Let’s play a game. What’s the biggest myth in Australian politics? There are certainly lots of candidates, but for me, it is that Barnaby Joyce enjoys widespread support in New England. I understand the notion that 52.46% of the primary vote doesn’t equate to widespread support is a bit confronting. But just because people vote for him does not mean they like him, or that they agree with him; it only means he was the least bad candidate in a seat that is rarely seriously contested.
There is no better issue to demonstrate how out of touch Joyce is with his constituents than renewable energy. Joyce’s position is basically “anything but renewables”, increasingly pro-nuclear power, and last week he pushed the party room to abandon net zero entirely.
New England loves renewables. New England wants renewables. Community benefit funds are pouring millions of dollars into our communities, boosting opportunities and amenity in areas that have been starved of services for far too long. Sam Coupland, the Armidale mayor and Bob Katter’s son-in-law, led the founding of the Coalition of Renewable Energy Mayors, a body aiming to ensure roads, housing and other basic infrastructure can be funded by this booming industry.
The voices opposing New England becoming the state’s biggest renewable energy zone (REZ) are loud, but few and far between. And most of them don’t oppose renewable power per se, they just have an issue with a particular development. Or more recently, the transmission lines.
Scratch the surface, and you’ll often find the loud opponents live on a “lifestyle block” and simply don’t want to lose their view. Most locals don’t care if the paddock is growing wool or generating solar power – whatever allows farmers to diversify their income, benefits the community and doesn’t damage the land and water is all good.
Much of the land in the New England REZ is, to put it politely, of limited agricultural potential, or best suited to conservation use. You can graze livestock, but it’s very hard to diversify a farm when part of your land is more rock than soil and can’t be efficiently worked for cropping. You can, however, put solar and wind on it. This means the REZ is giving many landholders the opportunity to improve their operations and really diversify for the first time in generations.
That said, to imply that New England has embraced its renewable energy future solely because of farm diversification or community benefit funds would be another misstatement.
Let’s take, for example, the village of Uralla, population just under 3,000, but growing at a rate of knots with a bustling main street. It has been working on becoming Australia’s first net zero town since 2014, six years before the New England REZ was formally declared. And it beat competing bids from fellow New England towns Bingara, Manilla, Glen Innes and Tenterfield to be the case study.
A small and joyful organisation called Z-Net is driving and coordinating much of the transition, from holding public forums on establishing its own community grid to running extremely popular preserving workshops in its own war on waste. From soil sequestration to EV charging stations, the small village is embracing it all. Without fuss, without fanfare, they’re just doing it.
Farmers in the Uralla area got together early in the transition and decided to support renewable developments, and the money that came with them, as long as they could continue to graze their sheep. New England Solar at Uralla, one of Australia’s largest solar farms with more than 1m solar panels, was opened in March by the climate change minister, Chris Bowen, who acknowledged the very strong community support for the project in his remarks. Joyce didn’t show up to the event.
The Nationals are simply out of touch with their base on this one. There are notable exceptions, of course, and some in the party, such as the state member for the Northern Tablelands, Adam Marshall, do not hide their antipathy for Joyce, and vigorously oppose his views on energy.
The shift to opposing the transmission lines is bare-knuckle politics at its most simplistic. Having lost the fight on renewable power generation in the heartland, they’re moving on to fighting the transmission lines. It’s a weak argument, sure – they already know it is not feasible to bury transmission lines underground and they are essential to connect the REZ to the grid – but it’s a fight they haven’t lost yet. Oh, and Joyce is personally affected.
While the NSW government slows down transmission line development for an inquiry and delays the closure of Eraring, there are huge renewable developments already generating power in New England and elsewhere that simply must be connected to the grid. Alas, Labor is easily spooked by the loud blokes in hats and is going softer and slower, when it should be going harder and faster.
• RK Crosby is the publisher of the New England Times
