Dimitri Burshtein and Peter Swan give climate and energy minister Chris Bowen a right old going over in their article ‘The grift that keeps on grifting ‘ (Spectator Australia, 11/12/25).

They describe Minister Bowen as not being up to scratch in any of the portfolios he has held, with his “relentless policy adventurism”. His current performance has been both “grimly amusing and economically terrifying”.

Unlike many others, the authors don't regard Bowen as hapless and stumbling. They see him as being ruthlessly efficient at getting things done, with what he gets done being often “catastrophically misaligned” with our best interests.

Bowen has approached every portfolio he has held with missionary zeal; and the mess he leaves behind is for someone else to fix.

. Human Services, for instance - sweeping tinkering and bureaucratic expansion.

. Immigration - asylum seeking, a difficult situation, was turned into a “rolling crisis” by Minister Bowen. In 2 years, he welcomed 389 boats and 24 thousand plus illegal entrants; almost half of what arrived during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd period of misgoverning.

. Treasurer (briefly) - his taxing and intervening made Gough Whitlam look like a “patron saint of fiscal prudence”.

. Energy - in which he has continued his “large scale disruption” and cost us a motza, driving up power bills, getting farmers’ backs up, and bulldozing the environment, and littering it with ugly solar panels and turbines; and of course, there is the 275 dollar lie, and the pigheaded insistence - in the face of bigger and bigger power bills - that renewables are the cheapest form of energy (which they might be if it didn't have to be distributed via billions of dollars worth of new infrastructure).

. Green hydrogen - all experiments failed at huge cost.

Bowen has no real world experience, and his political ‘career’ should have extended no further than his local council.

The lies and denial are the worst of it, with cult minions and grifters arguing that coal and gas are the reason for price increases, not wind and solar, or that the economic woes of Germany and the UK have nothing to do with renewable energy.

The annual cost of the wind and solar con, both direct and indirect, would be in the order of tens of billions. The destruction of natural heritage is an ongoing obscenity. The security implications of having the entirety of our generating infrastructure on China are being ignored.