Fizzer in Fiji takes the wind out of Bowen’s turbines

Seeing the Minister for Climate Change and Energy fall asleep at his own snooze-fest says it all.

Four years of promises, modelling, and National Press Club performances have run into higher electricity bills, angry people who live under the transmission lines, and billions poured into a policy failure that was obvious from the start. Bowen’s pre-COP31 fizzer in Fiji is the latest symbol of it. Seeing him fall asleep at his own snooze-fest says it all.

In Nadi this week he called the gathering a ‘pretty pedestrian affair’. It is costing taxpayers about $20 million, on the contracts published so far, and he refused to say how much when asked on national radio.

He has form. In March 2023, at the Sydney Institute, I asked him what happens if the plan fails and the lights go out. What is your Plan B?

My Plan B is for that not to happen.

That was the policy. Then as if on cue, the lights went out in Nadi.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Fizzer in Fiji takes the wind out of Bowen’s turbines.

Boys are no longer educated, they are emasculated

A boy given neither work nor rough play nor a hard man to imitate will never get there.

Boys are struggling in literacy, completion, and behaviour. It is no secret. In March 2026 Education Minister Jason Clare opened an inquiry into the gap and noted that at least one in three Year 9 boys could not read to the Naplan baseline. A Queensland University of Technology study of 71,955 NSW public-school students found exclusions peaked in Year 9, with boys twice as likely as girls to be excluded once, and more than ten times as likely to be excluded sixteen times or more. Homeschooling is rising. In NSW, boys now slightly outnumber girls.

Almost any man could tell you that age 14 was probably his most internally challenging.

Emasculation is the antithesis of education. Yet here we are. Many of the mothers of young boys I have spoken to are fed up with the education system. The default response from the system is suspension and exclusion. For a system that lauds its focus on inclusiveness, it is excluding boys to the detriment of our nation.

In the Morning Double Shot newsletter, Terry Barnes wrote:

Who would want to be a boy these days? We have raised a nation of squibs, and confident, masculine boys and young men are deemed by the chattering classes to be misogynistic and toxic. Yet boys have fallen behind girls when it comes to educational progress, and society favours girls generally. Michael de Percy has written another personal piece exploring what it means to be a boy now, and what it was to be a boy when he was. I disagree with him on one thing though: corporal punishment in schools should be brought back: it was the best deterrent of bad behaviour since the atomic bomb.

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Boys are no longer educated, they are emasculated.

Chris Bowen doesn’t need a Khemlani, he’s got you and me

Could Bowen’s Green Dreams lead to a Dismissal 2.0 for Albanese's money-wasting government?

On the ABC’s 7.30 in September, Bowen said he had never quite bought all the hype on green hydrogen. That was after years of talking up an Australian export industry, and after a hydrogen production tax incentive the government costed at about $6.7 billion.

Regional Hydrogen Hubs were supposed to seed an export industry. Canberra paid out $31.7 million at Kwinana, $19.3 million at Gladstone and $1.06 million at Townsville.

Then the agreements were torn up, and little of it has come back. The May budget then took $1 billion off the second round of Hydrogen Headstart.

Connor misled Parliament and was stood down. Bowen merely updated his enthusiasm.