David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Deputy President. It is always good to see you in the chamber. I would like to thank senators Cadell and Colbeck for their concerns about this issue. There are legitimate concerns from landholders, from rural communities, from environmentalists. I have met with and enjoyed engaging with a number of them, both here in Canberra and on trips into regional and New South Wales, but I am very wary of the politics at play with this issue. We have a coalition who had a decade to look into this, to build the kinds of frameworks that we hear them talk about yet we saw nothing of the sort. We saw a total failure of leadership when it came to planning for the transition, to building the social licence, to ensuring that people in regional communities—many of whom have been reliant on fossil fuels—benefit from this transition in a meaningful way, in a long-lasting way, in a way that sets them up. With that in mind, I worked with the member for Indi, Dr Helen Haines, to secure an independent, well resourced and wide-ranging review undertaken by Andrew Dyer, the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner. Andrew Dyer commenced his work in this area in November 2015 as the National Wind Farm Commissioner—a few governments away, I guess.

That has now been expanded from the National Wind Farm Commissioner to the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner on 26 March 2021.

As part of this review, Mr Dyer has so far held 74 meetings and spoken to some 575 people in remote, rural and regional communities, as well as meeting with stakeholders in cities. From Tamworth to Wangaratta, and to Dubbo, Muswellbrook, Ballarat and Brisbane, Andrew and his team are getting out and talking to people on the ground about these issues. They have received over 500 submissions in over 250 online responses, and will provide a final report which will be made public to the government in December. Much of the ground that we have been talking about late into the evening in these motions and debates are being covered by Mr Dyer. The review will consider community attitudes towards renewable energy infrastructure and provide advice on the best way to maximise community engagement and benefit in planning, developing and operating renewable energy infrastructure.

In conducting the review, the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner should have regard to the following: perceived or actual environmental impacts; perceived or actual impacts on agricultural land, including emergency management and fire and biosecurity risks—things that have been raised with me multiple times; and increases in landholder insurance premiums. We know that this is an issue, and it isn't just an issue with transmission lines. If you talk to farmers around the Pilliga, who are having gas pipelines put across their properties, you hear that they're being told at times, 'You're now uninsurable.' At the same time, Santos's plans, should there be a bushfire in the Pilliga, is to evacuate—to get out of there. And who is going to be left fighting these fires? All the farmers who are part of the Rural Fire Service are going to be the ones who have to turn up and fight these fires. These are the things we have to look at.

It will look at the impacts on tourism, and aesthetic and cultural indications—again, these are things we need to consider. There's community engagement and benefit-sharing, including financial, local infrastructure and knowledge-sharing, and any other type of benefit. The AEIC can advise on how to maximise community engagement within the existing regulatory and legislative frameworks, including the National Electricity Law, the National Energy Objectives and the regulatory investment test for transmission. There's a bunch more, and I have enjoyed engaging with Mr Dyer in his role—I found him to be knowledgeable and very passionate about his work. He certainly turns up at estimates as one of a handful who will give you a straight answer and tell you how it is. He's not hiding anything. So I look forward to seeing what his review recommends, because I acknowledge that this is a concern for communities. It's so critical that we get it right; we have to get this right as a country. And we have to act, knowing just how critical this is and the speed at which we're going to have to get this right to really lead the way.

Again, I'll just to touch on the politics of this. I would take it far more seriously if the people who raise concerns about things like transmission lines and turbines had in the past raised the same concerns when we saw the fossil fuel industry putting through pipelines and coal seam gas wells. We've seen Mr Dutton weighing into this, but a search of the Hansard of the 46th Parliament and also of the 45th Parliament doesn't return any results for Mr Dutton talking about the issue of transmission lines. So I welcome debate on this; I think it's something that needs to be looked into, but I'm very wary of some of the politics in play being used to whip up some of the fear and some of the flat out climate science denial that we've heard from some in this chamber in this debate.