Cheung Kong envoy from the Capital visits District 5575
20th Feb, 2026
In September I found myself in rural India, a town called Thalassery in Kerala, a beautiful part of the world, the sort of place where the only way to cross the street is entirely dependent on your ability to not look at the vehicles barrelling towards you. Orderly chaos. But one thing that did surprise me is how the electricity didn't flicker once. Boy was I in for a shock when I returned home.
On the day of writing this, 16 of the past 24 hours the power has been out, unexpectedly in two separate blackouts. I tried to figure out how many outages we have had. I get messages on my phone, sometimes, when the power goes out for an hour or two, or 10. I scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled and only got to early January. My sore thumb can be testament to how many outages there have been. Multiple per week. Sometimes multiple per day.
Dusty insulators are the problem. The once porcelain, then glass, now plastic insulators get dusty and electricity makes the jump. Blows apart the insulator and then no power. Some poor linesman needs to go sort it out. The unsung heroes in this story. I want to be clear, the linesmen fix the electricity, they aren't the reason the infrastructure failed.
So who is Cheung Kong? Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings Limited. A Hong Kong-based multinational that hoovers up infrastructure assets around the world, SA Power Networks being one of them. It's controlled by Li Ka-shing, one of the wealthiest people in Asia and, at 97 years old, probably not losing too much sleep over power outages in Minlaton. The South Australian government sold the network in 1999 when the state was carrying significant debt, a bargain, I'm sure, for someone sitting in Hong Kong who couldn't point to Minlaton on a map and has very little reason to start learning. I can understand why they went with 'SA Power Networks' rather than 'Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings Limited'. And I think some lessons from communist rural India can be learnt here, I’m sure they aren't begging a foreign mega-corp for maintenance costs.
Anyway, SA Power Networks held a cliquey town hall meeting in Minlaton on Tuesday, complete with mummers from the crowd, question time and disgruntled townsfolk. I don't doubt the envoy were well-intentioned South Australians doing their job. But make no mistake their job is to satisfy a regulatory requirement. Comments from the regulator get farmed so that the company can point to quotes like this one from the Australian Energy Regulator:
'The decision highlighted the value and importance of consultation and engagement with consumers by network businesses to balance service levels.'1
What that means in practice is that hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue get approved and shovelled offshore, and we get to politely ask Hong Kong for maintenance and infrastructure upgrades in return.
I could link their very public write-up about stakeholder liaison at the Minlaton town hall. But I won't.
1Australian Energy Regulator – Final Revenue Decision for SA Power Networks Balances Affordability and Investment.