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.

The economic woes of Germany are self inflicted.
Result of the loss of cheap Russian gas and paying U.S. 4 times the price for LNG.
U.S thought manufacturing would move to America, but it moved to China.

Bowen's expensive electricity has wiped 100,000 manufacturing jobs. But hey. Who cares. Labor continues to bring in masses of mainly unskilled people, many of them aged and useless, dressed in peculiar clothing, staggering around looking bewildered, on the wrong side of the footpaths.

It is projected that, by the end of this term screwing Australia, they will have brought in 2 million unwanted and inappropriate people.

I doubt that even the Bondi terror attack will shake this lot out of its stupidity.

Definitely not inept in uselessness !

Well, this thread certainly disintegrated fast!

It began as a summary of a Spectator article attacking Chris Bowen's competence. Within two replies, we're told wind and solar are a "con", Germany and the UK are economic basket cases because of renewables, Australia has "lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs" due to Bowen's electricity prices, and that mass immigration and even the Bondi terror attack somehow belong in the same causal chain.

This is mere grievance stacking.

Germany's economic shock is overwhelmingly the result of losing cheap Russian gas and operating a gas-indexed electricity market. That's not controversial. The same mechanism explains UK prices. Blaming renewables for outcomes driven by gas pricing is simply false, as Armchair Critic correctly noted.

Australian power prices spiked due to coal plant outages, gas export parity pricing, and network costs. Renewables reduce wholesale prices when generating. If someone believes otherwise, they should produce data rather than slogans.

The claim that Bowen "wiped out 100,000 manufacturing jobs" is pure invention. Manufacturing employment has been declining for decades across governments of both persuasions. There is no labour force dataset, Treasury paper, or industry analysis attributing a six-figure job loss to Bowen's energy portfolio. None.

"All green hydrogen experiments failed" is equally false. Many projects are pilots by design - some have scaled, some paused, some failed. Absolutist claims are doing the work here, not evidence.

Then comes the pivot. Suddenly the problem isn't energy policy but "unskilled", "aged", "useless" migrants in "peculiar clothing", capped off with a gratuitous reference to terrorism. That rhetorical move isn't accidental. When the policy case collapses, the thread reaches for cultural panic instead.

If the argument is that Bowen is a bad minister, make it. If the argument is that renewables are economically unsound, show the numbers. But laundering hostility toward migrants and Muslims through an energy debate only proves one thing: the evidence ran out long before the outrage did.