Opinion: Renewable energy’s actual place in Qld

I am not against all renewable energy, but I am against projects that do not get support from local people, writes Matt Canavan.

LNP senator for Queensland Matt Canavan

In 2019 it looked like Bill Shorten would be elected prime minister and there was a risk he would cancel the approval for the Adani mine.

Bill had said that “I don’t support the Adani project”.

But local people did support Adani because it would provide 2000 jobs.

So locals organised a rally in Clermont (the closest town to the mine) and 800 unionists, business people and farmers showed up to support the proposed mine.

The Clermont rally helped deliver Bill Shorten an unexpected defeat as Queensland delivered a swing against Labor three times that of the rest of the country.

This week the Queensland LNP government cancelled the approval for a wind factory (the Moonlight Range project) not far from Clermont.

But there will be no rally by 800 locals in favour of wind turbines.

As the Queensland minister, Jarrod Bleijie, said on announcing the cancellation, 88 per cent of local submissions about Moonlight Range were opposed to it.

The local Rockhampton council was opposed too.

People are opposed to these wind projects because they plan to install huge numbers of 280m-tall towers in our pristine Australian bush and they provide no jobs or reliable energy to local people either.

The Moonlight Range project would have provided just 10 ongoing jobs to Central Queenslanders.

The project involved the disturbance of over 800ha of high-value koala habitat.

If a farmer had proposed to do this kind of environmental destruction they would not get past the first door with government agencies.

And all of this for barely any electricity.

The Moonlight Range wind factory would produce just a tenth of the electricity of the nearby Stanwell coal-fired power station while using 20 times the amount of land to do so.

Environmental activists have been fond in recent years of claiming that new mines or power stations must receive a “social licence” to proceed.

The original concept of social licence was to impose an obligation on major projects to receive the support of the people close to the proposed impact.

So that if a mine is going to dig a big hole then the mine owners should work hard to deliver benefits to the surrounding area so that the local people do not feel their community has gone backwards.

This is why good mining operators will offer local traineeships and have buy-local programs to support small businesses.

However, in my dealings with most renewable energy investors, they pay almost no attention to the local community. If they do have local discussions they are normally approached as a “tick a box” exercise. Ironically, these “green” investors do not even show much care for the destruction of the local environment that their projects may cause.

The problem is that some renewable energy supporters have convinced themselves that their projects will save planet earth.

So if Joe and Nicole’s idyllic, rural, family lifestyle is destroyed in the process, that is a small price to pay.

What these self-appointed Captain Planets have forgotten is that all politics is local.

When 90 per cent of people oppose your project, no amount of Paris agreements will prevent democratically elected governments from listening to the people.

The situation that the renewable industry is in is very similar to that of the coal seam gas industry a decade ago.

They too were riding roughshod over local farmer’s interests but were telling everyone that the state needed the gas, so it was too bad if some local farmers felt inconvenienced.

The outcome was fracking bans almost everywhere in Australia.

We are still living with gas shortages thanks to the gas industry’s mismanagement of the local politics.

Meanwhile in the US landowners own the gas and therefore the gas industry must treat them with respect.

As a result, the US is producing more oil and gas than any country ever has in history.

I am not against all renewable energy.

But I am against the senseless destruction of high-value koala habitats.

And I am against projects that do not get support from local people.

My advice to the renewable industry is to learn from the mistakes of our gas industry and to invest in local communities if they are serious about winning political support.

Compensation should not just go to the hosts of turbines, near neighbours are just as impacted.

More jobs need to be delivered to local areas.

Why aren’t your headquarters in the regional towns you operate in?

We just need to restore a sensible energy policy that uses all of our energy resources, coal, gas, uranium, hydro, sun and wind.

That way we will not need to destroy our beautiful Australian bush because we are over-reliant on one energy source.

Matt Canavan is an LNP senator for Queensland

Originally published as Opinion: Renewable energy’s actual place in Qld