment to lead with integrity, or settle for gestures that expire with the news cycle?

These are crucial questions that go to the heart of Australia’s place in the region. The Pacific is watching. Not for promises, but for proof. Diplomacy without delivery is extraction by another name. To ask nations to share their political capital in a COP31 bid while we expand fossil fuels is to ask them to pay twice: once with their credibility, and again with their future.

Civil society cannot wait for clarity. We must force it. That means calling out contradictions without fear. It means demanding that the 2035 target be science-based, not focus group-tested. It means insisting that international hosting ambitions come with international responsibilities.

If not now, when? If a confluence of regional leadership, global attention, and legal accountability cannot move the needle, what can?

The Pacific does not have the luxury of Australian political timetables. Nor should it have to tolerate them. Australia has been given a unique opportunity to align national ambition with regional need and global responsibility. Whether the Albanese government takes it will reveal more than our policy settings. It will reveal who we genuinely are.