HYDRO Tasmania and the State Government will be grilled until the seats collapse from the squirming during Government Business Enterprise hearings this week over the power company’s debts. Or that should happen, following Simon Bevilacqua’s latest revelations on spiralling Hydro debt and Basslink-related incompetence.
Which should highlight the feeble Friday attempts of Energy Minister David Llewellyn to place all the blame for rising electricity prices …
… on the drought ( Hydro price rise warning )
The Sunday Tasmanian’s Bevilacqua tells a different story of Hydro management:
Hydro Tasmania’s complex financial dealings over Basslink have saddled Tasmanian taxpayers with an extra $148 million in costs
Tasmanian Times’ own Bachus H. Barren has been tracking this ineptitude for as long as Bevilacqua. His conclusion, way back in January last year:
Critics have noted that it would appear that the disastrous state of energy policy in Tasmania has been overseen by politicians with the performance and intellectual capacity of the Keystone Cops. In turn, technical advice on energy policy has been provided to politicians by a comfortable clique of bureaucrats with limited, if any, experience in the cut-and-thrust of national and international deregulated electricity markets.
When one considers the chaos of Tasmanian energy and the faces in the crowds of the Hobart Show, it is easy to be reminded of the old London Times lithographs of the faces of the un-knowing passengers aboard the Edinburgh Express as it rocketed towards the gaping chasm of the collapsing Tay Bridge on that fateful December night in 1879.
Read the Barren analyses, all written last year here:
Basslink: the ongoing disaster
Basslink and bungled power policy
Basslink backfires: buying dirty power
Bell Bay: another bungle
