E&OE
STARTS: 7.21pm
ENDS 7.33PM
MICHAEL McCORMACK:
Thank you. Thank you very much, Alexis (Garnaut-Miller), and thank you to each and every one of you for coming out this evening. There are probably a million other things that each and every one of you could probably be doing but tonight is an important night. It’s an information night. It’s a night where you get to ask questions, to seek answers and to show your concerns or your beautiful environment, for your beautiful community. Thank you to each and every one of the presenters. What you’ve said is very clear, very concise and very informed. I just want to take up a point that Chris Muldoon made about local media and I’ll just start my points on that, and he talked about the fact that local media doesn’t campaign these days like they used to, and I concur with that. We are and should be thankful that we do have, still, local journalists, local media papers, radio and certainly television. But it’s getting less and less, and the impact unfortunately is getting less and less, and it is up to each and every one of you, as Chris said, to make sure that you have a presence on social media. I just want to read to you a very interesting sentence, which was in the Australian Community Media on the day before the recent Federal Election. And it said this in part, “regional Australians need to know that the sprawl of renewables infrastructure, from offshore wind farms to acres of solar panels to the poles and wires that bring the power to the people, will not steamroll local communities or degrade our rural landscapes and pristine coastlines.” Now that appeared in most of the regional newspapers that ACM print. Now, they should be sticking up for local community newspapers or local community people, and indeed, when you get a paragraph like that at the end of a full page of editorial about the upcoming Federal Election, it shows you that this sort of material is being printed and written by capital city people. In that case, I think it’s obviously come from somebody who either works at The Canberra Times or in one of the far-off metropolitan news bureaus that just disseminates the information, which then local newspapers, because they don’t have the journalists on the ground that they once did, and then they’re forced to just publish it. Now when I was the editor of The Daily Advertiser newspaper at Wagga for 12 years, from 1990, three 1991 in fact. I had the access to 58 journalists. That’s probably as many, if not more than The Sydney Morning Herald has today. It was heady times in the newspapers, but we certainly campaigned and championed local causes. They don’t tend to do that anymore and it’s a real unfortunate thing that you get that sort of thinking being disseminated in local communities, local people being told to just wear it to just cop it, and it’s not right. They should be sticking up for local communities. And you heard Alexis talk a little earlier about an official Government definition about a particular topic or another one official Government definition that I know of is people power, and I think Alexis, you mentioned that as well. And if anything can sway politicians and governments it’s people power. Recently Kate Chaney got up in the Parliament and spoke passionately against the fact that that we should continue live exports of sheep out of her West Australian electorate and that night she was bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands of emails, and they weren’t just a chain email, they weren’t just pro forma. They were heartfelt, passionate, individually written emails from local constituents who urged her to rethink. And the next day she went into the Parliament, and she voted for the continuation of the live sheep trade. Now it went down, but the fact remained, there was a teal who was swayed by public opinion, and if anything would make politicians think twice, it’s the power of the people, the people they are supposed to serve. We are just public servants. Like any other public servants, politicians answer to the people and if there’s enough people who care enough about a particular thing, then please show it. Don’t just take a pro forma, don’t just take something that Chris Muldoon presents, even though he’s a good fellow and I loved his presentation tonight, but put your own spin on it because nothing more reaches politicians in basket or inbox or in-tray, call it what you like, than somebody having their say about a particular local issue, and it does move mountains, and you do need to move mountains. One of the big problems with a lot of these, generally foreign-owned companies, is that they come in with their very articulate, slick talking community liaison engagement officers. They’ll come in and they’ll give you a some of the information that they want you to know, and then six months later when they reappear in your communities, it’ll be a different person wearing a similar shirt but with a different sort of message. But you’d never see the same person twice. And as you go along, it’s always a different person and what they then do is they pick off people. It’s a divide and conquer mentality. That’s what these companies do, and the trouble is, the problem is that they will pick off your next-door neighbour. They’ll pick off sometimes another other family member and what these projects end up doing is dividing neighbours who’ve been friends for decades. Generational family farmers who will then not like their neighbour anymore, who they’ve played tennis with, who they’ve gone to Rotary with, who they’ve sat beside in church, who they’ve intermarried with, and they’ll pick off neighbours, they’ll pick off family members. I know of instances, particularly with these renewable projects where family members are now divided, families have been split apart, torn asunder because an energy company has come in, convinced one family member that it’s all good to sign up and then the family across the road, across the way, the farm has been divided and no longer does that family talk, and that is so sad. That is such a tragedy. And you get these projects that, I appreciate that like Paul Culhane has said, and I acknowledge too, that we do need to transition more to renewables, it’s part of what, obviously, we’ve signed up to for various international agreements. But the fact remains too you can’t ride roughshod over local communities. And if you’re going to have these renewable projects, put them in renewable zones, put them where communities want them. I think there’s great despair in the fact that our State Government, our NSW State Government, can ride roughshod over the Upper Lachlans of the world, over the shire councils, which are there to represent local community interests. And why is it right that Macquarie Street can tell a local council, a local council representing local communities, local people, that a project, just because it’s marked State Significant status just because it’s got supposedly that priority over it, then it should just proceed, irrespective of development applications, irrespective, of local community and local people’s concerns and irrespective of the councils. Now I’ve heard many, many people say that Upper Lachlan, Yass Valley, Snowy Valleys, those councils in particular, have done their fair share of heavy lifting, and you have, and you have. And why is it right that you continue to do the heavy lift when you’re not seeing the sort of wind towers and offshore wind towers be being built in Sydney? Being built in those areas that probably need more power than here, you’re not seeing that. And why is it right that regional communities have to keep giving and giving and giving and not getting any return and having their wonderful views, their wonderful vista, their wonderful environment and, as you quite correctly pointed out, their lifestyles and their health affected by these developments? I keep hearing the word wind farms, they’re really not, and it and it unfortunately just rolls off our tongues. But they’re not farms because they’re not producing food and fibre. They’re just getting in the way of, quite frankly, our local communities’ amenity, our local communities’ ability to have the environment that they want. Many people are moving to these communities, they’ve seen the light with COVID there, there’s much more affordable housing out here, yet people don’t want to have their backyards, their back doors, being taken up with these huge wind towers, these Sun mirrors that in the case of Yass, where a project has just been, thankfully, shelved by a French company called Engie, which was going to actually have a bigger footprint than the town itself. And the local community got up, and Chris should be proud of them, they objected to it, and I objected to it, and we got the outcome that we needed, that we desired, that was the right outcome for the town. We’ve heard tonight from Steven (Johnston) and others, and Alexis (Garnaut-Miller) about the fire concerns and that is a big concern. In 2013 around Binalong and Bowning – where there’s another wind tower development on the cards, and there’s a meeting there next Wednesday, and if you’ve got time, I urge you, encourage you, to turn up to that meeting – there’s a fire that that swept through in 2013, which was almost going to threaten the town of Yass and they wouldn’t have stopped it if it had have got into Yass and beyond. And now right in the very path of where that fire went, which burned out thousands upon thousands of acres of agricultural farmland and killed thousands upon thousands of stock, they’re now wanting to put these massive towers, towers that are bigger than the Eiffel Tower. This is not on. This is ridiculous. So, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak tonight. I very much appreciate that you’ve taken time out of your busy schedules to come. Rest assured, a Government having a mandate to put in renewables to get to whatever target for emissions that they’re trying to achieve, doesn’t have a mandate to ruin regional Australia. It doesn’t have a mandate to ruin the lives and livelihoods and health of people in Crookwell or anywhere else in regional Australia, which has done their share for this madness. Thank you very much.