‘Grossly inaccurate’: Treasurer blames company for faulty blast info

The Queensland Treasurer has blamed a government-owned power company for misleading him and allowing him to provide ‘grossly inaccurate’ information to the Premier.

Queensland Treasurer and Energy Minister David Janetzki. Picture: Dan Peled / NewsWire

David Janetzki has blamed the bosses of a government-owned power company for misleading him and allowing him to provide “grossly inaccurate” information to Premier David Crisafulli about an explosion at a coal-fired power station.

The extraordinary admission on Sunday came after Mr Crisafulli publicly rebuked the Queensland Treasurer for his lack of “transparency” over the April 4 blast at the state-owned Callide C power plant, which has forced it offline at least until the end of May.

Mr Janetzki and Mr Crisafulli appear to have comprehended the seriousness of the explosion only when it was reported by The Australian last Wednesday, a day after the Energy Minister delivered a major policy speech extending the life of the coal-fired power stations.

In a shock move, Mr Janetzki described CS Energy’s miscommunication as a “failure at the highest levels of CS Energy” and announced he was sacking the power station’s general manager and ordering CS Energy’s departing chief executive Darren Busine to leave immediately, instead of in May.

“It’s now clear the information provided to me, and therefore the information (I) provided to the Premier’s office, was grossly inaccurate and misrepresented the severity of the incident,” Mr Janetzki said on Sunday.

While he was briefed on the incident on the day it happened, Mr Janetzki said CS Energy underplayed the severity by explaining it was “nothing more than a pressure spike” leading him not to mention it during a major energy address on Tuesday, during which he detailed how important coal-fired power stations were to the future of the state’s electricity supply.

He did know the generator would be offline for weeks, potentially jeopardising electricity supply to Queenslanders unless planned maintenance of other units was delayed.

Mr Janetzki’s speech described the reliability of the state-owned fleet of power stations as “critical” and criticised Labor for a 2021 explosion at the Callide C4 generator, which put it out of action for years and cut power to hundreds of thousands of users.

The damage caused by an explosion at the Callide C3 power plant in central Queensland. Picture: Seven News Brisbane

In a press conference on Sunday, Mr Crisafulli said Mr Janetzki should have gone public about the blast, describing the omission as a “transparency issue”. He said the severity of the explosion was not communi­cated to him, and he criticised CS Energy for a “big failure” in not communicating the magnitude of the incident, which threatened worker safety.

“I’m certainly blown away by how serious this is,” he said.

“If there’s a criticism, it’s that the minister should have raised it as an example of the mess that he’s fixing up. It actually helps the minister articulate how bad things are and why we have to turn things around.

“It’s a transparency issue and it should be made public because it shows the mess he’s got to mop up, a mighty big mess.”

Mr Janetzki said he had ordered all state-owned energy companies to provide “real-time updates to Queenslanders following any and every outage, in the same way (electricity providers) Energex and Ergon do”.

“I have also asked for a full briefing on how the advice was prepared for government as I believe this has been a clear example of deception via omission,” he said.

Last year, Labor energy minister Mick de Brenni accused CS Energy of providing him with “incorrect” information about the maintenance of Callide C immediately after it exploded in 2021.

In a press conference on Sunday, Queensland Premier David Crisafulli said Mr Janetzki should have gone public about the blast. Picture: Annette Dew

On Sunday, Mr Crisafulli also said he did not know about an alleged $4.9bn cost blowout in the CopperString transmission line project – or the government’s new plan to have the Queensland Investment Corporation oversee the development – until Mr Janetzki briefed him hours before his speech.

He denied this was unusual. “If you’re asking me whether or not every minister should brief me on blowouts from the Labor Party, I’d never leave my office,” Mr Crisafulli said.

A five-year energy “road map” will be released by the government before the end of the year to describe how Queensland will hit net zero emissions by 2030 despite scrapping Labor’s renewable energy targets and keeping the coal-fired power stations open for longer.

Deputy Opposition Leader Cameron Dick said Mr Crisafulli’s explanation was “very suspicious” and did not add up. Asked whether Labor should take responsibility for the lack of maintenance leading to the latest explosion, he disagreed.

“There were significant investments in power stations following incidents ... into maintaining those assets, and this government now needs to explain what has happened on their watch,” Mr Dick said.