Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

I don't see Labor putting wind turbines up on the Dandenong Ranges overlooking Melbourne or out in Port Phillip Bay, and they aren't blanketing Melbourne's golf courses with black panels or erecting hulking 230-metre towers and transmission lines over people's homes in Toorak, Brighton or Malvern. I wonder why? Labor, the Greens and the teals expect regional Australians to do the heavy lifting on the energy transition, taking away our environment and tranquillity.

Victoria was made famous by the movie The Castle. Instead of an insulting $70,000 compulsory acquisition figure for the Kerrigans' family home to expand an airport, money is now being pushed on farmers for access and factory installation on their land—money that comes from taxpayers and energy bill payers during a cost-of-living crisis. Energy factory billionaires make a fortune from subsidies taken from battling Australians, throwing pensioners' money at landholders to stitch up an energy factory on their land. Some might say the Kerrigan family in the film The Castle should have expected an airport expansion, given they lived in sight of the runway. But our hardworking food and fibre producers on their third, fourth or fifth generation family farm live many miles from the industrial demand in the capital cities.

I have been proud to stand beside our farmers at their protests in my electorate and in Melbourne, and I hear they will soon be here in Canberra protesting the Albanese Labor government's radical anti-farming agenda. The National Farmers Federation's survey out this week shows three out of five farmers strongly disagree with the statement that the Albanese government understands and listens to farmers. Almost three out of four believe the Albanese government's policies are harming farming. A total of 81.6 per cent of farmers are concerned about mining or energy developments on farmland, up 5.2 per cent since last year, with 42.1 per cent very concerned. Almost three in five farmers say competing land uses from mining, infrastructure or urban expansion are having a high to medium impact on their productivity, and 72.4 per cent say the Albanese government is not doing enough to protect arable farmland.

In regional Victoria, the Allan Labor government's recent renewable energy zone mapping almost exclusively prioritised western Victoria and northern Victoria—specifically my electorate of Mallee and fellow coalition electorates of Nicholls, Wannon and Monash. Labor proposes conveniently avoiding the Labor held Ballarat and Bendigo electorates and Dr Haines's electorate of lndi. Labor's supposed REZ hotspots, many on low-altitude terrain and hundreds of miles from the coast, are due to 'low constraints'. What on earth do they mean by that? Low constraints are when you can connect and deliver the resource easily through existing infrastructure, yet the lowest constraints, according to Labor, are in my electorate of Mallee, where there is no transmission capacity. Landholders come to me in tears, literally, protesting at their poor treatment by proponents of the 400-kilometre, 500 kilovolt VNI West transmission line. Surely the absence of a transmission line is a high constraint. I interpret 'low constraint' as meaning there are only some farmers in the way. 'Just push that bulldozer throttle and knock those farmers over.' That's the mentality of Labor, the Greens and the teals.

Well, the farmers are pushing back. Their message to those opposite and the crossbench is, 'Tell 'em they're dreaming.' Farmers are locking their gates. How ironic that the farmers are defending their environments, protesting and locking gates, not the so-called environmentalist Greens or teals. Their radical socialist hard-left agenda is laid bare. It was never about the environment or the planet. The Greens and teals are about looking after their benefactors, and Labor are falling over themselves to keep up. The Nationals stand with our farmers, always have and always will.

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