Anne Urquhart (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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?

Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Firstly, Mr Acting Deputy President Leyonhjelm, I congratulate you on your initial turn in the chair in the role of Acting Deputy President. I am very delighted also, as Senator Urquhart has said, to rise to comment on the first annual report of the National Wind Farm Commissioner and to congratulate Mr Andrew Dyer on what I believe has been an excellent first report, no doubt laying the foundation for many more into the future.

As my colleague said, there are no statutory powers conferred on the National Wind Farm Commissioner and, in some ways, that is probably the strength of the role. This gentleman, as we know, had been an ombudsman associated with the telecommunications industry, so he has a wealth of experience in this space. The greatest attestation to the role has been the wide acceptance of the commissioner's role and, I understand, the positive reports that have come back as a result of his first annual report from, pretty well, everyone associated with the industry and many who exercised their right to raise complaints. This is bearing in mind that he has no statutory powers.

It is the case, nevertheless, in the face of what could have been a high degree of angst from the wind-farm industry, that he has been able to cause them to review complaints procedures, to make recommendations on a formal complaints procedure, and to get acceptance of most in the industry to adhere to a complaints procedure by people who believe they are affected or likely to be affected. As Senator Urquhart quite rightly said, the range of complaints relate, in some instances, to existing wind farms and, in others, to wind farms yet to be developed. That forum, which has not existed before in Australia, gives a voice to people's concerns about either existing wind farms or proposed wind farms.

I go back, then, to the guidelines. The commissioner has recommended national guidelines that could be adopted by all states and territories. You, Acting Deputy President Leyonhjelm, were a member of that select committee that consulted widely, as were Senator Urquhart and I. One of the issues that came up immediately was the stupidity of the fact that there were not consistent planning guidelines across state boundaries. We had a situation, for example, in which recommended distances from the closest wind turbine to a home differed from South Australia to Victoria to New South Wales to Queensland. We are now seeing an accepted standardisation across all jurisdictions, not by the heavy hand of legislation, direction or mandatory requirement but by the persuasion of a very sensible person.

One critically important element to come out of this report relates to an anomaly in which, in advance of a wind turbine being approved or an application going forward, an acoustician, an acoustics expert, so-called, would lend their support to what they believed was going to be the acoustic level, the sound and the infrasound that might come from that wind farm. After it was constructed, guess who got the job of going back afterwards and seeing whether or not those predictions were, indeed, accurate? Acting Deputy President, you and I recall the angst associated with this. It was exactly the same acoustician or firm of acoustics specialists.

One of Commissioner Dyer's recommendations is that, for transparency, integrity and probity—and all those other reasons—it should not be the party that made the original suggestions, recommendations or predictions as to the level of sound coming out of that wind farm, it should be a totally different and independent firm on which our decisions are based. Yes, not all parties are going to be satisfied. They never are, in a complaints process. But I am aware that through his good industry, commonsense and negotiation there have been some settlements between wind-farm operators and people stating they have been affected. And he has not got himself involved in the issues associated with health or otherwise. They will, no doubt, be the subject of future scrutiny.

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted. Debate adjourned.