Solar farms and wind turbines in the bush are a fire disaster waiting to happen

Anthony Albanese, speaking to the Bush Summit in Tamworth, said the coming fire season is going to be a bad one. He is correct but it’s going to be much worse than he could imagine.

What he and so many others don’t realise is that an unintended consequence of Chris Bowen’s transition to renewables is going to make the risk of uncontrollable fires 10,000 times more likely to happen, and place all of rural Australia in a perilous situation for every summer fire season.

Put tens of thousands of wind turbines on 180m to 300m towers (with hundreds of large lithium batteries) and scatter them across rural Australia. Add tens of millions of solar panels on solar farms, scatter them across Australia, and you have wide-scale disasters waiting to happen. On a total fire ban day, there only needs to be one turbine or solar panel to catch fire and a disaster is likely to occur. It is exacerbated because, in regards to firefighting, solar farms are a “no-go area” for firefighters, and aerial water bombers keep several kilometres away from wind turbines. So, stopping fires when they are small is out of the question.

This transition to renewables will be a disaster – for our essential, reliable and low-cost energy supplies, for our vitally important agricultural production, for the safety and peaceful lifestyle of rural communities, and for our unique wildlife, particularly birds, bats and bees, that will face extinction.

John Moore, Wangaratta, Vic

Not ‘guilty’

Douglas Murray’s survey of Australia’s guilt industry and the responses to it (Letters, 21/8) do not address the issue of why Australians cannot get a break from relentless attempts to socially engineer us into despising ourselves and our country.

It is because the majority of our political class has allied with the corporate world, academia, the sporting elite and the mainstream media to gang up on us, and assail us with propaganda that is designed to shame us into believing that one of the freest, wealthiest, happiest and most welcoming countries in recorded history is a cesspit of injustice and systemic discrimination.

Judith Loriente, Auchenflower, Qld

There seems to be a lot of talk about voting Yes to the voice “to right past wrongs”. That strikes me as a major lack of focus. We can’t return the Stolen Generations. We can’t bring back to life the original Australians who were killed in massacres or by smallpox. Those of us whose ancestors came after 1788 are not going to evacuate the country.

If you stop looking to the past, and instead look at living conditions, lack of opportunity, and domestic and substance abuse in many remote Aboriginal communities, shouldn’t the focus be on righting present wrongs?

Kevin Lathbury, Willetton, WA

Many seem to believe the referendum is an attempt to destroy our way of life and that a No vote will be a “big up yours” from the people; that these historically most marginalised people in this great country, which was once theirs, are going to somehow get more than us and that there will be terrible unimagined consequences for us.

Yes or No, the outcome of this vote will have no effect on my way of life. I have never had to live in a reservation outside town, having to walk or ride a push bike into the shopping centre, where I was looked on with suspicion. I never had to watch my parents destroy themselves with drugs or alcohol because their parents had been disenfranchised from a way of life they had known. Today, trauma counsellors recognise how families are affected through generations – for example, the families of World War I soldiers. Indigenous people had more than a war to cope with when their home was taken from them.

This is not a “big up yours” moment, only an opportunity to do the right thing.

Chris Gresham, Taree, NSW

High and dry

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce would do us all a favour if he focused on managing his airline instead of grandstanding as the favoured “son” of Anthony Albanese (“Qantas shouldn’t add its voice to the referendum”, 21/8).

Like many Vietnam veterans, I intended flying Qantas to Canberra and back to attend the 50th anniversary last Friday commemorating the cessation of our involvement with the Vietnam war. I travelled to the airport by public transport, leaving home on the NSW Central Coast at 2am to get to Sydney airport and ensure I met check-in requirements. As I went to the gate to board, the PA system announced “sorry, the flight to Canberra has been cancelled”. I was rescheduled for another flight, but the timing would not have guaranteed my arrival at the commemoration on time. I returned home.

Regrettably, I suspect I am one of many inconvenienced by an airline that was once “pride of country”.

Thank you, Mr Joyce. What day did you say you finish up?

John George, Terrigal, NSW