In footy-obsessed Queensland, there is only one thing on most people’s minds and it isn’t the long-awaited findings of the investigation into the ongoing shutdown of one of the states’ biggest power stations.
The explosion three years ago of the state-owned Callide C generator – blacking out 500,000 homes and sending electricity prices soaring – is one of the biggest failures of the Palaszczuk-Miles government.
Back in 2015, then opposition leader Annastacia Palaszczuk rode the wave of unpopularity of the pugnacious first-term premier Campbell Newman into office.
One of the only real policy differences she offered was opposing Newman’s plans to lease out the fleet of state-owned generators in a bid to pay down debt the Liberal National Party government inherited from years of Labor.
Palaszczuk promised to keep the power stations in taxpayer hands so that she could properly maintain them and keep a lid on power prices.
But her government failed on both fronts. In the year after the 2021 explosion at Callide, households’ electricity bill went up 9 per cent, and businesses by more than 10 per cent, with the Queensland Competition Authority citing the cut in supply from Callide as a major factor.
And now reports by forensic engineer Sean Brady into the explosion, and consultants HartzEPM into a subsequent collapse of a cooling tower at the power plant – which, combined, has kept the generator out of action – shows it wasn’t being properly maintained by the government.
The probes discovered a massive maintenance backlog at Callide, which failed to meet statutory requirements under federal law.
Brady also found there was no “safety risk” system to identify the kinds of problems that led to the explosion and tower collapse.
A plan to develop a system in 2018 never got off the ground because it was “under resourced and starved of funding”. And this was happening at a time that the Labor government was milking the generator of profits.
After no dividends were paid to the LNP government, CS Energy (the operators of Callide) then handed over $498m to the Labor government in the next five years leading up to the explosion.
When a draft of the Brady report was released last month, Energy Minister Mick de Brenni tried to shift the blame on former CS Energy board chair Jim Soorley, longtime Labor mayor of Brisbane, for misleading the government about what was going on.
Brady slammed the lack of expertise on the board, and that is reflective of the government’s propensity to appoint Labor mates to key positions.
Palaszczuk and her successor Steven Miles have benefited from the lengthy duration of the Brady investigation and the fact that CS Energy commissioned the probe through lawyers, which kept the drafts under legal privilege and out of public hands. But that should now change as the main game, the real decider of the October election, kicks off.
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Nothing like the day of a State of Origin decider for the Miles government to release a damning report that shows it well and truly dropped the ball on keeping the lights on and electricity prices down.