A private exchange between the prime minister of Australia Anthony Albanese and the Australian minister for climate change and energy Chris Bowen was inadvertently caught on camera on the sidelines of the COP31 summit in Türkiye.The exchange was a private joke related to phone radiation and male anatomy and was recorded by a news camera microphone before a business roundtable on renewable energy investment in Antalya on Friday. The conversation, which was not apparently heard by others in the room, was later broadcast by Channel 7 after being picked up during production.Albanese was putting his phone into his jacket pocket when he told Bowen he had heard it was better to keep the device away from the heart because it could interfere with its rhythm.Bowen jokingly asked whether this was because the phone was “a little bit radioactive”. Albanese laughed and said the explanation “makes absolute sense”.The conversation then turned to where Bowen kept his phone. When the minister said he was more concerned about carrying it in his pants pocket, to which Albanese retorted asking if it was because of his genitals.Both men laughed, with Bowen agreeing and adding that it was “arguably more important than the heart”.The Prime Minister’s office said the two ministers were sharing a joke between meetings. Labor frontbencher Murray Watt also dismissed the incident as people “having a joke”.
Coalition calls exchange ‘weird and gross’
Liberal deputy leader Jane Hume criticised the pair, describing the exchange as “weird and gross” and accusing them of behaving like “14-year-old schoolboys”.She also questioned the government’s spending and the size of Australia’s delegation to the climate summit, arguing that the trip had been justified as an effort to attract international investment.Hume said the government had sent almost 200 bureaucrats to Türkiye at a cost of more than $2 million and spent taxpayer money on a coffee cart, before accusing Albanese and his ministers of attracting ridicule rather than investment.Watt defended Australia’s participation in the summit, saying that taking part in and leading international climate discussions was in the country’s national interest.