Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Labor's reckless race to 82 per cent renewables by 2030 means that 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines are going to be put across prime agricultural land, native bushland and pristine coastline. We are all sent here to do a job; we are all sent here by our constituents to represent them, to stick up for them, to back them, and this is what I'm doing with the net zero approach that I have adopted.

By constructing tens of thousands of kilometres of transmission lines across rural and regional Australia in pursuit of a false ideology, the government is industrialising fertile rural farmland on a massive scale. I do believe the greatest moral challenge facing humankind is to be able to grow enough food to feed a hungry world. There are too many children going to bed with hungry stomachs across the globe at the moment. And many of those kids are in Australia. When we are taking up arable farmland with solar panels, wind towers and transmission lines, it means that we can't grow the food that we once were able to. It means that our farmers are leasing their land to largely multinational corporations—and these people are shysters. They have come into my Riverina electorate and divided families and communities. They have ended friendships that have lasted generations, all for the sake of the almighty dollar. For them, it's not about saving the planet; it's about making money. They have deep pockets, they have no conscience and they are dividing communities. I won't stand for it, and neither will the communities.

I heard the new member for Whitlam talking about renewable energy zones. Good luck to her; I wish her communities well with those proposals. But the area in the Riverina where they are plonking these wind towers, at a height of 260 metres—90 of them between Binalong and Bowning—is not a REZ. It's not a renewable energy zone. But that hasn't stopped these multinational corporations. That has not stopped these spivs. And, if you're not accepting what one of these spivs says, just wait, because six weeks later they'll send out another community engagement liaison person.

What happened at Mangoplah was that the proponent dropped a whole heap of brochures into the local farm centre and said, 'Would you mind distributing these?' That's simply not good enough. They want to plonk battery energy storage systems all over the area. The local rural fire service volunteers have said that they won't put out their fires, because they're worried about the toxicity of the flames. It's their health. It's their future. People have had enough in rural and regional Australia, and they are saying, 'Stop this nonsense.'