The Prime Minister's office has refused to say whether Tony Abbott will attend a crucial climate summit in Paris later this year alongside President Barack Obama and other world leaders, despite the PM potentially being in Europe just prior to the event.
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The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) will be held this year in Malta on November 27-29. By coincidence, the Paris summit to hammer out a new global climate treaty starts a day later, on November 30, "just a two-hour flight away", a Canberra-based diplomat said.
It's widely expected Australia will be represented in Paris summit by Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop even though many countries plan to send more senior officials.
Mr Abbott attended the previous CHOGM gathering in November 2013 in Sri Lanka and could be expected to attend this year's event, the diplomat said.
Pressure on Mr Abbott to join the Paris meeting may also rise now that the French hosts say they want the climate talks to kick off with the leaders present rather than leave the main summit wrangling until the end.
"The example of Copenhagen is not so good," Laurent Fabius, France's Foreign Affairs Minister, told a news conference on Monday. The previous climate summit in Denmark in 2009 collapsed despite the involvement of US President Barack Obama, China's Hu Jintao, Australia's Kevin Rudd and other world leaders in marathon talks.
"The idea would be to invite [leaders] to give some political impetus right at the beginning," Mr Fabius said, adding that the finer details of any deal could be left to environment or foreign ministers to negotiate.
'Obstructionist'
Labor's climate change spokesman Mark Butler said Mr Abbott had been "nothing but obstructionist" in the preparatory talks leading up to Paris.
"Tony Abbott could be staying at a hotel next to the Paris Conference talks and he still wouldn't go," Mr Butler said.
Greens climate spokeswoman Larissa Waters said Mr Abbott had skipped a United Nations climate meeting in New York last year despite arriving in the city just a day later for terrorism talks.
"Australia has a terrible reputation for dealing with climate change at the international level, so I wouldn't be surprised if the Prime Minister tries to avoid the embarrassment of being personally called out for it," Senator Waters said.
"Mr Abbott has torn down Australia's carbon pricing scheme, which was hailed as a template for the rest of the world, and is still pushing to make Australia the first country to reduce its Renewable Energy Target," she said. "It's no wonder he's been avoiding the international stage."
Avoiding a 'train wreck'
John Connor, the head of The Climate Institute, said he thought Mr Abbott should attend Paris particularly if he is already in the region for CHOGM.
It would be good for any national leader whatever their party affiliation "to actually confront the reality of both the extent and urgency" of acting to halt global warming, he said, adding that senior business leaders and investors would also be attending.
Mr Connor welcomed France's efforts to front-end the summit with the leaders attending. The Copenhagen experience showed that postponing the highest-level talks until the end "virtually assured a train wreck for the leaders to deal with in the final hours", he said.
Australia's climate policy track record, meanwhile, will come under international scrutiny this week at a UN-backed meeting in Bonn, Germany, that is part of the run-up to Paris.
The Abbott government has provided answers to a range of probing questions from other countries about its climate policies, touting its $2.55 billion Direct Action scheme to pay polluters to reduce emissions as an effective substitute for pricing carbon emissions.
With Reuters
