Fiji for him. The power bill for everyone else.

The man who promised cheaper power is in Fiji. The woman who never promised anything of the sort is packing halls in Victoria. Between those two facts sits the ugliest week of Anthony Albanese’s prime ministership.

On Monday the Prime Minister landed in Nadi for a pre-COP climate gathering Australia is co-hosting with Fiji and Tuvalu, ahead of the real COP31 in Türkiye next month. About 4,000 officials, advocates and climate grifters are there. World leaders are not.

Only two heads of government from outside the Pacific – Timor-Leste’s José Ramos-Horta and Mauritius’s Navin Ramgoolam – bothered to turn up.

Reports put the Australian outlay for the Fiji-Tuvalu exercise at around $20 to $25 million on event management, broadcasting, and resort bookings alone. This cost sits inside a broader package tied to Bowen’s COP role that has been costed nearer $150 million. Former prime ministers have been wheeled out to fill speaking slots actual sitting Prime Ministers would not take.

Chris Bowen, our very own Climate Change Minister, has dismissed criticisms of the expense as the cost of diplomacy.

On social media the clip doing the rounds is Bowen appearing to nod off at his own taxpayer-funded gabfest.

Labor went to the 2022 election on modelling that household electricity bills would be $275 lower by 2025. They are not. They are higher, and the households paying them know exactly who sold them the modelling.

While Albanese talks about Pacific voices and existential threat from a resort conference the rest of the world largely skipped, Australian families are still opening quarterly bills that make a mockery of the promise.

The comments under every story about the summit are not polite. They are the sound of people who were told the transition would be cheap and have spent four years discovering it was not.

The same note keeps turning up: someone still has the leaflet promising $275 off the bill, and the last quarter was the worst they have had, and the man who sold them the leaflet is in Fiji explaining the weather to people who did not bother to show up.

Polling numbers match the mood. A RedBridge/Accent poll for the Australian Financial Review, taken after the Reserve Bank lifted the cash rate to 4.60 per cent – a 15-year high – has Albanese’s net favourability at a record low of minus 27, down ten points in a month. Treasurer Jim Chalmers is at minus 23. Primary votes: One Nation 29, Labor 28, Coalition 21.

One Nation leads voters on cost of living, housing, immigration and crime. Labor leads on healthcare and almost nothing else. A three-way preferred-prime-minister question has Albanese on 31, Pauline Hanson on 26, Angus Taylor on 15. Newspoll had already put his net approval at minus 27 in September. The country has stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Which is why the contrast with Victoria is so brutal.

On Saturday, Hanson and Victorian leader Warren Pickering launched One Nation’s state campaign at Crown in Southbank in front of a crowd reported at somewhere between 750 and more than a thousand. The party is contesting every lower-house seat and the upper house on 28 November. Resolve has them on 23 per cent of the Victorian primary vote, with Labor on 25 and the Coalition on 28 – enough, on those numbers, to put them in the balance of power in the Legislative Council and possibly into the lower house.

The policy book is called The Real Deal: tougher sentencing, repeal of a stack of taxes, cancellation of the multi-billion dollar Suburban Rail Loop, a rollback of the renewable build-out and a lift of the nuclear ban. One Nation barred the $1.3 billion taxpayer funded ABC from the launch. The chant was “take Victoria back.”

A party that did not exist as a credible threat two years ago is barnstorming a state election on power prices, crime and debt. Hanson is still net negative in the national polls. She is also the only federal figure whose numbers are moving the right way, and the only one currently drawing a crowd that sounds angry rather than managed.

Candidate Mark Nicholson told the crowd that Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan would be “in prison by Christmas” if One Nation won. Labor Premier Ben Carroll called the whole raucous event an alarming Americanisation. The room did not care.

Albanese’s defenders will say the Pacific is the front line, that being a good neighbour costs money, and that pre-COP meetings were never meant to be G20 photo opportunities. All of that can be true and still miss the point the country has already reached.

The promise was cheaper electricity. The delivery was higher bills, higher rates, and a prime minister on a plane to a luxury resort in Fiji.