To top it off, the minister responsible for our energy needs has a well-deserved reputation for incompetence, having ensured administrative and economic bedlam in every portfolio he has held.
I am of course referring to Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who in 2021 promised that his plans to replace coal-fired power plants with a swath of solar panels and wind turbines would, by 2025, lower the average annual household power bill by $275.
It was a figure taken straight from Bowen’s abacus, so to speak. Instead of a $275 reduction, Australians will pay up to $1300 more than the figure promised. As enormous as that revised total cost is, it is nothing compared to the untold billions in taxpayer dollars that Bowen pours into the renewables money pit.
But take heart, for Bowen has a plan B. Struggling energy consumers, he volunteered, should “shop around for a better deal”.
It is one thing for Bowen to screw the power pooch, but it is next level for him to still believe that Australians value his advice about reducing power bills. On that note, minister, perhaps you could let us know which energy retailers are selling at the rate you promised in 2021. I’ll wait.
Bowen has built a career on enacting policies to reduce the cost of living, and always to the detriment of the public purse. As consumer affairs minister in the Rudd government, he promised Grocery Choice and FuelWatch would promote competition.
“Under FuelWatch, the days of motorists driving past a petrol station in the morning only to return in the afternoon to find a 10 cent per litre jump in the price of petrol will be over,” he proclaimed in 2008.
Humiliatingly for Bowen, a public service leak revealed multiple government departments opposed his policy, saying if anything it would increase fuel prices. FuelWatch did not get past the Senate.
As for Grocery Choice, Bowen declared it would “concentrate the minds” of retailers when they decided their prices. The only mind it did concentrate was that of his successor, Craig Emerson. It concentrated his mind so much he killed it off days after assuming his new portfolio in 2009.
But regarding Bowen’s recent suggestion to shop around, I could not agree more. Wanted: energy minister for immediate start. Unlike incumbent, must not suffer from chronic obtuseness, numeric illiteracy, or nuclear phobia. Applicants should specify, in 25 words or less, what is the greatest impediment to Australia’s energy security (aside from the gibbering political spiv with the high-viz vest and helmet).
Such is the arrogance of this ministerial clodhopper he refused last week even to concede he had failed to deliver his promised $275 reduction. To boot he repeated his false claim that “every bit of renewable energy you introduce puts downward pressure on prices”.
Has he not heard of the Australian Energy Regulator, which in approving the recent price rises said the decision was in part due to “low solar and wind output that drove high-price events”?
If mistruths were an energy source, Bowen could light up the entire Southern Hemisphere like a supernova. Writing on Wednesday about managing Australia’s energy needs, he insisted “at each point we’ve been honest with Australians and fought to get all bill payers a better deal”. This borders on confabulation.
As Bowen proved in 2019, he need only open his mouth to send swing voters the Coalition’s way. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is unlikely to sack his bumbling minister, because he too is compromised. Asked in 2021 how Labor would deliver on its $275 reduction promise, Albanese had his ‘Peace for our time’ moment.
“Well, I don’t think – I know,” he said, waving a booklet prop and revealing more about himself than he intended. “I know because we have done the modelling.”
Even if Albanese were to dismiss Bowen, no-one in their right mind would want to succeed him. The government’s policy of demonising coal-fired power and replacing it with renewables was a political measure. It was a desperate ploy to retain the bien pensant vote and buy Labor time to consolidate. Its designers knew it would eventually implode, hence spruiking these policies was always going to be a job for a political chump.
Being the Frank Spencer of cabinet, Bowen has all the experience required for that role. Some of you will remember that name from the 1970s BBC sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, starring Michael Crawford as a well-meaning but spectacularly useless fellow who caused chaos wherever he went.
One episode in particular resonates. Depressed at being sacked yet again, Spencer is referred to a psychiatrist, an upbeat man determined to reverse his patient’s failures and instil self-confidence in him.
But by the end of the session, and having interrogated Spencer at length, the psychiatrist is a shattered man.
“You were right, and I was wrong, Mr Spencer,” he says wearily. “You – are a failure.”
Whereupon Spencer leaps to his feet, delighted his belief has been validated. “I’m a failure,” he says with a smile as he strolls down the street. If only Bowen would have a similar epiphany.
Admittedly the analogy is not perfect. Although Spencer’s appearances inevitably resulted in disaster, they took place in a contained environment where he worked in low-level jobs.
It was not as if he was his country’s energy minister. In that case it would not be a comedy. It would be a television drama of a first-world country’s transformation into an energy dystopia.
You know, just like the one we are heading to under Bowen.
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