Rural Australia ‘needs policy’ on the nation’s renewables push, says AgriFutures Australia chair

Rural Australia needs policies to manage the rollout of renewable energy projects and ensure local communities – not just landholders – benefit, says AgriFutures Australia’s chair.

AgriFutures Australia chair Cathy McGowan. Picture: AAP

Rural Australia is in urgent need of policies and regulations to manage the rollout of renewable energy projects and ensure local communities – not just landholders – benefit, according to rural leader and former independent MP Cathy McGowan.

The chair of AgriFutures Australia, a statutory body focused on rural innovation and development, said renewable projects were being built in an “almost policy-free zone” where multiple ­developers vied to sign up farmers without consulting local communities.

“The previous coalition government deregulated this whole topic,” Ms McGowan said on Tuesday. “So now you’ve got developers with very limited regulation who are out competing in the sector. You might have three or four developers all competing for land.

“The planning around this is a long way behind the eight ball. A developer comes in and has a private agreement with a land holder and pays them money, and that’s all fine … but this has impact across the whole community and we haven’t got a mechanism for the community to actually come on the journey.”

She said the backlash in some regional areas against installation of transmission lines and other infrastructure was a real issue – although it would ultimately prove to be a “hiccup” in energy development.

But the bush needed policy: “We can’t just have developers out there developing stuff without some sort of political framework to work within.”

Ms McGowan was speaking in Canberra, where AgriFutures is this week holding a stakeholders summit of regional and rural leaders to “introduce them to Canberra and how policy is made, but also to get Canberra to listen to the regions”.

Her organisation is working with a group called The Energy Charter to develop a regional energy accord to “bring communities into the discussion with enough power and voice to say to developers, guys, you can’t just give us $70,000 for the footy team, and think you’ve done your job. You’ve actually got to engage the whole community.”

Ms McGowan said that while the Albanese government was “really good on trade”, which was vital for agriculture, there was a gap in other policy areas.

“[The government] is very good to work with on trade and market access – those things that are fundamentally important to the future of agriculture,” she said. “So that’s going really well. [But] the area of rural social policy and rural infrastructure policy needs a lot more work.”

The Canberra summit is promoting innovation and hi-tech development of agriculture along with job opportunities in the bush. “There’s a huge number of jobs in agriculture, well paying, diverse jobs, some in the country, some in the city, for example, in ­finance, in supply chains, in ­machinery, in AI, in robotics, in research,” Ms McGowan said.

“There’s no shortage of work at all. The old idea of one person buying a farm and being a farmer is rapidly changing so there are jobs as managers, there are jobs as share farmers, and there’s a ­career path into owning your own farm.”

She said there were now many more diverse land ownership models, such as sharefarming and leasing, and despite the drought in some regions, there was a “buoyancy around production”.

“I think the thing AgriFutures needs to do is to work on keeping productivity growing, we actually need to do the research to make sure the new inventions are coming in, that artificial intelligence works for farmers,” she said.