Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In following the very wise words of Senator Rennick, I want to start by reading an extract from the Western Australian government website concerning the compulsory acquisition of land. It reads:

The High Court decision of New South Wales v Commonwealth (1915) … held that the sovereignty of each State Parliament empowers it to take or acquire land with or without payment of compensation.

So where we have a protection in the federal Constitution of governments not being able to take property without just compensation, there is no such protection in the state constitutions. In fact, the High Court has actually found that state governments can take without compensation. So you have in this country a stated government objective reflected in significant modelling of the energy regulators that show up to 28,000 kilometres of new transmission lines will be required, the vast bulk of which are not going to be in cities. We're not going to be suddenly knocking over suburbs in Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane or even Perth. The corridors for those transmission lines are already present in those cities. There will be no disruption to particularly the inner city but to anyone who is living in one of our capital cities. The disruption will be minimal.

Who are these up to 28,000 kilometres of new power lines going to impact? It's an obvious answer, and it's pretty obvious when you see those on our side who have been standing up and making these points. It's going to impact on the regional areas of this country. It's going to impact on particularly landholders and land managers in this country. As many people in this chamber know, very close to my heart is the impact on our farming communities, and this is not an issue that is just restricted to the 60-odd farmers that were here yesterday and who brought their concerns to the capital, to Canberra, as they rightly should have. This is a concern for farming and regional communities right across this nation, including in my home state of Western Australia. This issue will see the potential reconfiguring of much of our energy grid. If the policies put forward by the government continue and probably are even ramped up over time, we'll see an extraordinary part of the burden of this change being carried by regional communities and being carried by farmers. All this motion does, all this motion seeks to do, is set up an inquiry into the way multiple levels of government are going to deal with this issue of an extraordinary impost on local communities, an extraordinary impact, particularly, on our farming communities—20,000 kilometres and that's only the start of it.

I spoke to one company in Western Australia—my good friend Senator O'Sullivan was at the same briefing I had—which is planning on installing, over the next few years, 4,000 hectares of solar panels. That's one company. This is a burden that is not, as I say, going to be placed on the cities. It's not going to be 4,000 kilometres in Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane or Perth; it's going to be 4,000 hectares in the regions. That's one company. And then you need the powerlines to support those 4,000 hectares of solar panels, and then you need the wind infrastructure to balance the power requirement, and you still need the backup power, whether it be gas or diesel generators, for when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.

Who will be the ones impacted by this significant development? It's going to be our regional communities, once again. They will bear the burden of this change—and it will be a burden. Make no mistake about that. Powerlines have never been loved. I can remember, back in my childhood, powerlines going through the periurban area where we lived at the time. They're disliked intensely by those who have to put up with them—but it's farmers, so you don't care. It's farmers, so you don't care.

The fact is that this burden is not something that's just a NIMBY attitude, a not-in-my-backyard attitude. That's not true. Farmers are not NIMBY. Farmers are actually pro development. Farmers want to see new infrastructure in their areas. They want to see reliable power supply to their areas. I could name 20 or 30 Wheatbelt communities that, right now, could have new industries moving to their towns, if only they could secure reliable power from Western Power in WA. So farmers are not against development; they just want to be consulted. They want to know where, when, how—how they are going to be compensated.

I'll go back again to the statement on the government of Western Australia's website. Under the High Court decision, compensation, when it's a state taking, does not need to be paid. Compensation at state level is voluntary. That is why Commonwealth governments have always left the heavy lifting in this area to the states. They know, if the states do it, they can undervalue it a bit; they can cut the costs. They don't even have to pay at all if they don't want to. So we have a regulatory framework that means, as this Commonwealth government, in particular, seeks to impose this vision of an energy grid upon Australia, people do have the right to be consulted. They do have the right for their representatives in this chamber to stand up and say: 'Hang on a minute. Let's just take a bit of a look at this.' We've got a particular community in Victoria who travelled overnight to be here to raise this concern. Let's step back. Let's take a look at this issue. Let's consider what we are doing in the overall picture of changing the energy grid and how this will impact individual communities.

It shouldn't be ad hoc. It shouldn't be done differently in Western Australia to Queensland to Victoria; there should be some consistency in the process, particularly as it is being driven from this place. If it was being driven from the parliament of Western Australia or the parliament of Victoria, then I would say: 'Fine. I'm a federalist. I believe that the states should determine their own destiny in this regard.' But this policy framework is being driven from this place. Therefore this place has the right—in fact, I would say beyond the right. This place has the obligation to look into what these decisions are going to do to regional communities across this state.

Again, it's not about farmers being NIMBY or landowners being NIMBY; they've got serious concerns. There's the economic loss, of course. Others have talked about that, and I won't go into that. It's about the fairness of the consultation process, the power imbalance between one or two farmers who are impacted versus those who are not directly impacted versus governments and large energy companies. Of course there's a power imbalance in that negotiation.

But it's also about other things, such as biosecurity. Biosecurity probably isn't something that most people in urban areas have to think about. Biosecurity might be something you worry about when you go through an airport check-in, or you're coming back from Bali or you're coming back from Singapore—do you have to declare something? Farmers have to think about that every day. The traceability is only getting more significant. The need to manage and control access to property, access to stock and even access to grain paddocks is extraordinary. You will now see biosecurity signs on the entry points of a vast percentage of farms in Australia, because traceability, trackability—the need to maintain and be aware of what is coming onto your property, when it's is coming onto your property, whether it's undergone proper clean-down procedures, and whether it's bringing in foreign matter from other farms, from other places in the state, perhaps even across state borders—is of paramount importance. This isn't just something that farmers put on their gates for fun. This is about them maintaining their biosecurity credentials in a global marketplace where those credentials are of increasing value. Farmers have a right to be concerned about that. They have a right to be concerned about who has access to their property, when they have access to their property, and the procedures they are taking when they come on to farming land.

It's also about burden sharing. The fact is, as I've said, that this burden is unfairly shared. Wholesale suburbs will not be knocked over in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane or Perth. New electricity corridors will not be created in those cities. They already exist and they will be utilised. Perhaps the capacity will be increased. But we are talking about up to 28,000 kilometres of electricity lines being imposed on regional areas, who certainly didn't ask for them. As I said, regional areas aren't against development. They quite like development, and they'd like to see it. But we need a process by which that is done in a fair way, in which the burden and the rewards of that investment are shared fairly across the community, and a recognition is given of that contribution that is being made by those regional communities to this entire process, because we also have other burdens coming from the suite of measures the government is talking about.

We have the companies that are involved in the safeguard mechanism. Considering how they are going to meet these reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, one of the ways they're considering is the purchase of agricultural land—locking it up, turning it into sequestration zones. That could have a potentially damaging impact on regional communities right across this country. If we see the wholesale move of productive agricultural land into sequestration zones then this could fundamentally undermine the economic viabilities of hundreds of communities across this country and leave farming communities smaller and less financially viable. And just as you see large mining companies, for example, buying up agricultural land, that of course that leads to a loss of population in those areas.

So the transmission lines, the solar panel, the sheer amount of land that is potentially going to be required to be put under solar panels all have impacts on our regional areas. They all require significant investigation. And then the flow-on impacts, again, of the other parts of this policy mix that we are seeing from this government, which has the potential to absolutely devastate agricultural production in this country, must be looked at by this place. We can't pretend that these things are not real, that they're not going to have real consequences on businesses, on families and on communities in the regions of Australia. They will. And this Senate has every right to look at this narrow set of issues.

It's not a highly political reference. It's not seeking to embarrass the government in any particular way. It's a straightforward reference. The fact it's been knocked back three times already, I believe—it's just beyond belief that the government are so embarrassed that they would not be able to support what is a genuine inquiry that literally hundreds of farmers, thousands of farmers, across this country and other land users have been making to senators in this place. The fact that they're not willing to even take this very small step of having a Senate inquiry into this issue beggars belief. It really is something that this Senate has an obligation to look at. I understand there won't be a division tonight, so I urge the government to really have a think about this, as to why they are voting against what is a perfectly reasonable motion.