‘And just when it looked like Labor might hold on to power, Chris Bowen came thundering into town to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the 2025 election.’ Will this be the final sentence when the TV screenplay for the increasingly likely Coalition victory at the next election is written? If it sounds a tad melodramatic, that is only because we respect Labor’s fondness for TV soap opera scriptwriters to craft public narratives, rather than getting ministers, such as the NDIS’s hapless Bill Shorten, to choose their own words.

If the above has the ring of truth to it, it is because Chris Bowen, Labor’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy, has a rock-solid record in securing last-minute, out-of-the-blue victories not for his own people but for his opponents. This he did most spectacularly and famously in 2019 when he defied the pollsters and delivered a ‘miracle’ win to Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison, courtesy of Mr Bowen’s franking credits scheme and his accompanying catch-cry, ‘If you don’t like Labor’s policies, don’t vote for us’; a command the Australian electorate eagerly took to heart. But prior to that, all during the woeful Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, Mr Bowen could be relied upon to conjure up out of thin air Labor policies and concepts that had the same desired effect of driving undecided voters into the arms of the Coalition. FuelWatch, GroceryChoice, ‘the Malaysian solution’ and many other delights including of course the failed EV sales pitch all bear the sticky fingerprints of the member for Prospect. (Indeed, Coalition strategists must wake up every morning and say a silent prayer of thanks to the long-suffering constituents of western Sydney for their political perseverance in returning Mr Bowen time after time to parliament.)

Now, of course, Mr Bowen is turning his not inconsiderable skills to securing victory for the Coalition on the nuclear energy debate. In order to do so, Mr Bowen has again formulated a winning two-pronged approach: on the one hand, Mr Bowen sneers and pontificates about the shortcomings and expense of nuclear energy in a manner which is self-evidently inconsistent with overseas experiences, whilst at the same time driving traditional Labor/Greens voters in pristine coastal and vast rural areas of Australia straight into the arms of the Coalition with his industrial-scale desecration of their natural environments thanks to his gigantic offshore and onshore wind farms, vast solar farms and the wastelands of his transmission lines.

Opinion polls have shown a steady growth in support for the Coalition since the Voice. And now, Peter Dutton has rolled the dice and released an energy policy that commits a Coalition goverment to building nuclear power plants across the nation. ‘Game on!’ as Julia Gillard would say.

In many ways, the energy/climate change debate echoes the Voice, a pivotal moment in Australian politics. (The Spectator Australia was of course the only mainstream media outlet to openly back the No side.) Net zero is an ideological goal, as was the Voice, that sounds superficially attractive, but support for it rapidly vanishes once the cold hard facts are exposed. Key to defeating the Voice was Peta Credlin’s excellent exposé of the lengthy Uluru Statement from the Heart. When Prime Minister Albanese admitted he had not read it, and even asked ‘Why would I?’, it was all over for the Voice. Similarly, the Coalition should seek to expose the monstrous unfairness, deception and socialist ideology that lies behind net zero and the Paris Agreement.

As we have been saying for over a year, Peter Dutton and the Coalition will win the next election if it is primarily a vote on Labor’s ideologically driven energy and climate policies. To paraphrase Mr Bowen: ‘If you don’t like our  whale-killing, koala-killing, rusting Chinese windfarms, vast acreages of solar panels covering and destroying arable land, environment-razing transmission lines and soaring electricity bills… then don’t vote for us.’

Don’t miss Toby Young’s visit

As we mentioned last week, we are delighted to welcome Toby Young, associate editor of The Spectator in the UK, to the Antipodes. Toby is here on a tour of our major cities to promote the excellent Australian and New Zealand branches of the Free Speech Union, which he originally founded in Britain in 2020.

The Free Speech Union has already achieved many successes in fighting pernicious cancel culture and the censorship of individuals. Toby’s tour is a fantastic opportunity for lovers of freedom to learn more about international free speech issues and the work of other Free Speech Unions around the world. For tickets and information go to: https://freespeechunion.au/news/toby.html Be quick!