Few things fire Jeremy Cordeaux up like a big number attached to a thin result. On this Garage edition of the Court of Public Opinion, he found one: nearly $400,000 of taxpayers’ money, spent by Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen on a 47-day global trip promoting net zero.
Forty-Seven Days, $400,000
The figures stopped him cold. Forty-seven days abroad. Close to $400,000 of public money. He didn’t bother with the daily average on air — the scale spoke for itself, a sum he found impossible to justify against whatever the trip actually delivered.
Your money, my money, he reminded listeners — not the Minister’s. That framing sits at the core of how Jeremy treats every story like this: government money is the public’s money, to be spent as carefully as anyone would spend their own.
“Look At Me”
What galled him wasn’t only the cost but the purpose. The Minister, in his characterisation, circled the globe essentially saying “look at me, look at me” — a tour of climate conferences and photo opportunities that amounted, to Jeremy, to expensive self-promotion dressed as diplomacy.
Are we totally mad, he asked, to put up with this rubbish? For a country grappling with cost-of-living pressure at home, the image of a minister flying the world at public expense to spruik net zero struck him as tone-deaf.
The Pattern Behind The Trip
Jeremy set the trip inside a bigger pattern he’s traced all year: a government, in his view, happy to pour money into net-zero symbolism while pleading poverty on the things households actually feel. The same government cutting a health rebate for 3.2 million pensioners, he has argued, can somehow find hundreds of thousands for a minister’s climate world tour.
It’s the contrast that stings. Every dollar spent chest-beating abroad, in his framing, is a dollar not spent easing pressure at home — or left with the taxpayers who funded the journey.
Follow The Money
As always, Jeremy’s advice was to follow the money and ask what the public got for it. A 47-day, $400,000 trip to promote net zero is, on his reckoning, long on spectacle and short on measurable benefit.
His broader point was accountability. Ministers spending public money on this scale should be able to show a return that justifies it. Absent that, Jeremy argued, the trip is one more case of a government treating taxpayers’ money as its own — and expecting no questions in return.
Listen To The Full Episode
Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
Watch The Full Episode
The Court of Public Opinion streams live every Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (ACST), right here at jeremycordeaux.com. Download the podcast anytime on your favourite podcast app, and join the conversation with your calls and comments.
