Andrew Bolt: I have Aboriginal friends far more sophisticated than Chris Bowen

Manic Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen’s response to being criticised is to demand my bosses sack me for being “racist”.

How frightening is this bloke?

Last week I accused Chris Bowen of being an anti-science zealot who was wrecking our electricity system and threatening our $200bn-a-year exports of coal and gas.

Bowen’s only response? To demand my bosses sack me for being “racist”. Wow.

What makes that frightening is that the comprehension skills of our manic Energy and Climate Change Minister are pitiful for a man claiming he can replace our coal-fired electricity generators with renewable pixie dust.

Chris Bowen’s comprehension skills are pitiful. Picture: Gaye Gerard

What got Bowen’s green goat was that I mocked his speech to the latest UN global warming love-in, which started: “I begin with an acknowledgment that at the heart of action on climate change must be profound respect for those people who have cared for our respective lands for millennia – Indigenous people across the world … Recognising that respect for Indigenous knowledge, cultures and traditional practices is critical.”

As I pointed out, Indigenous people who’ve been around for “millennia” include the white tribes of Europe, including the Saxons of Germany, the Gauls of France, the Celts of Britain, and my lot – the formerly tree-worshipping and human-sacrificing Batavi of Holland.

Well, excuse me if I don’t respect their “Indigenous knowledge” but value instead what reason and science has brought – not least unprecedented wealth, ease, longevity and freedom.

And if I don’t respect the primitive beliefs of “my” Batavi, why should I respect, say, the professed belief of a few Tiwi islanders who now claim a man-turned-crocodile lives in exactly the patch of sea where the pipeline from a giant new gas project would go, which is why it should be stopped?

Bowen exploded: “(Bolt’s) attack on First Nations people as ‘primitive’ is racist and disgusting. News Ltd should sack him.”

Should I flatter Bowen’s intelligence by calling him a liar, or flatter his character by calling him a fool? If he’s smart, he’d know I was not calling Aboriginals “primitive”.

Indeed, I have Aboriginal friends – Jacinta, Warren, Anthony, Adam – far more sophisticated than Bowen.

“Primitive” is what I called a Stone Age belief in an anti-gas Crocodile Man.

Bowen is either smart enough to know this yet still smears a critic as a racist, or he’s so stupid as to cry racist at anyone who scoffs at Crocodile Man.

Either way, the question is now even more urgent: Can we trust this country’s power to a man so dumb or dishonest?