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

There are a myriad of threats to Australia's food security in my electorate of Mallee. I want to quote a Mallee constituent, 93-year-old Jim Hepworth, known as Spud. Jim himself is a fourth-generation farmer in Donald, and he is looking forward to his grandson becoming a sixth-generation farmer on that farm. In his own words, Spud says about proposals like the VNI West transmission lines, wind turbines, mineral sands and mining operations in the region:

Something like a power line or mineral sands going through breaks your heart. We fought to keep this place through droughts and floods and for every 5 or 6 years we get a bad year and being a farmer you know how to get through those bad years. All my life, it's been the farm. Farmers are the greatest naturalist people in the world, if they don't look after their ground, it's gone—it's like, if you don't look after your wife she will be gone too, won't she? Land's the same.

Some people want the windmills, others don't want them—they don't tell each other what's going on, they are squabbling and fighting.

And I might just interrupt to say that many of these proponents are using non-disclosure agreements when they talk to farmers, so they're not allowed to talk with their neighbours. This is tragic in itself. I'll go back to Spud:

It never happened years ago—farmers went to their neighbours before they did anything. It's all gone out the back window, it's all money … companies throwing money at them left right and centre, they (the neighbours) aren't thinking of 100 years of friendship their forefathers brought together. Families aren't talking to family members. It's bringing a big division to the population, we can't afford to have people not being friends in the country. That's what it's all about—you love to go into the supermarket and talk to your neighbour, you don't want to see them in one row and dodge them because you don't want to meet them, that's not the country way of life. They are ruining the country way of life. People have to be wary, you want to talk to your neighbours and friends before you do anything like this.

Jim felt the need to speak publicly about the situation because there is bad blood being stirred in my electorate of Mallee and across regional Australia, weaponised by Labor's reckless approach to energy policy.

In the couple of minutes I have left, I want to talk about my electorate and, in particular, the VNI West transmission line. The corridor was confirmed last week to the outrage of 60 per cent of the farmers on that route. I've seen the map. I've seen all the red dots that light up, where farmers are saying: 'No. Transmission Company Victoria'—TCV, which sits under AEMO at a federal level—'are not going to be allowed onto my land.' I'm not sure how the Victorian government is actually going to achieve what they want to achieve. Well, I do know. The state government have actually legislated compulsory acquisition and a no-appeals process. We live in 2024 in Australia, a country that is free, where people who own land should be able to do whatever they desire on their land, particularly when it's being productive. But what we have in Victoria is a government who has taken away those rights. No farmer can go to VCAT and appeal the decision of the Victorian Labor government. This is an atrocious situation, and it is not Australian. Farmers are now paying lawyers to fight their cause but to no avail. Wind turbines are multiplying in Mallee, and we have become ground zero for the rush to renewables—the renewable energy zones. It's not something that is working out too well for the government.