Former Snowy Hydro CEO Paul Broad has accused Energy Minister Chris Bowen of urging him to blame the Morrison government for the project's massive cost and timeline blowouts when Labor came to power.
Snowy Hydro 2.0 is now estimated to cost taxpayers approximately $42 billion, more than 20 times the $2 billion forecast by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2017.
In an interview with Sky News on Monday, Broad said there was pressure from Labor to rewrite history. "When the (Albanese) government came in and Chris Bowen became the Energy Minister, he was hell-bent on knocking me over and rewriting history," Broad said. "He wanted me to go out and bag (Morrison-era energy minister) Angus (Taylor) and make all the problems his."
SkyNews.com.au has contacted Bowen for comment, while Taylor declined to respond.
Broad resigned as CEO in 2022 amid cost blowouts and reported tension with the minister. After his departure, Labor in 2023 changed the contract with Italian company Webuild from a fixed-price to a cost-plus model, which reimburses the contractor for certain expenses. Broad said this decision worsened cost projections, now forecast at $42 billion. "You can't do that. You've got to be incentivised. You can't have cost plus on a project like this. It will get out of control as it has," he said.
Shadow energy minister Dan Tehan said shifting to the cost-plus model was the "prime reason" for the budget blowout. "It beggars belief that Chris Bowen could have signed off on something like that," Tehan told SkyNews.com.au. "We now have the builder saying to the stock market how happy they are with the arrangement while the Australian taxpayer is bled dry by the overruns."
Bede Noonan, CEO of Acciona Australia which is building the HumeLink transmission line connecting Snowy Hydro 2.0 to the grid, warned the massively overbudgeted project was damaging the construction industry's reputation. "I'm concerned that that project is causing industry-wide reputational damage, putting aside just the ridiculous cost that we're now seeing," Noonan told The Australian. "I care about the jobs and costs of projects. We all need to really care more deeply about the future of the industry, the impacts to the industry and its reputation and how we conduct ourselves."
His concerns come as the construction sector battles elevated diesel prices, high insolvency rates, and burdensome regulation. The building industry suffered a record 3,596 collapses in the 2025 financial year, according to Australian Securities and Investments Commission data.
Despite public reports of massive cost blowouts, Labor still costed the project at $8.3 billion in last month's budget. The budget papers listed the value of investments in public sector entities, such as Snowy Hydro 2.0 or the NBN. Total valuations for these off-budget assets grew by $7.5 billion from 2025-26 to $59.3 billion. The government says $8.3 billion of its investments in public sector entities is for Snowy Hydro 2.0.
Tehan said he supported calls for the Australian National Audit Office to investigate Snowy Hydro 2.0's costings. "There needs to be some sort of inquiry into what's occurring before ... even further enormous harm and damage is done," he said.
The Albanese government also loaned Snowy Hydro $1.45 billion in the 2026 financial year and will lend the public entity $2.9 billion in the 2027 financial year.
Snowy Hydro said it was on track to deliver power from the renewable project by the end of 2028. Its CEO Dennis Barnes said the project was about 70 percent complete. The renewables project is expected to deliver upwards of 2,200 megawatts of electricity to the national grid. When Turnbull first announced the project almost a decade ago, he revealed the $2 billion price tag along with a 2021 launch date.
