Former hydrogen chief Sam Crafter paid more than new energy department boss
Highly-paid former hydrogen power project chief Sam Crafter is earning more than the department boss to whom he reports. Find out how much his whopping salary is worth.
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The $600,000-a-year chief of the shelved Whyalla hydrogen project, Sam Crafter, is being paid more than his new boss in the Energy and Mining Department, triggering accusations of jobs for the boys.
Appearing before a parliamentary committee on Thursday, Mr Crafter insisted the $593m hydrogen power project had not been a failure and declared he had previously been an ALP member.
Latest chief executive remuneration figures show Mr Crafter’s total package is $599,741, while Energy and Mining Department chief Paul Martyn, to whom Mr Crafter reports, is paid $538,000.
Energy and Mining Minister Tom Koutsantonis on May 1 told parliament that Mr Crafter had been appointed to a new role within his department of state lead, Whyalla Steelworks Industrial Transformation.
Liberal energy spokesman Stephen Patterson labelled the appointment “jobs for the boys”, because Mr Crafter had been transferred within the public sector without the job being advertised.
The committee heard 35 staff had transferred to the department from the former Office of Hydrogen Power SA, of which Mr Crafter was appointed chief executive in 2022, and their roles were being allocated.
Mr Crafter said: “I totally reject the notion that this is a failed project.
“ … I think it is very disparaging for the hardworking public servants who have spent countless hours — these are people who have led the energy transformation in South Australia …”
Instead, Mr Crafter, whose father, Greg, was a Labor cabinet minister, insisted considerable work had advanced a “world-leading project”, that could be activated, when required, for the Whyalla steelworks.
“That project changed because of the nature of the needs of the steelworks. It is not a failed project. It is there and ready to go at the point in time when the industrial transformation is able to and will use the hydrogen that is required,” he said.
Mr Martyn said Mr Crafter’s new unit would “lead the state government’s co-ordinated response to the administration of the Whyalla steelworks and the broader transformation of Whyalla’s industrial and economic future”.
This would include overseeing the state’s role in a $2.4bn Whyalla rescue package, jointly funded by state and federal governments, to which the hydrogen power plant’s $593m budget allocation had been redirected.
Mr Patterson said: “There’d be no part in the private sector where someone who headed up a project that failed was then rewarded by putting them in the same-paying amount of remuneration into a high-profile project. That would just not happen in the private sector.”
In response, Mr Koutsantonis said: “It beggars belief that the Liberals have just ditched their only energy policy in nuclear and are now complaining about the government reallocating money to save Whyalla.
“Sam Crafter is an impeccably credentialed public servant, whose services were retained and highly valued by the former Liberal Government.”
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