Flying Blind into Tasmania’s Energy Future
When governments make billion-dollar decisions, the least the public should expect is robust governance, independent advice, and honest disclosure. In the case of the Marinus Link Final Investment Decision (FID), Tasmanians got none of the above. Instead, we were served up a decision-making process with inherent conflicts of interest, starved of transparency, and rife with risk.
The Marinus Link is often pitched as nation-building, a golden cable connecting Tasmania’s renewable resources to the mainland. But behind the high-vis photo ops and rhetoric of opportunity, the governance process that delivered Tasmania’s support for the project deserves a far closer look.
The Tasmanian Government assembled a five-person panel to review the Whole of State Business Case (WoSBC) and advise on the state’s position. But three of the five were insiders with clear conflicts: the CEO of Hydro Tasmania, the Chair of Hydro Tasmania, and the Chair of TasNetworks. All three hold positions in government-owned electricity businesses that stand to benefit directly from Marinus going ahead.
How could such figures be expected to provide impartial, arm’s-length advice? Governance is supposed to test assumptions, not reinforce them. What Tasmania got was advice from the very people invested in the project’s success. That’s not independence—that’s circular endorsement.
Even more troubling was the information provided to the panel. Rather than the full, unredacted WoSBC, it appears they received only a redacted Executive Summary. It is also unclear whether they reviewed the Final Investment Decision Assessment Report (redacted or unredacted). In other words, critical details of Tasmania’s most significant energy infrastructure decision in decades were withheld not just from the public, but from the very panel charged with reviewing it.
The redacted FID Assessment Report itself is hardly reassuring. Of the eight decision criteria set out for FID, five were assessed as only “partially met,” even after mitigation measures. Just three were judged as “clearly met.” That is not a ringing endorsement; it is a red flag. Yet somehow, this was deemed sufficient to green-light Tasmania’s participation.
The Government had promised to release the WoSBC at least 30 days before the FID decision, allowing time for more broad and public scrutiny. That promise was broken. Instead, Tasmanians were handed a heavily redacted version only after the Government had already signed. By that point, the state’s share of risk had been locked in.
So much for transparency. Tasmanians were left with the bill but denied the right to see what they were buying.
One cannot read the WoSBC or the FID Assessment Report without being struck by the constant drumbeat of risk. The word appears 295 times in the 400-page WoSBC and 135 times in the 111-page FID Assessment report. Yet for all this repetition, nowhere is there a summary-level conclusion of what those risks mean in practice.
Another sleight of hand lies in the use of nominal dollars (future inflated amounts) rather than real dollars (today’s terms). Nominal figures inevitably make projected benefits look larger while obscuring the true scale of costs and risks. Anyone familiar with infrastructure accounting knows this is a neat way to cloud the numbers.
Even worse, traditional business case tools – benefit/cost ratios and net present value calculations – were not properly applied. Instead, Tasmania was offered a simplistic “cash” assessment: Hydro Tasmania’s incremental profits on one side of the ledger, and increased capital costs for Hydro projects and TasNetworks transmission upgrades on the other.
The most glaring omission, however, is the absence of a genuine evaluation of alternatives. The strategic option of “No Marinus” was never fully tested. Nor were other pathways for Tasmania’s energy future given the rigour of comparative assessment. This was not a weighing of options—it was a one-horse race.
Tasmania has now committed to a project without seriously considering whether the same or better outcomes could be achieved through less risky means. That is not strategy. It is tunnel vision.
Supporters of Marinus are right about one thing: the project holds opportunities. Increased access to mainland markets could bring revenue, investment, and jobs. But opportunities are only one side of the ledger. Risks are the other—and they are both significant and many unresolved.
By signing up to FID under these conditions, Tasmania is effectively flying blind into its energy future. The state has assumed decades of financial and operational risk without fully counting the costs, without transparent disclosure, and without independent governance.
This is not how billion-dollar decisions should be made. It is not how governments should treat their citizens. At best, it is a gamble that might pay off. At worst, it is a reckless leap into long-term uncertainty with Tasmanian electricity customers underwriting the risk.
Tasmania deserves better than this. We deserve genuine transparency, proper business case analysis, and governance that tests assumptions rather than rubber-stamps them.
The lights may still be on, but in terms of energy planning, Tasmania is already in the dark.