Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the annual report to the Parliament of Australia from the office of the National Wind Farm Commissioner. I am interested because this report was tabled not during the sitting of parliament but between the last sitting weeks. I want to start my contribution by saying that I am a senator who was on the original Select Committee on Wind Turbines that dealt with the matter around wind turbines in August 2015. That report was handed down in the Senate.

The inquiry that led to the formation of the position of the Office of the National Wind Farm Commissioner came out of the report of that select committee, to which Labor provided a dissenting report. During the course of that inquiry, the committee held 11 public hearings, and 490 submissions were put forward to that inquiry. There was an interim report and then a final report, and 15 recommendations came out of that report. As I said earlier, the Labor Party made a dissenting report, which had five recommendations. One of the recommendations that came out of that was the creation of the Office of the National Wind Farm Commissioner.

In the annual report of the Office of the National Wind Farm Commissioner, the first part is the commissioner's review. I just want to raise this matter. The report says:

It should be noted that our complaints handling process is a voluntary process. We are not able to compel parties to respond to a complaint.

The Office of the National Wind Farm Commissioner can listen to complaints but is not then compelled to act on them. From my point of view, I would question what role the commissioner has. It was established for an initial period of three years. It is an independent role, as is stated in this report. If you go to page 8 of the report, it talks about the complainant activity, and it says:

From the Office's inception up to 31 December 2016, the Office received a total of 90 complaints.

Those 90 complaints were:

One could joke about whether they came from a former member of the other place, Mr Hockey, who I know did not like wind farms. If I recall, he said they were ugly. The report continues:

As at 31 December 2016, 67 complaints were closed by the Office. The remaining 23 matters are at various stages of the complaint handling process.

There is not a lot of detail around what the complaints actually are about. If you go to the 67 that have been closed, 31 of the complainants chose to not progress the matter, and information was provided to a further 32 complainants addressing concerns raised—so they got some sort of information. This report does not go into what that information was. It has no detail around what that is. For two of those 67 matters that are closed it says there was a negotiated settlement between the parties, and for the other two, as I said, the details are not known. So there is not a lot of detail in the report. I know that the commissioner's report has something like 79 recommendations in it, and a lot of the recommendations that are outlined in the annual report are very similar to the dissenting report and the Labor senators' recommendations in the actual final report of the Select Committee on Wind Turbines.

What compelled me to raise this issue here today was: what is the point of spending taxpayers' money on a National Wind Farm Commissioner that has no jurisdiction to follow through with complaints? A lot of the issues were raised in the original report, so my question is: why are we spending money on this?