Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, once stood before the nation and promised that Labor’s ‘Powering Australia’ plan would slash household power bills by $275 a year by 2025. That was the headline figure, repeated ad nauseam during the 2022 election campaign.
With 2025 now almost behind us, the average household is not $275 better off, it is hundreds of dollars worse off. Wholesale electricity prices have repeatedly spiked, retail offers have soared, and the subsidised-for-rich-people surge in rooftop solar and batteries has done precisely nothing to shield everyday consumers from the brutal reality of a grid that would crumble in the night without coal and gas.
Yet instead of staying home to fix the mess in his own portfolio, Mr Bowen is packing his bags for yet another international talk-fest.
Bowen will chair COP31 in Turkey next year after Australia’s late and ultimately unsuccessful bid to co-host with Pacific nations was abandoned. Having failed to land the gig for Australia, Bowen has pivoted seamlessly from bidding contestant to presiding officer.
Alongside Airbus Albo, we now have Boeing Bowen. While Aussies pay for his lollipops and rainbows ‘free’ electricity, he is forever in the air, and forever somewhere else when the bills arrive.
The irony is almost too rich. The man who cannot keep the lights on affordably at home will now lecture the world on climate ambition from the chair of the United Nations climate conference.
Meanwhile, Turkey is a nation that still commissions new coal plants, ranks among the top twenty global emitters, and has ratified the Paris Agreement while treating its emissions-reduction pledge as a polite suggestion rather than a binding commitment. It is, in short, the perfect venue for a bit of theatrical hand-wringing followed by zero consequences. Minister Bowen was made for the role.
One struggles to recall a more vivid illustration of Labor’s priorities. When Australian families were opening power bills that had doubled in some states, Bowen was in Dubai for COP28. When Queenslanders were sweltering through blackouts, he was in Baku for COP29. And when the Auditor-General and multiple independent analysts confirmed that the $275 savings promise had evaporated faster than morning dew on a solar panel, the Minister’s response was to blame ‘global factors’ and quietly delete the pledge from the government’s website.
This is not leadership, it is frequent-flyer diplomacy.
Every international junket burns more aviation fuel than the average Australian household uses in electricity in a month, yet the carbon maths is apparently different when you are a climate minister. The same logic that condemns a suburban tradie’s ute as a planetary threat somehow exempts the perpetual motion machine of ministerial travel.
Australians are not stupid. They can see that the government that promised cheaper power delivered the exact opposite. They can see that the renewable energy ‘transition’ is code for higher prices today for theoretical emissions cuts tomorrow. That’s if the rest of the world ever follows suit. And they can see that the Minister who presides over this domestic policy failure is now rewarded with the international stage, chairing a conference in a coal-building nation while our own energy system remains a high-cost, high-risk experiment.
If Chris Bowen wants to salvage any credibility, he should decline the Turkish chairmanship, stay in Canberra, and devote every waking hour to delivering reliable, affordable electricity for Australian households.
Until the lights stay on and the bills come down, any claim to global climate leadership is nothing more than a head-of-turkey COP-out.
A bush turkey might argue that an accountable Blackout Bowen in the Australian bush is worth two Boeing Bowens in Turkey.
Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.
