This is strange, though true. But you can now file it away with “Rolf Harris was once a children’s entertainer” and “Bankstown Hospital used to be safe for Jews”.

It’s alarming how dramatically things can change these days.

STRATEGY

The Guardian reported in the weeks after the 2022 election that Bowen was the implementer of the key strategy that got Labor over the line.

Six months out from the 2022 election, Labor was divided on how ambitious its election promises to reverse the effects of “climate change” should be.

Specifically, Labor wasn’t sure how many tonnes of carbon-dioxide it should promise to reduce from Australia’s emissions.

If, like me, this kind of nerdish jargon makes you want to slam your head in a car door, allow me to paraphrase The Guardian’s report in a way that is easier to understand.

Labor was torn over whether it should thoroughly destroy the Australian economy before 2030, or after.

To be fair, the incumbent Coalition Government was in on this too, proposing a policy that put it in the post-2030 group, which is where brilliant political strategist Bowen saw his chance.

Bowen later explained: “If we had just matched the Liberals on climate targets, we wouldn’t have won seats like Higgins and Bennelong and probably those voters in Wentworth and Kooyong would have said, what’s the point?

“We can’t change anything, so what’s the point?”

Labor won, but voters wound up asking themselves what the point was anyway.

Bowen was quickly thrust into the spotlight, announcing endless eye-wateringly expensive and impractical projects that he claimed would make Australia a “renewable energy superpower”.

By June 2023, Bowen was spinning his agenda faster than a windmill in a force-ten gale.

He launched the Net-Zero Authority, and boasted about having clocked up more than $40b on subsidies and other boondoggles for things like offshore windmills, batteries and dangerous, disruptive high-voltage cables strung across prime agricultural land.

Splashing around so much of other people’s money can make you giddier than a sailor on shore leave.

AGGRESSIVE

“Bring it on,” he famously and aggressively said of the Coalition’s new nuclear policy in September last year.

The Coalition duly brought it on – and Bowen ducked it like the loudmouth weakling he is.

He has deleted his X account and is conspicuously edging towards the exit.

He correctly read the room being in his favour in 2022, and he’s correctly reading the writing on the wall now, which says his three years of unprecedented expenditure on schemes that don’t work has turned him into electoral poison.

The cost-of-living crisis overshadows everything, and Bowen’s renewable largesse, the foundation for an energy transition that will sink the nation if it continues, is now the albatross around his neck.

Bowen has been reduced to announcing projects that are deliberately small enough to not attract attention from the media, lest the punters be reminded that he’s still one of the government’s senior ministers.

Hilariously, he recently announced a bilateral renewable energy partnership with South Korea that will supposedly reap benefits in hydrogen, clean energy technologies, green metals and carbon sequestration.

If he was really interested in clean energy, though, he’d ask his South Korean counterpart how many “emissions” are coming from Korea’s 27 nuclear reactors, generating 29 per cent of the country’s energy.