You Need Government to Stuff up Like This

To err is human, but to really, colossally, eff things up, at truly eye-watering cost to someone else – that takes government. Governments like the successive, deckchair-swapping, incompetent clowns of the uniparty who’ve ruled Australia for far too long. When Donald Horne called Australia ‘the Lucky Country’, it was a backhanded compliment: he meant that the country was lucky enough to be so endowed with natural riches that it prospered despite the best efforts of the idiots trying to run it.

Our luck ran out long ago.

For proof of just how colossally Australian governments can and will screw up, the list is endless. Even the last couple of decades have provided more than enough evidence of the stupendously costly incompetence of the ruling elite: the NBN, the NDIS, the Covid madness... the entire state of Victoria. And, of course, the latest titanic monument to governmental stupidity at tremendous cost: Snowy 2.0.

The whole idea was mad enough when the Sun King, Malcolm Turnbull, first farted it out. Then Chris ‘Boofhead’ Bowen got his turn at the wheel.

Bowen, a man whose grasp of economic reality is somewhat less than a mediaeval peasant’s understanding of quantum mechanics, is sitting on a report that will make the national ledger look like a Greek insolvency hearing. The figures are, quite literally, designed to induce cardiac arrest in any taxpayer foolish enough to still check their bank statements.

Industry estimates on the likely total cost of the Snowy 2.0 expansion range between $20bn and $26bn – or more than $40bn including transmission lines.

Forty billion dollars. And that’s likely a conservative estimate. All to pump water up a hill and let it slide back down again whenever the breeze happens to drop across our taxpayer-subsidised wind farms – which on their own won’t leave the national purse much change from a trillion dollars. It’s a financial haemorrhage of such epic proportions that you almost have to admire the sheer, unadulterated audacity of it. Naturally, the relationship between Snowy Hydro and their primary contractor, Webuild, has deteriorated into a standard-issue bureaucratic bunfight, with both sides pointing fingers like infant schoolchildren caught nicking apples from a neighbour’s orchard.

The state of the machinery itself serves as a rather exquisite metaphor for the entire enterprise. Consider Florence and Monica, those glorious, multi-million-dollar tunnel-boring behemoths sent into the bowels of the earth to conquer the Great Dividing Range. Florence has spent considerably more time broken down and cracked than an Italian automobile. Meanwhile, Monica is trundling ominously toward an 800-metre geological fault line: a delightful little obstacle created by nature itself, which the project’s chief executive cheerfully concedes might stop them dead in their tracks.

“You’re going through the geological fault that created the Snowy Mountains. And until we really get into it, we won’t know. So, yeah, there are nerves associated with that.”

Nerves! You’d bloody well think so. When you’re careening headlong toward a multi-billion-dollar cliff of your own making, a touch of nervous perspiration is the least one might expect from the captains of this sinking ship. Yet our ruling elite remain wondrously insulated from the tangible consequences of their subterranean follies. While the rest of the populace grapples with an unrelenting cost-of-living crisis directly born of their fiscal incontinence, the uniparty continues to bicker endlessly over who gets to hold the ceremonial shovel when the whole edifice finally caves in.

The coalition, led by the very same bright sparks who originally birthed this subterranean white elephant into the world, remains awkwardly wedded to the disaster. Only the likes of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation have had the political gumption to state the bleeding obvious: that when a bottomless hole in the ground starts swallowing 40 billion quid of public treasure, the only sensible course of action is to cease and desist immediately.

As the Senate issues stern orders and upcoming Estimates hearings loom like a dread tribunal, Mr Bowen prepares to drop his ledger of fiscal shame upon a long-suffering public. It will no doubt be spun as a triumph of green engineering, a glorious leap forward into the promised land of net-zero nirvana. But no amount of bureaucratic whitewashing can obscure the fundamental reality. Snowy 2.0 is not an infrastructure project: it is an expensive, subterranean monument to the unyielding hubris of a political class that wouldn’t know a sound economic proposition if it bit them firmly on the posterior.

Perhaps some day it will find its rightful purpose: as a monument to the wasteful stupidity of governments. Busloads of future schoolchildren can take the grand tour, ending with a fun round of throwing tomatoes (greenhouse-grown, of course) at effigies of politicians.

Actually, forget the effigies: just use the real thing.