Steve Price: the great Green Dragon is coming for our bush, farmland

Bush and prime agriculture land in Victoria is about to be gobbled up by massive solar and wind farm projects as the state ambitiously tries to reach 95 per cent renewable energy by 2035.

Steve Price

@StevePriceMedia

5 min read

November 3, 2023 - 12:00PM

Steve Price warns that the rapid move to green energy will damage Australia.

Opinion

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Victorians need to be aware of the great Green Dragon headed our way in the form of massive solar and wind farms.

Bushland and prime agricultural food growing real estate is about to be gobbled up by these projects as the Labor/Green alliance in our state tries to get to 95 per cent renewables by 2035 – that’s just over 11 years away now.

The targets are a pipe dream and impossible to reach but the damage that will be done to “feel good” about climate change will be massive.

If you think I am kidding a recent experience in Europe proved I’m not.

Travelling south from Rome in Italy on the A1 toll road skirting Naples you see in stark reality what the obsessive green energy future looks like for regional Australia.

It’s depressingly ugly and a real shock.

Regional Victoria will soon be lined with white wind turbines as Australia pushes forward with overly ambitious renewable energy targets. Supplied

Smothering the ancient hillsides on both sides of the road are dozens and dozens of giant white wind turbines. On the way south last month and on the way back I saw one, maybe two if I was lucky, turning in the warm autumn sunshine.

These giant windmills destroyed the vista as you looked towards distant hilltop towns gleaming white in the distance.

Italy, on one report I’ve seen published in 2022, has more than 7000 of these green dream monsters, largely in the south. Germany, Spain and France have even more and make no mistake they are on the way to an Australian regional and rural landscape near you. They are not, of course, on the way to Teal politician Monique Ryan’s Hawthorn backyard or Zoe Daniel’s bayside residence, but are set to carpet Victoria’s Western Districts, as The Australian reported this week, with a $750 million, 570ha solar project planned for prime farmland in the King Valley in northeast Victoria.

New National Farmers Federation president David Jochinke warned this week of the damage this rush to renewables would do and launched a campaign called Keep Farmers Farming. If we need these things, surely planting them in the ocean kilometres offshore is the way to go.

The NFF warning is timely because the Green Dragon is on our doorstep.

National Farmers Federation president David Jochinke has warned the rush to renewables will be damaging. Picture: Martin Ollman

The Albanese Government’s climate change minister, Chris Bowen — a global warming zealot — is hoping the city dwellers of Brunswick and Fitzroy don’t notice until it’s too late. Surely even these inner-city greenies would be horrified at what these turbines and their transmission lines will do to pristine Australian forests and valuable farm land.

Sadly, for those of us not willing to buy into this mad rush to renewables from a country contributing virtually zero to global warming, there will be no national referendum around the question of turbines and solar panels.

No Voice question and no Same Sex marriage vote just a carpet-bombing transformation of the Australian bush into a giant renewable energy experiment costing billions and changing forever rural Oz.

And don’t buy the argument that this was what the last Federal election was about because until you see a lot of these things up close you don’t realise just how invasive they are. Wrecking regional Australia with this madness will be a massive mistake made by inner urban Greenie elites led by Bowen and other zealots like Adam Bandt and people like the Teals Ryan and Daniel’s who will never have to look at them.

What makes this crazy rush to wind and sun power even more depressing is the fact it’s happening in Australia at all. Unlike Italy — that walked away from nuclear power in the ’80s, has banned gas production on Italian soil, has a struggling hydro scheme hit by droughts and imports virtually all its energy needs in the form of natural gas — Australia has all the energy assets we need in our own country.

Australia has abundant supplies of natural gas – so much gas that we fill up ships and export it to countries around the world that buy it cheaper than Australians can. Our coal is the cleanest in the world, again exported to Asian neighbours to generate power to produce steel from Australian iron ore to make wind turbines and sell them back to us.

How dumb are we?

Solar panels are appearing on rooftops but will also be appearing in massive swathes of farmland.

Italy’s neighbours like France power their countries with clean green nuclear energy combined with gas and renewables. The French alone operate 56 nuclear reactors and Europe relies on nuclear energy for generating over 25 per cent of its power. We dig up uranium and again fill up ships and sell it to the world instead of taking the natural advantage we have, meaning like the Italians we have soaring power bills that many struggle to pay.

Fresh from the 60 to 40 defeat of the divisive Voice referendum the Federal Coalition now needs to step up and realise that the common sense Australians relied on to make that decision would be equally applied to a genuine debate about climate change and what Australia’s response should be. Sadly, past Liberal leaders have either wilted in the face of climate change hysteria or like Malcolm Turnbull were major spruikers of Australia promising things it never needed to.

Peter Dutton urgently needs to find the spine to frame a real alternative to this mad rush to crazy policies like banning the sale of new petrol engine cars from 2035. That’s just 11 years away and any sensible person looking around them on the way to work realises how mad that is.

Interestingly, British PM Rishi Sunak — just over 12 months away from a general election — has allowed reality to interrupt the climate change promised land and moved to step back some of Britain’s madder promises.

In a speech in mid-September Sunak, according to London’s Daily Telegraph, “declared war” on the green establishment and walked away from cross party consensus on getting to net zero.

Australia is being “held ransom” by state governments led by premier’s who think they can save the planet, Steve Price says.

He walked back on banning gas connections but stuck with the idea that new petrol engine vehicles will be banned from sale from 2035.

Dutton needs to do the same, but Australia of course is held to ransom by State Labor Governments led by Premiers who think they can save the planet.

He should be emboldened by the Voice result and realise we are headed down a road to more expensive power for all in a nation blessed with abundant resources.

I suggest he starts with a visit to the Stanley Peninsula in northwest Tasmania. Community action there has forced a mob called Ark Energy to walk away from plans for a 50-megawatt wind project on the coast. The battle took two years but the locals just this week claimed victory arguing for “scenic protection” for their little community.

The project consisted of only 12 turbines but just like those giant windmills in Italy it would have changed that little place forever.

Ark Energy ominously declared they were concentrating on larger projects around Australia.

Beware the Green Dragon.

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