It was encouraging to hear Pauline Hanson announce One Nation's policy to pull the plug on the Snowy 2.0 debacle: shut the project down, cut the losses, and spare taxpayers from having to pour billions more dollars into what has become one of the greatest infrastructure disasters in Australian history.
It is a position I have advocated for years.
Snowy 2.0 has descended into a monumental white elephant: a project plagued by cost blowouts, endless delays, environmental destruction, and bureaucratic incompetence. Every additional dollar spent on this fiasco is another dollar wasted that could have been invested in genuinely productive infrastructure or used to ease the cost-of-living pressures facing Australian families.
Most importantly, the Snowy 2.0 disaster stands as a devastating indictment of Energy Minister Chris Bowen and his disastrous stewardship of Australia's energy policy. If there were ever proof that Bowen is fundamentally unfit to hold ministerial office, Snowy 2.0 is it. The warning signs were there from the beginning. Former Snowy Hydro CEO Paul Broad has revealed explosive details about Bowen's conduct after the Albanese Government came to power.
According to Broad, Bowen was more interested in political score-settling than solving the project's mounting problems. "When the government came in and Chris Bowen became the Energy Minister, he was hell-bent on knocking me over and rewriting history," Broad told Sky News. "He wanted me to go out and bag Angus Taylor and make all the problems his." At a time when the project was already facing enormous engineering challenges, Bowen's priority appears to have been rewriting the political narrative rather than addressing reality.
But it gets worse. In an extraordinary display of arrogance and incompetence, Bowen ripped up the original incentive-based construction contract and replaced it with a cost-plus arrangement, effectively handing the Italian construction giant Webuild a blank cheque funded by Australian taxpayers. Under this arrangement, the contractor bears far less risk while taxpayers bear virtually all of it. The longer the project drags on, the more Australians pay.
It is difficult to imagine a more reckless approach to managing a major infrastructure project. The results speak for themselves. Snowy 2.0 was originally promoted as a project costing around $2 billion. Today, estimates suggest the final bill could exceed $40 billion. The completion date has slipped from the early 2020s into the 2030s, assuming it is ever completed at all.
No private company could survive such catastrophic project management. Yet under Bowen's watch, taxpayers are simply expected to keep writing cheques. Even the fundamental premise of Snowy 2.0 is deeply flawed. Pumped hydro does not create energy. It consumes more electricity pumping water uphill than it generates when that water is released through turbines.
It is not a source of energy; it is an expensive and inefficient storage system. The project has been marketed as some sort of energy miracle when, in reality, it is little more than an enormously costly attempt to compensate for the instability created by Australia's rush towards weather-dependent wind and solar generation. The engineering risks were obvious from day one.
Any competent engineer could see the dangers of attempting to bore a 29-kilometre feeder tunnel, one of the longest ever attempted anywhere in the world, roughly one kilometre underground through highly complex geology inside a national park riddled with faults, fissures, groundwater issues, and varying rock formations.
This was engineering hubris on a grand scale. Yet despite the obvious risks, politicians, bureaucrats, consultants and climate activists cheered the project on while dismissing legitimate concerns. Inside Parliament, I was one of the very few voices willing to publicly challenge the fantasy and warn that this project was heading towards disaster. Unfortunately, every one of those warnings has been vindicated.
The latest audit by the Australian National Audit Office has delivered another devastating verdict. The report found there remains significant uncertainty around when the project will be completed, while Snowy Hydro still lacks reliable systems for forecasting and tracking future project costs. Think about that. After years of delays and tens of billions of dollars in exposure, those running the project still cannot provide taxpayers with a credible estimate of what it will ultimately cost or when it will actually be finished.
That is more than mere mismanagement. It is an absolute scandal.
Meanwhile, the environmental damage continues. Vast areas of the Snowy Mountains National Park have been scarred, ecosystems disrupted, and enormous quantities of spoil excavated, all in pursuit of a project whose economic and technical justification becomes weaker by the day. Pauline Hanson is right. Australia should cut its losses now before even more taxpayer money is squandered on this catastrophic failure.
Continuing to throw billions into Snowy 2.0 in the hope that it somehow becomes viable is the equivalent of a gambler doubling down after every losing hand. At some point, common sense must prevail. Indeed, it may prove more valuable to preserve the site as a permanent museum to government waste, bureaucratic incompetence, and the destructive economic consequences of Net Zero ideology.
As for Chris Bowen, if he possessed even a shred of ministerial accountability, he would accept responsibility for this disaster and resign.
Instead, Australians are left paying the bill for one of the most expensive policy failures in the nation's history.
Thought for the Day
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” ― Peter Drucker
Craig Kelly was a Liberal Member of Parliament (2010 - 2022) representing the seat of Hughes. He quit the Liberals in 2021 over their failure to defend liberties during COVID. He currently serves as Director of the Foundation for Economic Education.
