Chris Bowen launches a brutal post-election attack on his critics – as he pushes ahead with plan to phase out coal-fired power plants
Chris Bowen has doubled down on his green energy drive, citing Labor’s landslide election victory as evidence that voters in the suburbs and the bush support renewables.
The Minister for Climate Change and Energy has claimed that a ‘silent majority’ of Australians are in favour of solar and wind farms, backed up by gas and storage.
‘Peter Dutton described the 2025 election as a referendum on Australia’s energy choices. Fair enough,’ Bowen wrote in an opinion piece published in The Australian newspaper.
‘And the results of that referendum are clear: in uncertain times Australians want an affordable plan, backed by the experts.’
Bowen cited swings towards Labor in seats where candidates had advocated for offshore wind farms, such as Bass and Braddon in Tasmania, which adjoin the Bass Strait offshore wind zone.
He slammed the Coalition’s nuclear policy, repeating Labor’s scare campaign price tag of $600 billion while insisting the policy was all about ‘securing internal political peace at any cost to taxpayers’.
‘Dutton paid a particularly high price for his support of Ted O’Brien’s nuclear policy: 47 per cent of voters in Dickson said the nuclear policy was their reason for withholding their support in the leader’s constituency,’ Bowen added.
The Smart Energy Council, a Labor party donor, came up with the $600 billion price tag, which was disputed by independent body Frontier Economics, who estimated the the Coalition’s plan would cost around $331 billion.
Chris Bowen (pictured holding up a solar panel during Question Time in June 2021) has doubled down on his green energy drive, citing Labor’s landslide election victory as evidence that voters in the suburbs and the bush support renewables
The Minister for Climate Change and Energy has claimed that a ‘silent majority’ of are in favour of solar and wind farms , backed up by gas
Bowen, 52, took aim at what he believes is a fallacy in the argument against renewables: that they are supported by inner-city dwellers and opposed by those in the suburbs and rural communities.
‘One of the great myths of the climate change debate in Australia is that inner-city dwellers support strong climate action and the rest of us are lukewarm or hostile,’ he wrote.
‘In fact, people in the suburbs and regions are living the transition and benefiting from it.
‘The top three suburbs in NSW benefiting from our electric vehicle discount aren’t in the inner city or North Shore. They are Baulkham Hills, Marsden Park and Kellyville, deep in northwest Sydney.
‘You’re more likely to see an EV in Werribee than Toorak.’
He added: ‘When it comes to solar panels, there are 10 times more solar arrays in Blacktown (in my electorate) than in Bondi (in the seat of Wentworth).’
Although Bowen resigned himself to the fact that conservative commentators would still argue about ‘how unpopular renewable energy is, at least now there is real-world data to remind us how wrong they are’.
He committed to replacing Australia’s ageing coal-fired power stations with renewables.
The Labor administration has an ambitious target of the national electricity grid being made up of 82 per cent of renewables by 2030.
On Tuesday, the new Liberal Leader Sussan Ley would not confirm or deny whether the Coalition would dump its unpopular nuclear policy or its commitment to achieving net-zero by 2050.
