The Liberal Government’s announcement of a Marinus breakthrough treats Tasmanians like mushrooms, and does nothing to mitigate the ballooning project costs that will be paid by Tasmanian consumers through power bills.
Despite months of parliamentary pressure about the Marinus deal secrecy, and his government plunged into minority, the Premier’s announcement today continues to avoid the top concern about true costs to consumers.
The Premier appears to have renegotiated the government’s share of the cost it would carry, but there is no change to the 80% of project costs Tasmanian consumers would be slugged through power bills for decades to come.
With speculation the construction bill for Marinus and NW Transmission has doubled to well over $5 billion, Tasmanians deserve to know the updated project costs. Today’s announcement was for stage one of Marinus link only, but not the updated NW transmission line costs. Tasmanian consumers will be repaying a percentage share of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation debt, but still have no idea how many hundreds of millions, or billions this might be.
Given the concerns expressed by both experts and the community and the failure of Energy Minister Guy Barnett to adequately respond to parliamentary requests of cost disclosure, announcements about how the excessive costs of this project are carved up are meaningless without knowing how much those costs are to be.
Instead of transparency about the biggest infrastructure investment in the history of Tasmania, today’s announcement continues to hide the cost to the budget, and importantly to electricity consumers.
With some Tasmanians already forced to cut off power to juggle the cost of living, the Greens will continue to call for full transparency about government decisions worth billions of dollars to consumers.