McCrann: Chris Bowen’s EV pipe dream fading

Chris Bowen’s EV pipe dream is quickly fading, and he’s curiously pointing the finger at his own government’s “poor policies”.

Photo of Chris Bowen with the Ford F-150 Lightning.

Have you driven a Ford lately, Chris? An EV Ford, more specifically?

That’s Chris Bowen, the minister for - as I affectionately tag him – destroying our electricity system.

Destroying it, while wanting people to plug more and more things into it. Go figure, as they say; as Bowen clearly hasn’t.

Earlier in the year, there was our Chris touting a very muscular tradie-friendly electric ute from Ford, the F-150.

Bowen actually called it an EFord-150 in a tweet, but hey who cares about little slips like that. More impressive was the way Chris himself posed next to it like the very – metro – model of a Westie tradie.

That said, Bowen’s pic did rather leave you with the impression that the only tools going into it wouldn’t be going into the back.

Well, no-one and nothing else, neither tool nor tools, is going into one of these F-150s – bought directly from Ford in Australia, anyway – anytime soon.

Apparently, you can get a specially engineered EV version of the F-150 from a company in Queensland. Starting at $200k and going straight to $250k.

As for Ford, its local website tells us that while “the F-150 Lightning is an extremely exciting and significant vehicle”, we have “no news to share about any plans to bring F-150 Lightning to Australia”.

Hmm, overnight Wednesday, Ford in America announced it was cancelling plans for a large electric SUV, and taking a $US1.9bn ($2.8bn) hit, to boot.

I guess that’s another Ford, our Chris – and everybody else down under, tradies and tools - won’t be driving anytime soon.

Although curiously, and it passed unnoticed at the time, Bowen was blaming himself that we were being denied the electric F-150.

His tweet did note it was not available in Australia – “due to poor policies”.

They could only have been his own government’s policies: he and his true-blue dinkum mates – Albo, Jimbo, Plibo and the rest – had been in government for over two years.

Or does he have the ‘Kamala schtick’ – with her campaign across the Pacific laser-focussed on fixing up the disastrous consequences of her predecessor?

Her predecessor being none other than, well, herself – in partnership of course, with whom she herself describes as the “greatest president”, at least in decades, if not centuries, who nevertheless had to be disposed of?

As for America, our own Michele – RBA Governor Bullock, not Michelle with two-Ls Obama – famously recently said: it really was only one statistic.

Bullock was referring to the – now all-but forgotten – panic on Wall St in reaction to that, one, poor US jobs report. Well said, Michele.

And as I noted at the time, Wall St always rather made a habit of rushing from one side of the boat to the other; only to promptly rush back. As it has now done.

Well, now there are two figures.

Overnight Wednesday the US BLS – their version of our ABS – announced that there had actually been 818,000 fewer jobs created over the March year than previously reported.

You call that a bad number – the one three weeks ago?

Well, hold my beer. And I’m not even a tradie.