Andrew Bolt: Bowen still a believer in baloney

Chris Bowen has claimed Australia could become a “renewable energy superpower” by exporting green hydrogen, but as we’ve seen his green plans are leading this country to disaster.

An election doesn’t make problems magically disappear.

Can someone tell Chris Bowen, now crowing about Labor’s win?

Bowen, the Albanese government’s Energy and Climate Change Minister, is so unpopular that Labor hid him during the election campaign.

Yet on Wednesday he claimed Labor’s smashing victory was because of his policies. The “silent majority” had given him its “endorsement”, he claimed, telling him to “keep on, and get on with the job”. Really?

Labor should be freaking if Bowen thinks voters told him to go in even harder, and not just because international evidence shows that the more wind and solar a country has, the higher power bills are likely to be.

Chris Bowen at first Cabinet meeting with the newly sworn in Ministry at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Martin Ollman

Just this week came two more signs of Bowen-style green plans already leading this country to disaster. First, the Dyno Nobel fertiliser plant at Phosphate Hill, 140km from Mount Isa, said it would shut unless someone bought it out. That’s 500 jobs that could be lost, because making fertiliser takes lots of gas, and gas now costs too much.

We’ve had too many gas projects strangled.

This isn’t an isolated failure. Last year, Qenos, our biggest manufacturer of plastics and chemicals, also shut, and three months ago so did Australia’s only architectural glass manufacturer, Oceania Glass. Both also blamed gas prices among other factors.

High power prices have helped to wipe out our nickel industry, which couldn’t compete with Indonesian plants powered by new coal generators financed by China. But Dyno Nobel isn’t the only news to remind Australians that voting Labor still left us stuck with Bowen’s turkeys.

Andrew Forrest, Australia’s biggest spruiker of green hydrogen, said he was laying off another 90 staff working on his hydrogen projects. Oh dear.

Oceania Glass' former distribution centre in the Port of Brisbane. Picture: Supplied

See, Bowen was such a sucker for Forrest’s miracle gas that he claimed Australia could become a “renewable energy superpower” by exporting green hydrogen, made from pumping vast amounts of green electricity through water.

The Albanese government promised billions in subsidies to green hydrogen investors, but Forrest last year walked away from most of his hydrogen projects, admitting the gas was too expensive. Forrest isn’t alone. Woodside and Origin also dropped planned investments in green hydrogen last year.

But Bowen says we just told him to “keep on” with this green energy madness. Does the PM seriously agree that was the message voters sent the minister he hid for weeks, from sheer fear?