Qld Farmers fight to stop regions becoming ‘decarbonised waste land’

Queensland farmers are gearing up for a year-long fight in the lead up to the 2024 state election to stop renewable energy projects swallowing up prime agricultural land.

Queensland primary producers are preparing for a year-long fight in the lead-up to the 2024 state election to stop renewable-energy projects swallowing up prime agricultural land and turning the regions into a “decarbonised wasteland’’.

At the heart of the fight – spearheaded by peak industry group Agforce – will be a bid to change the Regional Planning Interests Act to protect the valuable acreage, which takes up about 20 per cent of the state.

AgForce chief executive Mike Guerin said the Act had to be changed to ensure that, when the science showed a development could damage prime agricultural land, it had to be quarantined from development.

“What we are talking about here is the future of the nation’s food supply,’’ he said.

“We simply cannot compromise on this.’’

Farmer Cedric Creed is fighting a proposed solar energy factory. Pictures Steve Vit

Mr Guerin said AgForce would be using advertising, traditional media and social media to apply pressure to the Labor government and the LNP opposition to get commitments to change the Act.

Farmers also want some legislative muscle forcing renewable-energy companies to rehabilitate land, as well as more transparency on approvals processes and compensation payments.

“What we are increasingly concerned about is the impact these renewable-energy developments are having on the young generation of farmers who fear buying a farm only to see it swallowed up by wind turbines or a solar panel factory,’’ Mr Guerin said.

“We’re finding the younger generation, who are often expected to go deep into debt and make a decades-long commitment to primary production if they are going to succeed, are finding there is no certainty about what will happen to their land.’’

The Act – passed in 2014 – is the legal framework applied to the state’s regional plans and is designed to support productive agricultural activities as well as assisting in resolving any land-use conflicts.

Goondiwindi Mayor Lawrence Springborg, who slammed wind farms at the LGAQ Bush Council Convention last month, said other primary-producing peak bodies – including the Queensland Farmers’ Federation along with the majority of Queensland councils – would be joining AgForce in taking the fight up to renewable-energy companies.

The former state National Party leader said renewable energy had become a largely regulatory-free industry with such a powerful social licence that it could “destroy” native fauna and flora – including scar trees, which were sacred in Indigenous culture – without suffering any consequences.

Scar trees brought down in the Goondiwindi district.

“Renewables have a regulatory green light like no other industry in this nation,’’ Mr Springborg said.

“And there is no key strategic plan to this stuff, no assessment of the social and economic input expected from them, no requirements for associated infrastructure, no overall state planning instrument creating a coherent framework in which they are expected to operate and no real reliable assessment of the economic benefits they are expected to produce.

“We could all end up being decarbonised paupers, living in a decarbonised wasteland.’’

The LNP federal member for Flynn, Colin Boyce, said primary producers across his electorate were increasingly concerned that they would be carrying the weight of the renewable revolution as renewable-energy proposals, in­clud­ing one near Theodore, began to dot his electorate.

In Wide Bay, LNP member Llew O’Brien said landowners were standing up for their rights and “rightfully demanding their voices be heard’’.

He said a series of projects – including the Borumba Dam Pumped Hydro and Forest Wind projects, and associated transmission lines – were a threat to farming communities from the Fraser Coast to Gympie and throughout South Burnett.

Yeppoon-based LNP senator Matt Canavan said he was continuing his fight to have a Senate inquiry into how renewable-energy developments and associated transmission lines were going to be managed – but said the move was being blocked by Labor and the Greens.

The Queensland government said it was already reviewing the state code for wind farms and its accompanying guidelines “in an effort to build greater community and industry confidence in clean-energy projects”.

In a statement, it said the review would look at ways of better protecting areas of high environmental value as well as “highlight rehabilitation requirements and expectations’’.

Cedric Creed at his Central Queensland property. Picture: Steve Vit

SOWING SEEDS OF ANGER

A small group of Queensland farmers has reached desperation point after spending five years fighting a proposed solar energy factory in Central Queensland that will cover 3600ha of land which, for generations, has produced grain, beans and cotton.

Grazier Cedric Creed, a member of “The Tenacious Ten of Smoky Creek”, says they have sent more than 300 letters to the three tiers of government in the past five years to try to convince someone in authority to “stop this madness’’.

“I have lived here all my life and I know that about 80 per cent of the country they want to use up is good country,’’ he said.

“This land has been good for cattle, but it’s also grown all sorts of things over the years – mostly cereal crops, beans and cotton.’’

He said renewables were not a source of “free’’ energy.

“The wind and sun are free, but that’s where the freebees stop,” Mr Creed said.

“The sheer cost of refining, transport, erection and dismantling outweigh the cost it is supposed to save, and that doesn’t include the destruction of the environment during construction.’’

The solar factory, now in its final stages of approval, will generate an estimated 1,194,000 megawatt hours of renewable energy annually.