Tell Us This Isn’t a Government Operation

As Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) groans with exasperation, in Apollo 13 (1995), “Tell me this isn’t a government operation!” That despairing cry ought to be Australia’s national motto. At all levels of government and on both sides of the uniparty. In Victoria, the Andrews-Allan Labor government’s ‘Big Build’ has become such a byword for eye-watering government waste, incompetence and corruption that Allan dare not even mention it in her advertising for the upcoming state election.

Nobody, though, holds a candle to the dimmest bulb in Canberra, ‘Climate Change and Energy Minister’ Chris Bowen. Boofhead’s mad devotion to the Climate Cult is leaving Australian taxpayers facing trillion-dollar-plus bills for grandiose ‘renewables’ schemes that are unlikely to ever come to fruition. At least Jacinta Allan and Daniel Andrews can say they eliminated level crossings and built a tunnel under the Yarra. Of all Bowen’s lunatic schemes, barely a handful have ever been completed and those only at the lowest scale.

At least, though, Bowen can say that the sheer madness of Snowy 2.0 scheme was inherited from his political opposite but ideological ally, Malcolm Turnbull. Not that Bowen is prepared to pull the plug on arguably the biggest white elephant in Australia’s history. Not when Labor’s union bosses stand to profit so handsomely.

The NSW and Victorian Snowy 2.0 […] disaster incorporates crazy time targets, money guarantee rorts and now the latest addition, the incorporation of “CFMEU rules” into the most difficult engineering project Australia has attempted.

This is the same kind of ‘agreement’ developers were strong-armed into as the Victorian Suburban Rail Link. Not only are there huge pay rises but effectively the CFMEU people will be joint managers of one of the most complex tunnelling projects ever attempted in Australia. It will go exactly as you think it will.

The addition of the CFMEU locks in a $1 trillion network charge bill that will hit all power users. To escape the looming exorbitant network charges Australians who invested large sums in roof top solar and batteries will need to consider diesel generating back up, even though that will increase the burden on everyone else.

Snowy 2.0 was already a disaster. Turnbull sold it as a $2 billion pumped-hydro battery. It is now heading for $40 billion just for the high-country bit, with the drill from the top getting stuck and a new one being sent in from the bottom. The main contractor, Italian outfit Webuild, started on a fixed-price contract but losses exploded so fast that Bowen handed them a cost-plus deal instead. The engineering talent that built the original Snowy has long since scattered overseas. What remains is high-risk tunnelling under union joint management.

The precedents created via union management and the locked in returns will take the total outlay for the project past $1 trillion – greater than the national debt.

That is not a wild guess. Recent estimates put the core construction at $375 billion before the CFMEU rules are even applied. Those same rules, already inflating costs on Melbourne’s big projects and now locked into the Suburban Rail Link, will push the bill well above $450 billion before the guaranteed returns to developers are even counted. Those returns, some reportedly north of 10 per cent, are locked in by secret contracts the government is desperate to keep hidden.

The electricity from this mess has to travel enormous distances from western Victoria, eastern South Australia and western NSW. That means thousands of giant towers across prime farmland. The power then has to be subsidised to aluminium smelters and other favoured industries at well below real cost. Households and businesses will cop the rest through network charges.

Don’t expect the Liberals to say a peep, either. Not only are they as wholly captured by the Climate Cult as Labor, but the whole lunatic Snowy 2.0 scam is one big ol’ skeleton rattling around in new leader Angus Taylor’s own closet. If One Nation are as smart as they’ve been so far, lately, they’ll be wrenching the closet door wide open.

Liberals leader Angus Taylor should and could take advantage of the looming network price crisis, but because as a former Energy Minister, he was involved in the early stages of the scheme, he has hesitated.

One Nation’s Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce are in an ideal position to be the winners. Exposing the government’s biggest secret will require relentless parliamentary questioning.

The government will almost certainly try to use the very subsidies it handed out for rooftop solar to trap people on the grid. Either way, in true socialist style, the burden falls on everyone else. Bowen’s renewables obsession was always going to be expensive. Adding CFMEU joint management and secret guaranteed returns has turned it into a trillion-dollar con.

Turnbull started the white elephant. Bowen owns it now. Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers are too weak or too captured to stop it. The only people who stand to gain are the union heavies and the developers with their locked-in profits. Australians get the bill and the blackouts.

The whole scheme should be scrapped before the costs become completely irreversible. One Nation and anyone else with the stomach for it should be hammering this in parliament every sitting day. The public deserves to know exactly how much of their future power bills are being handed to union mates and rent-seeking investors under the cover of ‘climate action’.

Snowy 2.0 is not nation-building. It is nation-robbing on an industrial scale.