00:01It's five senior executives who were paid a combined $1.2 million in bonuses, including
00:08a $323,000 bonus for Chief Executive Dennis Barnes, and that was despite revelations late
00:16last year that the major renewables expansion, Snowy 2.0, was continuing to blow out in its
00:23cost. This is a huge project. It's meant to power about 3 million homes for a week when
00:27it's completed, but it's since grown in costs from an original price tag of $2 billion up
00:34to $12 billion, and now an unknown but more expensive figure. The senior executives obviously
00:40did not meet their targets for Snowy 2.0, and their report also says that they underperformed
00:47on other targets, financial and operational targets, but the board determined that they
00:52should be awarded bonus pay anyway because they had met their customer satisfaction, safety
00:57and work culture targets. Now, that's a decision by the board. Meanwhile, Mr Barnes's salary,
01:04a $1.7 million base pay, one of the most well-paid public servants in the country, is determined
01:11by an independent remuneration tribunal. And when we asked Finance Minister Katie Gallagher
01:16whether that pay was justified, she simply made the point that it was independently set.
01:22Snowy Hydro says that, look, these senior executives also have remit for much more than Snowy 2.0,
01:30and while it's a critical project, they also have to run the third largest energy generator
01:36and fourth largest retailer, at least in the eastern states. So, Jake, this project already
01:42seven years late, costing at least $10 billion more than expected. What do we know about how it's tracking?
01:49It has been a real saga. It was Malcolm Turnbull, the former prime minister, who first announced
01:55this expansion in 2017. And when he did that, he said it would cost $2 billion and be dispatching power
02:00by 2021.
02:02That obviously hasn't happened. When Labor entered government and a new chief executive at Snowy Hydro,
02:08Dennis Barnes, took the helm. They reviewed the project and said it was now going to cost about $12 billion
02:14and not be generating power until 2028. Since then, it's been plagued with further problems,
02:21stuck tunnel borers, flooding, issues with supply chain costs, wage disputes. And in October last year,
02:29Mr Barnes said that the contractor was now reviewing the project line by line and would be coming back
02:37with an expected much higher figure. We still don't have that price tag. It's been nearly nine months,
02:44which was about how long they said it would take to review the project. But a lot of pressure to
02:49at least
02:50detail something about how this project has blown out in cost, particularly because Snowy Hydro is due to
02:56appear before Senate estimates of post-budget hearings on Tuesday next week. There's a lot of
03:03finger pointing here. The federal government says it inherited serious problems that were previously
03:08unknown from the coalition government. The coalition says that Labor mismanaged a contract renegotiation,
03:14and that has led to these spiralling costs. Certainly when Snowy Hydro appears before the Senate next week,
03:21there'll be a lot of tough questions for it.
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