Taxpayers hefty bill to send bureaucrats and minsters to climate summit revealed, as Chris Bowen defends use of funds
A collection of answers to questions on notice asked by former shadow finance minister Jane Hume has uncovered that the Albanese government spent a whopping $1.5 million sending a delegation of bureaucrats to last year's COP29 climate summit.
An average of $20,000 was spent to send each of the 75 civil servants to the conference, with a further $102,343.69 spent to send transport Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen and his staff to Baku.
More than $20,000 was also used to fly the Assistant Climate Change Minister Josh Wilson to the same conference.
The total bill came in at an exorbitant $1,672,000.
The mammoth contingent included 42 representatives from the Department of Climate Change, Energy the Environment and Water, 25 officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and two civil servants respectively from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and the Department of Finance.
A representative from the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the Department of Health and Aged Care also jetted to the South Caucasus country.
Documents from the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority also showed that Mr Bowen's travel expenses for the COP29 summit stood at $33,049.03, with his staff raking up a $68,601.66 tab.
Mr Bowen only attended the conference's second week.
Shadow finance minister James Paterson blasted the government and relevant department heads for their excessive use of taxpayer funds and labelled the conference, which resulted in few binding climate initiatives a 'talkfest with nothing to show for it.'
'On Labor's watch, power prices and emissions are both up – and so is spending extravagant sums of taxpayers' money on climate junkets,' Mr Paterson told The Australian.
'The Albanese government must justify why they sent almost 100 people and spent millions of dollars on a delegation to a talkfest.'
'While Australians were struggling to pay their electricity bills, Chris Bowen, Josh Wilson, and at least seven government departments and agencies were travelling on the taxpayer dime with nothing to show for it.'
However, Mr Bowen refused to accept accusations of waste and slammed the Coalition's attitude on climate change.
'The LNP doesn't believe in net zero anymore and now apparently they don't believe in sending ministers to COP either,' a spokesperson for Mr Bowen told The Australian.
'Given [former prime minister] Scott Morrison took 39 people to the Glasgow COP they are also nothing more than hypocrites.'
It was separately discovered that the government spent substantially less in previous years on international climate conferences than that of 2024.
This includes spending $1,075,000 for its pavilion at the COP26 at Glasgow in Scotland in 2021, $971,682 on the COP27 climate conference in harm el-Sheikh, Egypt in 2022 and $831,549 for COP28 in Dubai.
Australia is currently competing with Turkey to secure hosting rights for the COP31 conference in 2026.
The government has stated it is unable to provide the total expected cost related to holding the summit.
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