Queensland promised 100 fast chargers. It opened 51.

Queensland’s Electric Super Highway was meant to deliver 100 government-owned fast chargers across phases one to three. As at February 2025, the state’s Transport and Main Roads minister confirmed 51 were open. The last three sites, at Injune, Emerald and Rolleston, were still pending. Later counts put the number around 54, though we could not trace that one back to a departmental source.

South Australia, over roughly the same period, funded a statewide network of 144 sites with 550 or more plugs for $12.35 million and finished it. Western Australia funded 49 locations and 110 charging points for $43.5 million, and reported the network operational in early 2025.

Queensland spent about $9.13 million on the government-owned Super Highway chargers. South Australia spent $12.35 million. The budgets are the same order of magnitude. The delivery records are not.

The money is not the variable

The obvious explanation for a program running late is that it was underfunded. That does not survive contact with these numbers. Queensland’s per-charger funding is not meaningfully worse than South Australia’s, and Western Australia spent considerably more per site than either while still landing close to scope.

What separates them is who was asked to do the building.

South Australia’s network was delivered by the RAA, the state’s motoring club, under a government grant. Western Australia’s was delivered by Synergy and Horizon Power, the state electricity utilities. Both organisations already owned the hard parts of the problem. A utility does not have to wait in the queue for a grid connection because it is the grid. A motoring club has decades of relationships with the roadhouses and councils that own the land you want to put a charger on.

Queensland’s Super Highway was government-delivered through Yurika, and its parallel co-funding scheme asked private operators to build sites with the state paying up to half. That co-fund scheme had approximately 46 sites in its pipeline. Nineteen were open as at February 2025. By the end of June 2026 the figure had reached 40, well past the “throughout 2025” language the program launched with.

What actually goes wrong

ARENA commissioned an independent review of its own public charging projects, published by Energeia in July 2024, drawing on lessons-learned reports from eight funded projects. It is the most useful document I have read on this, largely because an agency reviewing its own grant program has little incentive to flatter it.

The recurring causes are unglamorous. Grid connection delays of up to six months. Aging switchboards that need unplanned upgrades once someone actually opens the cabinet. Design and contractor failures discovered late.

None of that is a funding problem. It is a problem of who is standing in which queue, and how many of the dependencies the builder already controls. Which is precisely why the utility-delivered networks landed and the co-fund schemes drifted.

Queensland’s Kynuna site makes the point better than any statistic. It was dropped altogether because the local electricity network could not support fast charging. No amount of grant money fixes that. Somebody had to go and find out, and finding out takes a site visit and a network study, not a budget line.

Read the announcements accordingly

A charger announcement is a statement of intent with a funding figure attached. It is not a charger. The gap between the two is measured in years in the cases above, and in at least one case the gap is permanent.

This matters if you are deciding where to live, or whether a particular road trip works, or whether to buy a car with a shorter range on the assumption that the network will improve around you. The announced map and the energised map are different maps.

I would treat announcements from utility and motoring-club delivery models as reasonably reliable. I would treat direct-build and co-fund announcements as a plan rather than a schedule, and I would not make a purchase decision on the strength of one.

A caveat on the national numbers

You will see confident national totals for Australian public chargers. Treat them carefully. The Electric Vehicle Council counts fast-charging locations from industry data. Counts derived from Open Charge Map, which several outlets use, are crowdsourced and come out materially lower for the same period. Neither is wrong exactly, but they are counting different things, and a headline number without its methodology attached is not telling you much.

We would rather publish a state-level figure we can trace to a minister’s own answer than a national figure nobody can reconcile.

What to watch

New South Wales is the interesting case next. Its fast-charging grants program reported 184 sites and 1,032 bays delivered as at December 2025, against a wider strategy target of 1,000 ultra-fast bays by 2027, and it opened a fourth funding round closing in April 2026. That is a co-funded model, which on the pattern above should struggle, but the delivered numbers so far do not look like Queensland’s.

If NSW lands close to its 2027 target, the delivery-model thesis needs revising, and the more likely explanation becomes program design rather than who holds the contract. We will be counting.

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Sources and method. Figures are from state government and agency sources: Queensland Transport and Main Roads and ministerial statements, QRIDA program pages, the South Australian Department for Energy and Mining, Synergy, and NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. The ARENA-commissioned Energeia report Insights from ARENA’s Public Charging Projects (July 2024) is the source for delivery-failure causes. All figures carry the as-at date stated in the text. Where a figure comes from press reporting rather than an agency source, we have said so. We could not obtain an independent audit of charger delivery against target for any jurisdiction; if one exists we would like to see it.