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As readers are no doubt aware, I regularly castigate the Albanese government and its ‘Climate Change and Energy Minister’, Chris “Boofhead” Bowen, for their ‘Net Zero’ agenda. It is, after all, one of the most ruinously expensive and worse-than-useless boondoggles ever inflicted on our unlucky country by an ideology-deranged government. But lest anyone think this is just anti-Labor bias, there’s more than enough ammunition to throw at past coalition governments. Idiocy wears blue ties as well as red.
Consider the NBN: what would have been an astonishingly modest – in hindsight – $2 billion project fibre-to-the-premise deal offered by Telstra got nixed by the Howard government on purely ideological grounds. Having built it, Telstra not unreasonably wanted to own it. John Howard, in a fit of ideological derangement, insisted on ‘competition’: Telstra would have to hand it over for every telco to use. Unsurprisingly, Telstra walked away.
Enter Kevin Rudd. Suddenly, a much-limited network (fibre-to-the-node, rather than the premise) had ballooned out to $4.7 billion. Then Rudd Labor was dumped and Malcolm Turnbull shoved his oar in for the coalition. Under this supposedly hard-headed businessman, an even more limited network came with a supposed $9 billion.
Over a decade later, an NBN still 14 years from completion is now expected to have a final cost of over $50 billion. Don’t hold your breath on that one.
Australia can ‘thank’ Malcolm Turnbull for another white elephant project likely to rival the NBN for cost and delays. Another day, another green fantasy turns into a taxpayer-funded catastrophe. Snowy Hydro 2.0, the pumped-storage white elephant once hailed as the backbone of Australia’s renewable energy transition, has officially become one of the most spectacular infrastructure disasters in our history. What began as a modest $2 billion quick-fix under Malcolm Turnbull has ballooned into a $42 billion behemoth that won’t be finished until 2032 – if then.
Australia’s most expensive infrastructure project faces a new and devastating delay. The $42bn rebuild may not be complete until 2032, making it four years late, according to industry expert Ted Woodley.
Energy economist Bruce Mountain (please tell me his nickname is ‘Snowy’) and former energy executive Ted Woodley have crunched the numbers, and the verdict is damning. Construction costs alone have exploded, while transmission lines and eye-watering interest charges push the total bill to twenty times the original promise.
By the time all associated infrastructure and financing costs were priced in, Dr Mountain said the bill was 20-times higher than former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull first promised.
This is not mere bad luck or unforeseen geology: it is the inevitable outcome of ideological fever dreams colliding with engineering reality. Yet again, both sides of politics own this mess. Turnbull’s Liberals launched the project as a fig leaf for their own renewable energy targets. Labor’s Chris Bowen has doubled down, treating Snowy 2.0 as essential to his 82 per cent renewables fantasy, while long-suffering Australians carry the millstones of blackouts and sky-high power prices.
It’s the same bipartisan delusion that turned the NBN into a multi-billion-dollar fiasco. Rudd’s fibre-to-the-premises dream was already wildly optimistic. Turnbull, as communications minister, ‘fixed’ it by switching to a cheaper hybrid model that somehow made the whole thing even more expensive and slower. Now the same pattern repeats with Snowy 2.0: political vanity projects dressed up as climate salvation.
The deeper scandal is what that $42 billion could have bought instead. Bjorn Lomborg has been making the case for years: the smartest response to climate change is not quixotic attempts to ‘stop’ it by wrecking reliable energy systems, but sensible adaptation. Sea walls, better flood levees, drought-resistant crops, improved bushfire management, air-conditioning for the vulnerable: practical measures that deliver real protection today rather than pious promises of a cooler planet in 2100.
Lomborg’s work shows mitigation policies like this deliver absurdly high costs for minuscule temperature reductions. Every dollar blown on unreliable wind and solar plus storage like Snowy 2.0 is a dollar not spent on hospitals, roads or genuine resilience. Yet both major parties remain locked in the net-zero cult, terrified of being called ‘deniers’ by the inner-city commentariat (with good reason, despite being fully signed-on to ‘climate change is real’, Lomborg is nonetheless damned as an heretical ‘denier’ by the Climate Cult).
Meanwhile, Australian households and businesses are crushed by the highest electricity prices in the developed world, manufacturing is fleeing offshore and the grid growing more fragile by the year. Snowy 2.0 was meant to smooth out the intermittency of wind and solar. Instead it has become an unaffordable, decade-late band-aid on a self-inflicted wound.
Snowy 2.0 is not ‘progress’. It’s proof, as if any more were needed, that ideology makes for terrible engineering and even worse economics.
