Whitlam’s infamous Minister for Minerals and Energy, Rex Connor, set in motion the wheels that led to The Dismissal on November 11, 1975. Labor’s socialist experiment came to an abrupt halt in the energy sector because Connor couldn’t get the money for his – literally – pipe dreams. He wanted to build a government-owned and controlled, north-south, and east-west gas pipeline grid.

Connor approached Tirath Khemlani, a London-based Pakistani commodities trader, to borrow petrodollars to fund his vision. But no funds arrived. In the end, the secrecy, the denials, and the telexes led to Rex Connor being stood down for misleading Parliament. The rest is history.

Chris Bowen arrived in 2022 with a grand vision to make Australia a green energy superpower. This began with a policy to achieve 82 per cent electricity generation by ‘renewable’ energy.

In Parliament, Rex Connor, the great economic nationalist, armed himself with a misremembered American poem and dared the Opposition to live up to it:

Give me men to match my mountains,

Give me men to match my plains,

Men with freedom in their vision,

And creation in their brains.

Chris Bowen did no such thing. But I’ve heard in and about the big house on Capital Hill the singing of this limerick:

Some said that green hydrogen was ripe,

To power our cities all night,

Now they say it’s too dear,

But did you ever hear,

Me say that I’d bought all the hype?

The difference is that Bowen didn’t need a Khemlani to be his bagman. We voted him in, and here we are some four years later holding the bag.

On the ABC’s 7.30 in September, Bowen said he had never quite bought all the hype on green hydrogen. That was after years of talking up an Australian export industry, and after a hydrogen production tax incentive the government costed at about $6.7 billion.

Regional Hydrogen Hubs were supposed to seed an export industry. Canberra paid out $31.7 million at Kwinana, $19.3 million at Gladstone and $1.06 million at Townsville.

Then the agreements were torn up, and little of it has come back. The May budget then took $1 billion off the second round of Hydrogen Headstart.

Connor misled Parliament and was stood down. Bowen merely updated his enthusiasm.

The reality is that the turbines have been quieter than the speeches.

There is no refund desk for a scheme that underwrites projects rather than building them, and commercial-in-confidence is not a receipt.

This is not only federal Labor’s mess. The Independent Planning Commission keeps consenting to the wind farms that reach it. Bullawah, near Hay, was approved at the start of October.

Construction is another matter. Squadron’s Uungula, in the state’s central west, is the only large-scale wind farm being built. The first turbine went up in August.

Rye Park reached financial close in September 2021. Iberdrola committed to Flyers Creek in February 2022. Since then, only Uungula has started. I rode through Rye Park this afternoon. Turbines as far as you can see, and a run of new transmission towers, as if Mr Eiffel had been let loose on the Tablelands.

Developers are also dropping about half their projects before an environmental impact statement, which the industry treats as ‘normal’.

In the Central-West Orana zone, New South Wales struck deals under which taxpayers may wear up to $300 million if the transmission is late and the contracted wind farms cannot connect.

Rex Connor’s 20-year loan was for ‘temporary purposes’, which let him hide it from the Loan Council. NSW called a damages clause commercial-in-confidence and hid it in a commercial agreement. Perhaps that’s progress.

But nobody is going to ring the Governor-General. Supply is not blocked, and the Senate is not the Opposition’s. Despite the endless failures of this government, the official Opposition is having no cut-through whatsoever. Given Labor’s recent fall from grace, the Coalition’s poll results are embarrassing.

Dismissal 2.0, if it comes, will not be by the pen. It will be a cancelled turbine, a quarterly bill, and a minister who has decided the hype was never really his. Forrest can shelve a wind farm. Origin can exit one before lunch. The mum in Walcha cannot exit the Renewable Energy Zone, and she was never offered a commission.

Khemlani delivered nothing, so Connor delivered nothing. With our money, Chris Bowen has delivered a shelved wind farm, an exited wind farm, and a line on 7.30 about hype he never quite bought.

The bagman, this time, is us.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you’d like to support his writing, please shout him a drink over at Donorbox.