Second Reading
Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (16:08): I am pleased to rise to say a few words. I want to begin by correcting some of the absolute mistruths delivered by the previous speaker, who talked a lot about wind farms. Apparently we banned wind farms. The member needs to understand planning –
Nina Taylor interjected.
Danny O’BRIEN: You said ‘banned’. You said ‘banned’ and your government says ‘banned’ repeatedly. I am happy to be corrected, but the member for Albert Park also said that we banned them in certain locations. The member for Albert Park, let the record show, has departed the scene now and does not want to hear the truth. She said that we had banned them in a whole lot of locations. I would like to read into Hansard from the Planning Guidelines for Development of Wind Energy Facilities, which were first published in June 2015. Can anyone tell me who was in government in June 2015? That would be the Labor government. The guidelines specifically preclude the development of wind energy facilities in:
• Yarra Valley and Dandenong ranges, Bellarine and Mornington Peninsulas, the Great Ocean Road area within five kilometres of the high water mark, and Macedon and McHarg Ranges
• the land within five kilometres of the high water mark of the Bass Coast, west of Wilsons Promontory
Is anyone seeing a pattern here? Does anyone know what this is? These are all either Melbourne or Labor-held areas. For areas east of Wilsons Promontory, ‘Go your hardest. Build a thousand wind turbines there. We don’t care. It’s not relevant to us.’ It goes on:
• all land west of the Hume Freeway and the Goulburn Valley Highway …
which is the racing area of the state, the thoroughbred area, and it goes on. This is the hypocrisy of this government. They will have wind farms, and they will sell it in Brunswick and Northcote and Fitzroy but not anywhere we want it – not anywhere in regional Victoria, where farmers and people who live in the rural parts of this state have to put up with them. No, they just want them out of the places they live and the places they holiday, like the Yarra Valley and the Great Ocean Road. But Gippsland – ‘Oh, go your hardest’ – unless it is in Bass, because on the Bass Coast that is a bit sensitive. That is one of their marginal seats; they do not want it anywhere there. The member for Albert Park has wilfully misled the Parliament in saying that it was the previous government that banned wind farms in these areas. It was the Labor Party. I think they stand condemned for their attitude on this.
This is one of my frustrations with this legislation and this debate. As a regional member of Parliament and as a member who is representing rural and regional areas – the areas that have historically powered our state, both through coal-fired power generation and more specifically in my electorate through the production of gas, where 90 per cent of Victoria’s gas comes from, through my electorate at Longford – we hear so much debate about energy, but all the benefits are for the city, and the country wears all the issues. We are going to lose the jobs in the Latrobe Valley. The member for Narracan knows this. The member for Morwell is sitting there because he and his constituents know that the Labor Party abandoned them and the blue-collar workers in the power industry a long time ago. Do not get me started on the timber industry – that is a whole other kettle of fish. Now we have got the government saying, ‘We’ll just build all this stuff here.’
That leads me to – and I wanted to come to this a bit later, but I will go to it now – the issue of offshore wind. Members will be aware that the offshore wind sector is planning to be developed in Gippsland, or off Gippsland. Indeed it is almost entirely off my electorate of Gippsland South and that of my colleague the member for Gippsland East. Of course even the federal government has banned offshore wind west of Wilsons Promontory: ‘Because some people from Bass Coast might see that, and we don’t really want that.’ But if you are on the other side, if you are on the Ninety Mile Beach, ‘Oh, we don’t really care. That’s not our area. We don’t mind about that at all.’ Anyway, I digress because there are great opportunities for us in Gippsland from offshore wind, and I hasten to add that this government is very late to the party on it. The offshore wind sector planning started in 2017, or earlier, when Star of the South first started their planning and certainly came to me and other parts of my community and said, ‘This is what we want to do.’ Now the government is saying that the offshore-wind sector is the Labor Party’s policy: ‘It’s all our idea.’
But what are we actually going to see in Gippsland? Offshore wind is a port-based industry. You do not put a tinnie in at Seaspray and go out to work at the offshore wind tower out in Bass Strait. You have to go from the port, or potentially from a heliport, and that might be an opportunity for us too. What does the government do? Does it look at a port in Gippsland, like Barry Beach? No, it says, ‘We’ll go to Hastings in the marginal Labor seat of Hastings.’ How did that go for them? That has gone really well, because the federal government has put the complete kibosh on that and said, ‘You can’t actually do that.’ There are issues with Barry Beach as well. It is also part of a Ramsar-listed wetland, and there would need to be dredging. But I urge the government to not be so stubborn as to continue to say that Barry Beach is not an option for construction for offshore wind, because it is in fact much closer to the proposed location and there is land there. There is not a town within the immediate vicinity of Barry Beach, so there is little local impact – noise and all those sorts of things in a port. We run the risk, and we need the government to guarantee that this offshore wind sector is in fact going to be delivered from Victoria, because there are developers who are looking for acreage who have said to me, ‘Well, actually, Bell Bay in Tasmania is closer to our proposed acreage than Hastings, let alone going to Geelong or Port of Melbourne or somewhere else.’ The government needs to have all the options on the table and actually ensure that if offshore wind is going to happen, there are some benefits for Gippsland, because ports in Hastings are no good to us. You might as well move Loy Yang and Yallourn and everything over to Portland, because there are just no jobs for Gippsland if you have this operating out of Hastings.
I want to just talk a little bit about the issue of electricity more broadly. Members will be aware that my community was savagely hit last Tuesday by the storm that came through, and in particular the town of Mirboo North. I do not get the opportunity to talk about it another time this week, so I am just going to reflect on it briefly here, with indulgence. For the Mirboo North community the impact that is had from the supercell storm that went through actually has to be seen to be believed. The pictures do not do it justice, and I have spoken to numerous people who have said the same thing. Even on TV and social media photos just do not do justice to how catastrophic the damage has been, particularly to the forests around Mirboo North and, sadly, to about 20 homes that we believe are currently uninhabitable, homes which have had their roofs ripped off and damage done. Even more sadly and tragically, we had the loss of a local dairy farmer in that storm. He was out trying to get his cows in to protect them when apparently the roof of the shed blew off. My condolences to his family. I did not know him personally, but I knew of him and know that he was a very well-respected dairy farmer not only in the district but in the industry.
We have got a lot left to do. The questions we asked in question time today about the government’s response were not about politics, they were about trying to make sure that we get the help that we need. The Premier says she has announced that there will be a head contractor to help with the clean-up in Mirboo North. That will be great, but we are now a week down the track from the storm event happening and there are still tin sheets on the side of the road. There are still tin sheets in people’s front yards and there are still massive trees everywhere. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of what we call potential widow makers – trees and branches hanging down from the trees that are going to be seriously dangerous. I know the community is very concerned that if the wind gets up again, which I think it is predicted to do on Thursday, there will be danger. I urge the government to quickly get on with appointing that head contractor. Volunteers, Forest Fire Management Victoria and the SES are doing quite a lot of the work, but there is still a lot of rubble, building debris and massive amounts of trees and branches down – it is just hard to comprehend how much – and the government needs to act quickly to get in and do that.
I just want to very briefly pay tribute to Mirboo North. Like your children, you love all your communities equally, but Mirboo North has shown time and time again, well before this event, what a beautiful community it is and what a great proactive community it is in supporting each other, and we have seen that again. Indeed not just in Mirboo North – we have seen it from throughout the Gippsland region, with people coming in in droves to volunteer, people bringing in food, businesses coming in and providing food, people coming in with generators, people checking on their neighbours and people helping out everywhere they can, cutting their way into neighbours and people who are elderly and unable to look after themselves. I just want to say I am so proud of the people of Mirboo North and what they have done in the last week. I love looking after them, and I hope we can get through this as quickly as possible.