Bowen branded ‘consciously incompetent’ during brutal exchange

Both men have repeatedly traded barbs over the past week, with the Coalition’s freshly announced nuclear policy the subject of heated debate.

Mr Bowen has mocked the plan, arguing it will be prohibitively expensive and lacks the support of state Premiers. But Mr O’Brien has claimed it represents a more effective alternative to the Albanese government’s renewables agenda and will ensure cheaper and more reliable power for the future.

The shadow minister has also highlighted the pain households are suffering due to soaring cost of living pressures, arguing the government’s failure to reduce power bills shows their energy policy has failed.

Mr O’Brien took his attack a step further on Monday, delivering a scathing speech about Mr Bown’s handling of power prices and the net zero transition.

“For nearly 110 weeks the Albanese Labor government has been in power and, on average, every single one of those weeks has seen over 600 additional households sign up for hardship arrangements with their energy retailer,” he began.

“As of today, there has never been, in Australia’s history, more Australians on hardship arrangements, because of Labor’s energy policy.”

While there has been a significant increase in those seeking assistance from providers, experts note a sharp uptick in inflation and interest rates, as well as energy shocks caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, all played a part in driving up wholesale energy costs independently of government policy.

But Mr O’Brien continued to assert that many households were now faced with difficult choices as they struggled to pay bills, suggesting unaffordability was even forcing those in an otherwise secure financial position to seek help from charities and non-profits.

“I met a senior citizen who made it very clear that she no longer has hot meals at night, because she is desperately nervous about not being able to turn on the heater,” he said.

“She has to make a trade-off, but of course, that’s Queensland. There are places right across Australia where we have senior citizens who can do neither heat nor eat at night because they cannot afford it.

“I was speaking to the Salvos (Salvation Army) in Maroochydore only a couple of weeks ago and they were explaining to me they were seeing a completely different set of people coming in.

“This is now not just those who have always been struggling in the lower socioeconomic bracket, but middle Australia, more and more families coming for help because they cannot afford to live.”

Mr O’Brien added that all those groups were promised “97 times” by the Albanese government that they would receive a $275 reduction in their power bills, repeating a frequent line of attack, before rounding on the Energy Minister himself.

Pointing directly across the chamber to where Mr Bowen was seated, the shadow energy minister claimed his counterpart lacked the “courage” to admit power bill relief was a broken promise, dismissing measures in the last two budgets as attempts to “mop up” previous failure.

Rounding out his attack, Mr O’Brien then argued Mr Bowen’s claims that prices would come down were “false prophecies,” disputed by all credible forecasters, as he turned to previous arguments over the viability of nuclear energy.

“I gave this Minister the benefit of the doubt over the first year or so in office. I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt, he is unconsciously incompetent’,” the shadow minister said.

“He now knows full well what is happening and he still will not come clean, which makes him consciously incompetent.

“He knows full well that people whom he told untruths to are out there struggling to turn their lights on, keep the heating on, cook their meals at night, and yet he goes out still and promises them false prophecies of a world in which prices will come down and yet no serious energy commentator agrees with his forecast.”

Rising to respond, Mr Bowen wasted little time rubbishing the shadow energy minister’s claims, using Mr O’Brien’s own words to describe the opposition’s energy plans.

“What a great opportunity for the House to consider the choice that comes before them at the next election when it comes to energy policy for this country,” he began.

“I was going to say he didn’t talk about his own policies at all during the MPI (matter of public importance), but he did when he mentioned false prophets and false prophecies.”

The Energy Minister then claimed it was common to know “less about his policies at the end of one of his interviews than the beginning,” highlighting what he described as poor performances in several media appearances where Mr O’Brien had been quizzed on details of the opposition’s nuclear proposal.

“He opens more questions than he answers when it comes to his own energy policy and that’s deliberate because the answers are no good,” Mr Bowen claimed.

Pivoting away from nuclear, the Energy Minister then launched into an impassioned defence of the government’s renewables plans, whilst also attacking his counterpart’s “fundamental misunderstanding” of the net zero transition.

Highlighting Mr O’Brien’s past criticism of the Australian Energy Market Operator, Mr Bowen suggested the shadow energy minister needed to reassess his view after he had earlier used research from the body to attack the government’s policy.

Mr Bowen also attacked the opposition’s record on wholesale power prices, claiming they were choosing to omit the fact prices had been $376MWh when they left office before falling to $75MWh under Labor.

“Just before the last election, the then Minister for Energy was so worried about the impact of their government’s nine years of neglect, with four gigawatts of dispatchable power leaving the grid and only one gigawatt coming on, that he had to change the law to hide energy prices,” he declared.

Returning to the debate over nuclear, Mr Bowen argued Mr O’Brien “fundamentally ignores the evidence” the government has been provided about the cost of nuclear energy, labelling the opposition’s policy a “fact free and evidence free zone.”

The Energy Minister also highlighted ballooning costs for nuclear developments overseas, as he doubled down on previous claims the technology was unaffordable.

Concluding the brutal exchange, Mr Bowen sought to highlight the lack of evidence for the use of small modular reactors, a key component of the Coalition’s plan.

“The Liberal Party has had many chances to implement small modular reactors, they keep saying they’re coming,” he said.

“One of the shadow minister’s predecessors as shadow minister said: you would know that new generation reactors with maximum safety features are now coming into use. They are small, from 250 to 400 megawatts and fully automated, and overcome the many safety problems associated with the large scale reactors of the past.’

“Who said that? It was the shadow minister for the environment, in 1989.”