Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

There's probably not a more pressing issue in rural areas of our country than the takeover of land by industrialised renewable energy investments. These things have invaded our country over the past few years, primarily due to investors from overseas seeking to make a lot of money for themselves, which is fine. It's not a crime. But the way in which many of these solar and wind companies have run roughshod over people's property rights and their right to amenity in their local community is causing a massive backlash and reaction across our country.

I want to start today with a story from someone I met. I've met many people—hundreds of people—on this issue in the past year or so, but one individual's story struck me. He lives near a town called Calliope in Central Queensland, not far from where I live, and he's a proud farmer and cattle grazier. He lives on his farm.

If a solar farm is approved and built on his neighbour's property, not his own, he is now facing the prospect, when getting home, of having to drive through paddock upon paddock—nine kilometres—of solar panels. They will just completely blanket the entrance to his home. His home is near the boundary with his neighbour, and a nine-kilometre area on both sides of the road will be blanketed as far as the eye can see with solar panels. If you're listening, just think about that when you're driving home from work tonight—that you would have to drive through nine kilometres of that. It would take you roughly 10 minutes or so on these country roads just through solar panels that reflect the sun. Effectively, you wouldn't see a blade of grass or a tree. It's total destruction of our landscape and people's amenity. That person won't get any compensation and he doesn't have a say. There is no power for him to stop this. As I said, in my experience with some of these companies they take short shrift with the reasonable complaints and issues that locals are raising.

On top of the concerns that people have about how it affects their own local communities, there's also the issue of how it affects our local environment. West of where I live in Rockhampton there are hundreds of wind turbines planned to be built, almost all of them seeking to be built on ridgelines—on the tops of mountains. Of course, that's where the wind is and that's the economic benefit for those particular projects—to get up as high as they can. These new wind turbines get to a height of almost 300 metres. They're massive—they're as big as the Eiffel Tower. They're absolutely enormous and they will shadow the valleys in these areas. The environmental problem here is in the way that these areas in Central Queensland have developed over time. Graziers have tended not to clear the landscape on mountain tops, because it wasn't economic to do so when running cattle. Trees were cleared to provide paddock areas for growing cattle in the valleys and the lower areas. But the areas on the hilltops remained pristine, natural wilderness, and they are some of the only places where we continue to have abundant populations of koalas, sugar gliders and other endangered species.

Those areas now face destruction from these massive projects—these huge projects that are going in across Central Queensland. Because they want to build on the mountain tops, they have to do quite a lot of damage to these wilderness areas. And because these new wind turbines are so high—as I said, at almost 300 metres—they need a very flat pad to secure the appropriate foundations to keep the towers in place. To get that flat pad on a mountaintop they have to take off a lot of land. In an area near Kalapa, west of Rockhampton, some of these mountaintops are facing the removal of 20 to 30 metres of soil, just to get a sufficiently square pad for the foundations to be laid for these wind turbines. That's an enormous amount of sediment which is going to be moved from the tops of these mountains and an enormous amount of local vegetation that will be destroyed.

There are a few issues with that. Of course, there's concern for the local habitat which will be destroyed. There are also issues for the Great Barrier Reef. We've been told constantly—for decades now—that a farmer can't cut down a tree or can't change their land in this area because that would cause more sediment run-off to go into the Fitzroy River and then out to the Great Barrier Reef. How is it that an Australian farmer, an Australian landowner, can't really move one bit of dirt, basically, on their property without approval by the Greens and the government, and yet a foreign investor can come in and knock the tops off mountains onto the sides of hills and just walk away?

Where is all this sediment going to end up if it's pushed down the side of a mountain, which has been done in Clarke Creek? It's pushed down the side of a mountain, and next time it rains a lot—bang—all of it's going to end up in the river and out to the reef. We're told that does enormous damage to our coral. Where are the assessments of this? I've looked through lots of environmental impact statements on this, and there are very inadequate assessments of the wider impacts compared to what you typically have to do now in regard to farming and mining. As someone very succinctly said to me the other day, 'We're not going to save the polar bear by destroying the koala bear.' We're destroying our local habitats in this country and we are removing the wonderful natural landscapes we have all in some futile attempt to save polar bears to respond to climate change, apparently. It's not about that; it's about making money for the investors. The worst thing here is that no-one is pausing to look at what the impacts will be. Will we regret this in 10 to 15 years time?

I was sitting on a gentleman's back deck in Kalapa discussing this issue, and the whole community in Kalapa is effectively up in arms about what's proposed to happen in that area. I could see from this gentleman's back deck, having a cup of tea with him and his wife, the Stanwell coal-fired power station. It's probably five to 10 kilometres away, so I could see it clearly. The Stanwell Power Station has been there for 30 or 40 years with no real issues. The locals don't have a problem with it. It takes up a very small area of land and provides a lot of jobs. A lot of local graziers work there. This gentleman worked there in the past, and his income helped him buy his farm. Now he's a full-time grazier. It has a small impact because it sits on about 1,000 hectares of land, so its whole footprint is about 1,000 hectares. The proposed wind farm for the area is set to take up 10,000 hectares, so 10 times the size of the land occupied by the Stanwell coal-fired power station. What's worse is it will produce just a tenth of the power.

This is the fundamental problem with this so-called environmental move to renewable energy. It is not good for the environment. Solar and wind energy is not good for the environment because of the basic principle that it takes up too much of our environment. It takes up so much of our land to produce such small amounts of power. If we want to go to 82 per cent renewables, as the government does, we're going to need an enormous area of land to be covered with solar, wind and potentially batteries, and even more land for solar and wind if we want to move to hydrogen. Why are we having this massive impact on our natural environment? There's a recent study by Net Zero Australia, a group that's pro net zero and wants to deliver net zero emissions. It's a consortium of the University of Queensland, Princeton University and others. They estimate we would need an area the size of half of Victoria covered in solar and wind to meet our net zero emissions target—half of Victoria! When will we have the debate about whether this is what we should do to our natural landscape? Why would we destroy the environment in a futile attempt to protect it? Putting aside the fact that we account for only a small amount of carbon emissions, we're going to destroy our natural environment. If we do achieve our target and convince other countries to cut emissions at the same time—even if all that is done—what for? We will have lost our kingdom for a horse. We will have lost this beautiful country's natural landscapes, which will be destroyed totally unnecessarily.

There is another way. There are other options if we do want to reduce carbon emissions and don't want to extend the life of the Stanwell coal-fired power station. We could build a nuclear power station that has zero emissions and takes up a smaller footprint than the Stanwell coal-fired power station. They're even more energy dense, particularly given they don't need as much mining material. Uranium is incredibly energy dense—indeed, a can of coke filled with uranium will serve your energy needs for your life.

It's very energy dense. If you care about our natural environment and protecting the green and wonderful places of our country, you should be pro nuclear energy, because that's what's good for the environment. What's good for the environment is having a lower impact on the environment.

We often hear the other side say, regarding us, that we're the dinosaurs and that we want to hold on to old forms of power like coal. Yet these are the people pushing wind turbines. Wind turbines go back long before the coal industry. Wind turbines were one of the power sources of choice well before the industrial revolution. We're going back to that form of power. Back in the days when wind turbines were around, the world had to deforest large amounts of area to provide fuel for people's homes. The same thing is happening overseas now. I just got back from England, where they are converting coal-fired power stations to biomass. They're burning wood in old coal-fired power stations. They're getting the wood from North America, where they clear-fell forests, turn it into wood and burn the wood for the energy needs of those in England. Why are we destroying our forests for this? Why are we adopting these old technologies, which we've moved on from and improved our environment?

Even if we were to stay with coal, that would be better than going down this path. At least the coal industry doesn't require the large-scale deforestation of parts of our planet. It did deliver that environmental benefit when the industrial revolution occurred: Europe greened again. There are a lot more forests in Europe now than there were at the industrial revolution, and that's thanks to the coal industry. If we can provide cheap energy throughout our region we can cut air pollution. The biggest environmental issue in our region is air pollution, not carbon emissions. Air pollution kills six million people a year. Six million people a year die, and it's not from carbon dioxide; it's from the organic matter that is released when people burn straw, dung and low-quality coal right through our region. When poor people have to do that to stay warm and cook in their homes, that's how people die.

Using energy resources from this country, be it the high-quality coal used in a modern coal-fired power station or the gas or uranium we export, all of those energy exports help to cut the amount of people that die from air pollution every year. Instead, we are obsessed with one form of emission, carbon dioxide, which doesn't directly kill anyone; carbon dioxide doesn't cause you to cough, or sneeze or die in that direct fashion. But because of our obsession with just that one metric we're destroying all these other things. This happens all the time in life: when you obsess over one thing you forget about lots of other things in your life, and everything comes crashing down.

We need a better balance here in this debate. If we want to reduce our carbon emissions, let's do so in a way which doesn't destroy our natural environment—which is happening right through the bush. I ask the people in our cities who are listening to this, please listen to the greatest custodians of our environment in our country: our farmers. They live in the natural environment and understand what is happening on their farms. It may seem like renewable energy is clean and green when you see the advertisements on TV showing these wind and solar farms looking fantastic, but out on the ground on the front lines the reality is coming true. Please listen to our nation's farmers before it's too late and we destroy our natural environment.

That's why we need this inquiry—so we can hear from those people who know our environment best, who want to protect it and to make sure that our whole country can be left as good a natural environment for our children as we have been lucky enough to inherit as citizens of this nation.