Two leaders shared a Climate Week stage, but their speeches revealed contrasting approaches to climate leadership. Albanese spoke about Australia’s climate efforts; Miliband set out how governments must prepare for climate threats. The question is where Australia’s plan is.

Put someone who hasn’t got a clue up against a person with talent, and the incapacity becomes quickly obvious. That was the case when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was joined by the UK foreign secretary to give the official launch speeches at Climate Week in New York on 21 September.

Held during the United Nations General Assembly meetings when most heads of state turn up and perform, NYC Climate Week is the most significant annual political event in the global climate networking diary.

Prime Minister Albanese was listed as giving the opening keynote speech at Climate Week, titled by the organisers as ‘Climate security is national security’. Joining him was Ed Miliband, UK foreign secretary and until recently climate minister, and a person who does get the climate challenge.

The basic problem with Albanese’s speech was that it was almost completely off-topic. Neither of the terms ‘climate security’ and ’national security’ was mentioned, nor the ideas underlying climate-security risk analysis. And there was just one reference to security: “This is why we continue to back Pacific-led climate action and innovation to protect livelihoods, security and cultures.”

But the government does not have a credible Pacific climate-security strategy, and the continued harking to Australia’s magnanimous role in the Pacific does not wash. Maina Vakafua Talia, Tuvalu’s climate and environment minister, says Australia’s aid “doesn’t really matter” next to Australia’s fossil fuel subsidies.

And on the biggest near-term threat to regional climate security, there was also just a single mention: “In Australia, spring has arrived. With a record-breaking El Niño forecast, Australia and the Pacific nations are preparing for a potential (sic) summer of extreme heat, bushfires and floods.” No mention of drought or food in/security, yet Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and the Philippines are three of the most El Niño-vulnerable states.

In Papua New Guinea, drought is already leading to food insecurity. As well as raging wildfires in Kalimantan, Indonesia is currently experiencing a drought, which poses risks to food security, with warnings of potential crop failures and rising rice prices due to the lack of water. In such countries, where food can take half of a family’s income, price jumps can lead to social breakdown and conflict, as they did in the Arab Spring.

Scientists project that more than 450,000 people will die from the additional heat brought by the super El Niño in the next six months, including 25,000 in total across Indonesia and the Philippines. The global estimate is 450,000 extra deaths. In brutal terms, that is one expression of climate-driven human insecurity, but this reality seemed far from the prime minister’s mind.

These are the real stories of ‘Climate security is national security’. But Albanese has not recognised these immediate risks in his speech, or Australia’s role as a fossil-fuel export superpower in making the problems worse. Nor has Australia publicly articulated any plan to help mitigate these risks this year in such vulnerable countries, or considered how extreme heat and drought in Australia can drive food-flation at home, adding some pep to the cost-of-living crisis.

Ed Miliband’s speech, in contrast, pointed to the need to “recognise the national security imperative”:

“Nepal’s devastating floods happening due to glacial collapse and the coming El Niño, as Prime Minister Albanese said, is already forecast to be the strongest in living memory. And the nature loss crisis is just as acute, with ecosystems being degraded in every region of the world. That is the conclusion of the UK’s recent nature security assessment, which you can all read.

“This is why. These facts. What is happening in our world. Is why climate breakdown, in my view, must be an issue for foreign ministers and prime ministers, as well as energy and climate ministers. … And once we accept this, several implications follow.

“First, we must change how we assess risk. Climate and nature must be embedded in national security systems, in threat assessments, and contingency planning.

“Second, we have to become better at managing shocks. These shocks that cross borders, better forecasting and early warning systems, more resilient infrastructure, health and food systems, more effective disaster risk finance and insurance. Acting before the crisis hits, rather than simply picking up the pieces afterwards.

“That’s why we all have a responsibility, if we care about national security, if we care about keeping our populations safe, to act as countries against the threat of the climate crisis.”

What a contrast. Miliband talks about risk assessments and embedding them in policy. The Australian government commissioned the Office of National Intelligence to assess the national-security implications of climate change in 2022, but that report remains classified, despite a Senate committee subsequently recommending that a declassified version be tabled in parliament. No further assessment is planned, despite accelerated warming since the ONI report, and a deteriorating climate-security environment. And the risks have not been incorporated into policy.

Yet just three days after the opening event, Miliband announced that he will appoint a new special representative for climate security and a new ministerial taskforce focussed on “the national security and resilience risks of a changing climate and nature loss”, with military and security experts as well as climate scientists.

The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group (ASLCG) says genuine climate leadership must be measured by what Australia does at home, not simply by what it says on the international stage. Former chief of the Australian Defence Force, Admiral Chris Barrie AC (Ret), says that “Australia cannot credibly claim climate-security leadership overseas while failing to confront the scale of climate risk at home, including continuing to approve new and expanded fossil-fuel developments.”

He says the question for governments is no longer whether climate disruption will create serious security consequences, but how severe those consequences will become and how well prepared Australia will be to withstand them: “Where is the plan? The government has yet to set out a clear climate-security framework showing how escalating climate risks are being incorporated across defence strategy, foreign policy, regional security, intelligence and national security decision-making.”

The government’s failure to publicly address climate-security risks is no accident. Silence facilitates climate disinformation, and the government is complicit, as P&I has previously documented. Further evidence was reported recently by Ryan Copp in the AFR, where, “according to a tally of the number of mentions per 10,000 speeches in parliament using the privately-owned artificial intelligence tool CheckHansard, in 2026 the conservatives talked about climate change more than Labor did for the first time in almost three decades”.

The government has a policy of avoiding discussion about climate impacts and joining the dots between fossil fuels, extreme events and climate insecurity. The government does not want to talk about future climate risks because it is working closely with the fossil fuel industry to make the problem worse.

So when the prime minister gave the finger in the air to the topic he was asked to speak on at the Climate Week opening, it was not an accident. It is a political strategy.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.