Steve Price: Regional revolt against Allan government about to get louder

After speaking to a sheep farmer in western Victoria it’s clear a regional revolt not seen since Jeff Kennett lost the unlosable election back in 1999 is fully under way, and you can feel the rural anger growing.

Sitting on a bar stool in the front bar of the Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld in western Victoria you can feel the rural anger.

Locals make up a minority of the crowd, but it is their pub and the only one in town. Next door the tourists – me included – line up for an outstanding but expensive Saturday night early sitting dinner.

Our sheep farmer starts out quietly but by the end of our conversation it’s clear a regional revolt – not seen since Jeff Kennett lost the unlosable election back in 1999 – is fully underway.

Kennett lost 13 seats back then handing power to Steve Bracks off the back of ignoring regional and rural Victorians.

Since that fateful night the Coalition in Victoria has only been back in government once in the past 26 years. Ted Baillieu won government for the Liberals in 2010 and was replaced in 2013 by Denis Napthine who lost to Daniel Andrews way back in 2014.

Steve Bracks and Jeff Kennett in 1999.

If there is a lesson in any of this governments in Spring Street must realise sooner or later that they need to govern for the whole state not just Melbourne.

Our sheep farmer has property at a tiny outpost called Glenthompson 19km east of Dunkeld. Asked what the road between the two places was like he simply said it was a dangerous pot-holed death trap.

He was right and as this newspaper has reported repeatedly our roads are falling apart. On a trip to Adelaide and back the contrast couldn’t be more obvious. The South Australian roads are largely pothole free with a posted speed limit on single lane country roads of 110km/h. In Victoria you are seriously taking your life into your hands driving at anything over 80km/h and the limit is 100km/h.

It’s not just potholes though driving the custodians of some of the richest farming land in Australia wild it’s a combination of taxes, levies, unparalleled demands over green energy schemes and the blatant arrogance of bloated spending projects in the city. Asked if he would ever travel the Suburban Rail Loop between Cheltenham and Box Hill our farmer laughed and shook his head at the idea.

Victoria’s roads are falling apart. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

On these back roads as you pass through tiny communities with a rich history you see the signs of rural anger literally.

Town after town with hand scrawled messages to KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF THE CFA. On a barbed wire fence back on the highway west of Geelong hang four CFA uniforms and the message is blunt – hung out to dry.

As bad as the treatment of volunteer firefighters is – and it’s bad – and as pathetic as the response of the Victorian government has been to a crippling so called green drought, and business smashing taxes are, the issue that is about to crash through communities statewide is renewable energy projects.

This issue is dividing neighbours and, in some cases, even dividing families. It will split communities that have farmed those paddocks and plains for literally hundreds of years.

It’s the mad rush to net zero fed by a cult like obsession with climate change in Canberra, facilitated by state and local governments so obsessed with wind turbines and the transmission lines needed to feed intermittent energy into a grid, that people like Environment and Energy Minister Chris Bowen wants to be 82 per cent renewable by 2030.

CFA members protesting the government’s fire services levy. Picture: David Caird

An impossible target and a dangerous dream.

That’s four years and six months away and in that time much of rural Australia will be asked to pay the price for this obsession but not the greenie advocates living in the inner suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney.

Just last weekend at a meeting in the NSW town of Bowning locals confronted executives from a Victorian based company called Wind Prospect over what they claimed were private deals with some farmers to host turbines on their land smashing the real estate value of farms that rejected the idea.

This is happening Australia wide and is only going to get worse as governments including the Victorian state government flex their planning muscles to force massive transmission lines across farmers properties with a threat of hefty fines if they refuse to host these things.

On that same trip on dangerous back roads, I came across the little community of Rokewood south of Ballarat. It’s home to the massive Golden Plains Wind Farm and note how the spin doctor’s dream up sweet nirvana type names for these things that are not even remotely a farm- they are wind factories plonked on farm country.

In an October statement last year in a media release the Premier’s office announced that Golden Plains was being turned on with a capacity she claims to power 765,000 homes and then this “or EVERY home in regional Victoria.”

The Golden Plains Wind Farm. Picture: Nadir Kinani

Seriously she then added this “when fully operational.” No comment on the need for thousands of kilometres of transmission lines to hook it up or any insurance for a windless day like last Sunday when I was there. The statement went on to claim the Rokewood factory would meet 9 per cent of Victoria’s current energy demand.

Think about that with Victoria’s aim to have 40 per cent of energy by renewables this year rising to 60 per cent in less than five years from now. On those numbers we are going to need another ten or more of these giant installations to get anywhere near the targets.

At Rokewood a few of these giant towers are right on the little country road. To stand near these things is confronting – no frightening – they are a mass of steel and concrete jammed onto flat farming land completely dominating the landscape.

What is not lost on being up close to these things is the notion that rabid green advocates like the Teals and Greens who shout renewable at every opportunity have probably never been anywhere near one.

My bar mate at the Royal Mail is trying to survive as a traditional farmer because he loves that life.

At the same time, he must endure a government so broke it can’t fix his crumbling roads, a government that imposes an Emergency Services Levy on him that he struggles to pay and forces the cult of renewables on his area to power the energy needs of city people he’ll never meet.

Trust me a regional revolt is already underway and it’s going to get a lot louder.

Likes

• Glasgow and Gout Gout giving Dan Andrews the middle finger with a Commonwealth Games showdown in 2026 paid for by us.

• Hidden gem that is the secretive Swan Island Queenscliff golf club.

• Giant super fund Hostplus calls out Jim Chalmers tax attack on unrealised profits.

• Amazon and the AFL team up for a global behind the scenes look at footy.

Dislikes

• State government’s continued delays around machetes as attacks intensify.

• Melbourne University’s laughable vape cop on the beat job.

• My local Liquorland store forced to lock its door in daylight after 30 store robberies in one week.

• Slow reaction from Canberra to SA’s algae bloom disaster.

Originally published as Steve Price: Regional revolt against Allan government about to get louder