Peter Dutton Is Blaming Australia’s Energy Crisis On The Guy Who Has Had The Job For 16 Days

In case you somehow missed it, much of Australia is suffering through an energy crisis right now and somehow, Peter Dutton has blamed it on the new Energy Minister Chris Bowen — who has quite literally been in the role for less than a month.

From spiking prices to supply issues that have wreaked havoc on most of eastern Australia, things are looking pretty dire right now. So dire, in fact, that the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) suspended the entire wholesale electricity market on Wednesday for the first time ever in an attempt to prevent further supply issues and potential blackouts.

To simplify an extremely complex process, when the regulator capped energy prices, wholesalers quickly tried to limit supply in an attempt to minimise the amount of power they had to sell at a loss. This is, obviously, bad, so AEMO suspended the entire market until they can be confident this will stop.

“Once we are confident we can operate it and not see generators withdrawing their availability then we will restart the market,” AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman said.

Essentially, this is the result of privatising the energy industry and now we’re all paying the cost of it.

This decision has been backed by both Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen in separate media appearances.

“This intervention from the energy market operator will continue, let me be clear, for not a day more or day less than it needs to,” Bowen told ABC News Breakfast on Thursday. “I’ve been clear with that chief executive of the operator, he has my full support for any action he deems necessary.”

Albanese was quick to assert that the current crisis is the result of a plethora of decisions made by the Coalition in their twelve years in power.

“You can’t fix a decade of inaction in 10 days. What you can do is to provide that certainty going forward, whilst dealing with the immediate pressures which are there,” said Albanese in a press conference.

However, Liberal leader Peter Dutton — who played a key role in the Coalition throughout the last 12 years — was quick to blame Chris Bowen for the issue, who — and I cannot possibly stress this enough — has been in the role for less than a month.

“This is a direct result of a failure to invest, of a failure to have an energy policy,” said Dutton on Wednesday, calling it a “problem of Chris Bowen’s making.”“As a result of that we have the circumstances that AEMO are dealing with. What we’ve seen is a failure of policy that has led to a market failure.

“Labor is transitioning to renewables too quickly, that is very obvious. It’s obvious that they are spooking the market.”

It is unclear what exactly Dutton expected Bowen to do to fix the problem, which does not have a simple solution, in the 16 days he has been in the role.

Bowen has been quick to clarify that chucking more money into fossil fuels isn’t the solution to the problem. “The problem is there is not enough investment in renewable energy. There hasn’t been enough investment in storage,” said Bowen.