On behalf of the Greens, I attended the Liberal government’s briefing on Marinus Link yesterday afternoon, alongside other crossbench MPs.
While it was a rushed and secretive process that afforded no opportunity for meaningful scrutiny, the briefing reinforced the Greens’ serious concerns that Marinus is a bad deal for Tasmanians. It’s unaffordable at a time of soaring state debt, would be environmentally destructive, and will drive up power costs for Tasmanians.
The Liberals gave us less than 24 hours’ notice of the briefing. We were given less than half an hour to read through multiple documents, totalling thousands of pages.
The briefing included viewing a copy of the business case for Marinus Link. We were not permitted to discuss commercial-in-confidence or sensitive information, nor were we able to take away any documents.
The Rockliff Government promised to release the Marinus business case at least a month before a Final Investment Decision was required – and Jeremy Rockliff promised this again just last week. Instead, they purposefully kept the Marinus business case hidden from Tasmanians for over two months, well before the snap state election and current Caretaker period.
It’s more of the same secretive, born-to-rule approach from the Liberals. Here they go again, paying lip service to consultation with Tasmanian people and doing deals behind closed doors.
Tasmanians have a right to read this business case – before a final decision in made. While we cannot disclose some specific details, we can say what we saw is far worse than expected.
The Greens, energy policy experts and analysts have formally raised concerns for years about the project, both publicly and to an unfinished parliamentary inquiry into energy matters.
We already expected Marinus would cost Tasmania too much, but the impacts on the state coffers are far higher than we imagined. It will increase power prices for residential and small businesses, and included no environmental assessment or environmental policy responses to the serious impacts.
Respected experts, and the Parliament Inquiry into Energy Matters, have repeatedly cautioned that the Marinus project in Tasmania has been overtaken by far cheaper and more effective alternative storage generation technology. Nothing we saw from the business case countered this view.
The scant information we were able to glean reinforced our existing concerns – we cannot support this project and the risks and massive debt associated with it.
The Marinus business case should have been made public well in advance, as the Liberals promised, so it could be scrutinised by independent experts, and especially by the Tasmanian people. This was a deliberate tactic the Liberals employed to avoid Tasmanians exercising their democratic rights at the state election. On such an historically massive investment decision, this approach shows contempt for Tasmanians.
