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Inside AusPol

Inside AusPol

By: The Financial Register | Kangaroofern Media Lab Pty Ltd
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Episodes
  • Snowy 2.0’s price tag has grown twelvefold since 2017, and taxpayers are carrying it

    Snowy 2.0’s price tag has grown twelvefold since 2017, and taxpayers are carrying it
    25 Oct 2026
    A new Snowy Hydro cost review puts the renewable energy project at up to $25 billion, reopening a fight between the government, the opposition and the two companies building it over who is responsible.Snowy Hydro released the review on Thursday night. It puts the target cost of Snowy 2.0, the pumped hydro project meant to back up the electricity grid when wind and solar output drops, at $22 billion, with a further $3 billion allowed if it’s needed. That brings the real ceiling to $25 billion.The number has grown in stages. When the project was approved in 2017, the budget was $2 billion, with power expected by 2021. A 2023 reset lifted that to $12 billion and pushed first power out to late 2027. The new figure pushes the schedule out again, to early 2029, about a year later than the 2023 plan.Snowy Hydro chief executive Dennis Barnes said he was “incredibly disappointed” by the result, and would not rule out the number moving further. “There’s never any guarantees with mega projects,” he said.Construction progress is genuine. About 65 per cent of the project’s machine tunnelling and 90 per cent of its cavern excavation are complete, according to Snowy Hydro, and work has begun on the underground power station.A tunnel boring machine named Florence spent 11 months stuck underground in 2023 after triggering a sinkhole, a well-documented setback that ate into both the timeline and the budget.What’s less settled is who is responsible for the rest of the overrun. In its own submission to a parliamentary inquiry, Snowy Hydro points to “design immaturity” before the 2023 reset, along with the project’s complexity and underperforming productivity.Its main contractor, Future Generation Joint Venture, blames something else. It points to “unprecedented geotechnical uncertainty”: ground conditions in a national park that, it argues, can only be fully understood once excavation is already under way. The two explanations assign the blame in opposite directions, and nothing in either company’s public account resolves which one carried more weight.A more independent read comes from the Australian National Audit Office. Its most recent review of the project, handed down in June, found Snowy Hydro still lacks a reliable system for forecasting its own costs, and that its data-assurance processes are not well established. That is a step back from a more favourable audit in 2022.That finding, from the body whose job is specifically to check projects like this one, is more significant than either company’s account of what went wrong.Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.Snowy Hydro is wholly owned by the Commonwealth, which means the cost growth lands directly on the public balance sheet. Energy Minister Chris Bowen and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher addressed that in a joint statement this week.They argue that abandoning the project now would cost 5,000 jobs, weaken grid reliability and push power prices up rather than down. They placed responsibility for the project’s early troubles on the former Coalition government, which approved Snowy 2.0 in 2017.Shadow Energy Minister Dan Tehan rejected that framing, calling on Bowen to apologise to taxpayers and resign, and arguing the funding model and the cost of connecting the project to the grid, the “poles and wires” component that sits outside the headline figure, need closer scrutiny. He did not say whether a Coalition government would cancel the project.Both the ministers’ account and Tehan’s response are political positions as much as factual ones, and this piece is not taking a side on which is right.What the audit office’s finding does establish, independently of either side’s framing, is that a reliable cost-forecasting system for Snowy 2.0 still doesn’t exist, nearly a decade after approval and three cost resets in. That’s not a verdict on whether the project should have gone ahead. It is a verdict on whether the public has been given numbers it can trust, and on the available evidence, the honest answer is not yet.Snowy Hydro has also commissioned its own economic case for the project. A GHD study estimates $18 billion in economic activity during construction and more than $7 billion in savings on wholesale power prices by 2075, figures Barnes has cited publicly. Those numbers come from analysis Snowy Hydro itself commissioned, and have not been independently tested.The scrutiny isn’t new. At Senate Estimates in May, Barnes declined to give a cost estimate while the contractor’s review was under way, citing commercial sensitivity.Industry and Science Minister Tim Ayres told the same hearing that the original project had been approved “on the back of an envelope” by the Coalition government of the day. Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson called the lack of disclosure “extraordinary.”Five months on, ...
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    10 min
  • The government says its new trust tax will raise $4.5bn. Industry says complying with it will cost up to $13.3bn

    The government says its new trust tax will raise $4.5bn. Industry says complying with it will cost up to $13.3bn
    18 Oct 2026
    Both figures are on the table this week as the Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 3) Bill 2026 enters Parliament, and neither side has produced a number in between.Treasurer Jim Chalmers introduced the bill on Wednesday, calling it “the most ambitious tax reform package in a generation.” Underneath that framing sits a specific, checkable set of numbers, and this week two very different ones arrived on the same table.The government’s figure is $4.5 billion: what Treasury expects the measure to raise in its first year. Industry’s figure, reported this week via Wilson Asset Management and CPA Australia, is $8 billion to $13.3 billion — what the roughly 210,000 trusts expected to be affected could spend on advice and restructuring to comply.That second figure comes from firms whose business is trust and SMSF advice, so it’s their estimate, not one that has been independently modelled. It is, however, the only cost figure anyone has put forward, and nobody in government has offered a competing number to weigh against it.What the bill actually doesFrom 1 July 2028, discretionary trusts pay a 30 per cent minimum tax on their taxable income. Chalmers says that aligns the rate with what a worker earning $45,000 to $135,000 already pays. The government estimates about 350,000 active small businesses used a discretionary trust in 2022-23, roughly one in six, and that Treasury expects around 140,000 of those won’t pay a cent more under the change, leaving roughly 210,000 that will.Exemptions cover family farms, registered charities, deceased estates, special disability trusts and super funds; none of that is contested. The dispute is over a narrower carve-out: distributions to other tax-exempt entities, including sporting clubs and schools, are exempt up to a cap the government describes as “reasonable.” That cap has not been set. A draft circulated last month flagged that one would apply; as of this week, it still hasn’t.The bill also isn’t travelling alone. The same legislation carries separate changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount for new housing, which Chalmers says target distortions that have “locked too many young Australians out of housing for too long.” If the trust provisions sink the bill in the Senate, the housing measures go down with them.Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.Two Greens, two different complaintsGreens economics spokesman Nick McKim wants the charity and school exemption removed outright. “The treasurer needs to knock this out of the legislation,” he said, adding “there is far too much leniency.” His specific concern: a family could keep paying private school fees out of a trust and still qualify for the concession, even though the bill leaves schools’ own tax treatment untouched.Chalmers’ response treats the exemption as minor. “There are good reasons” for it, he says, calling it “a very specific sliver of what’s being proposed here,” and separately estimating fewer than 10 per cent of small businesses will be touched by the measure overall. Neither side disputes what the bill says; they disagree about whether the carve-out is a loophole or a reasonable line.A second Greens senator, David Shoebridge, took a different line earlier in the week, arguing the government had already “managed to water down its own position” and warning that what he called Labor’s “political cowardice” risked making the reform “yet another missed opportunity.” It’s a broader complaint than McKim’s, less about this specific carve-out and more about whether the government has the appetite for the fight at all.As of this week, the Greens have said they will move for a Senate inquiry into the carve-outs. No inquiry had been established as this issue went to draft, only sought.The other side of the fightThe Coalition opposes the bill outright and won’t be won over by amendments, so the government needs the Greens’ votes regardless of how that inquiry question lands. Liberal Senator Michaelia Cash told Seven’s Sunrise the changes would “tax small businesses twice,” describing them as “slugging the backbone of the Australian community, our small and family businesses, with yet another tax.” Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson sought to refer the bill to the Senate economics committee; the request was rejected.Wilson separately disputes Chalmers’ claim that trusts restructuring to avoid the tax won’t trigger state stamp duty, saying businesses doing so will still face it — a direct factual disagreement neither side has resolved on the public record. Shadow Assistant Treasurer Kevin Hogan’s assessment was blunter still: he said tax accountants would be the “great winner” of the reform.Enforcement is the quieter half of the story. UNSW tax academic Dale Boccabella points out that a rule is ...
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    10 min
  • Deaths of older Australians on the home care waitlist jumped by a third. It took two Senate orders to get the number

    Deaths of older Australians on the home care waitlist jumped by a third. It took two Senate orders to get the number
    12 Oct 2026
    The data arrived months late and almost unannounced, after the Senate ordered it twice and the government missed both deadlines.Six thousand, four hundred and thirty-six people died in 2025-26 while approved for home care but were still waiting for the funding to arrive.The figure only became public after the government missed two separate Senate deadlines to produce it.The Department of Health published the number on 8 October, without a press conference or a dedicated government announcement. Independent Senator David Pocock said the data had been released “quietly, and in a way that’s difficult to find.”The sequence behind the release matters as much as the figure itself. On 20 August, the Senate ordered the government to produce 2025-26 death data for people on the waiting list for home care.The government did not comply, saying the figures still needed validating.A second order followed on 9 September, this time seeking the documents, briefings and emails behind the number. Minister Jenny McAllister, standing in for Aged Care Minister Sam Rae, told the Senate the required searches were “expansive” and could not be completed by the 14 September deadline.The figure surfaced almost a month after that deadline passed.Read against the past two years, the trend is consistent. In 2023-24, 3,383 people died waiting for their assessed level of home care, a figure disclosed at Budget Estimates.Appreciate the newsletter but aren’t ready to pay for a subscription? Grab us a beer or snag the exclusive ad spot at the top of next week's newsletter.In 2024-25, that rose to 4,812, a 42 per cent increase, as disclosed at Additional Estimates in February. The government did not volunteer either figure; both were extracted under parliamentary questioning.This year’s 6,436 continues the same climb, roughly a third higher again.The Department of Health has noted that the two most recent years are not directly comparable because the system changed partway through, from the former National Priority System to the new Support at Home programme.That caveat is real, but three consecutive years of rising deaths, spanning a system change meant to fix exactly this problem, is not something that caveat resolves.Shadow Aged Care Minister Anne Ruston said the figures showed the government had tried to conceal the scale of the problem.“Everybody on the wait list is a person; they’re not a statistic or a number,” she said. “The extent to which the government tried to hide this information from the public is appalling.”Minister Rae rejected the framing. He said the death rate among people on the waitlist was “significantly lower than the rate of death for older Australians in the broader population.”He pointed to 83,000 additional home care places delivered in 2025-26, with a further 32,000 rolling out this year. “Every single death of someone who is waiting for care is a tragedy,” he said.Council on the Ageing Australia chief executive Patricia Sparrow called the figures “an absolute tragedy” and said people should receive their package within about 30 days of assessment, not months or years later.A separate backlog figure sits underneath the death toll. The government’s own count put the home care waitlist at just over 106,000 people as of 30 June.A Four Corners investigation in August, using a different counting method, put the number waiting for full funding at almost 154,000, a gap of roughly 48,000 people who do not appear in the official figure.The department has not disputed that the counting method changed, and has not explained on the record why the new method counts fewer people as waiting than the old one did.The pattern of data emerging only once challenged is not new to this portfolio. In May, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the state of aged care as “not good enough,” after a report found patients were waiting an average of a year for services.Critics said that report was released quietly during the May budget lock-up, before the current figures emerged the same way.What the data does not establish is intent. There is no evidence that any individual decided to delay the release deliberately, and the government’s own account, that validating national mortality data took time, is a plausible explanation on its own.What is established is the incentive: an agency holding unfavourable figures in the lead-up to a mid-year budget update already framed around finding savings has every reason to let that number sit, regardless of whether anyone intended it that way.One case illustrates the stakes behind the aggregate figures. A Hobart man with Parkinson’s disease and cancer waited more than 12 months for his home care package. It was approved three days before he died.The release lands in a week when the government’s own financial position is already under scrutiny. Treasurer Jim Chalmers told the ABC the mid-year budget update will be shaped by “the need to find more ...
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    12 min
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