Ploughed And Clear

Farmers across Australia are quickly learning they are powerless to stop governments seizing land to make way for renewable energy infrastructure.

A former member of the royal family arrested for allegedly betraying state secrets to a sex cult. The Victorian government giving $15 billion to bikies to deal drugs and extort contractors on public infrastructure sites. And the federal government secretly trying to repatriate Muslim women in Syria whose late husbands chopped people’s heads off for fun.

As our illusions about postwar liberalism crumble, revealing truths about our governance that more closely resemble Soviet, Chinese and North Korean-style corruption than democracy, it’s reassuring that, if nothing else, we haven’t yet reached the stage where the government can forcibly drive us off our property on a whim.

Except we have. And the details of how it’s happening are as disturbing as any of the other tyrannical horrors occurring in plain sight everywhere you look these days.

As if all the other state-sponsored abominations aren’t enough, the New South Wales government has for the past two years been using its power under the Land Acquisition Act to seize sections of privately owned farms in a prime agricultural area north of Mudgee, one of the state’s five designated Renewable Energy Zones.

It gets worse when you learn why. The government is doing this so that ACEREZ, a partly foreign-owned infrastructure consortium, can build monstrous high-voltage transmission lines connecting millions of (also mostly foreign-owned) solar panels and giant windmills to electricity consumers in Newcastle and Sydney.

As Germany’s disastrous foray into renewable energy has demonstrated, all this will achieve is to decrease the reliability of electricity, increase its cost and shut down what’s left of our industries while doing nothing to alleviate the consequences of “human-induced climate change”, which doesn’t exist anyway. (Inversely, the rapidly increasing prosperity of China and India has been almost exclusively fuelled by coal, oil and gas.)

To say that the government is doing all this for the benefit of its constituents is like saying Jim Jones gave his followers Kool-Aid to quench their thirst. The government’s representatives are as nonplussed as Jones was about the destruction they wreak but unlike Jones don’t hang around to witness the carnage.

“They show us sympathy while they’re here but as soon as they leave they couldn’t give a stuff,” says Stuart Hackney, one of the first people in the state to be forced into one of the government’s contracts to give up parts of his farm.

Hackney says EnergyCo, the government-owned corporation charged with overseeing this authoritarian rural revolution, used the threat of compulsory acquisition to get what it wanted, which was use of about 90ha of the arable 570ha on his family farm to build towers for three high voltage lines across his property.

He compared the process to having a “gun to your head all the time” and says “EnergyCo doesn’t give a fuck about anyone”.

Hackney was given about $700,000 compensation, which he says is only slightly below market value. But he won’t be getting all of it because the federal government has decided to tax it — at 48 per cent.

What effect all this will have on property values is unknown because the market for farms operating under these dangerous, ugly, disruptive wires hasn’t been tested yet. “That is what we are all about to find out,” Hackney says with understandable pessimism.

The Melbourne-based Institute of Public Affairs visited a similarly tyrannical government project in rural Victoria in 2024 and was told that the value of a all farms in an area “dropped dramatically” as soon as a government hack in Melbourne decreed them to be in or near the path of the wires. The “uncertainty of where the power lines lie” affected all the farms, St Arnaud real estate agent Brett Douglas said. Douglas also said that the proposed power lines in his region had caused unprecedented rifts between supporters and opponents in the traditionally harmonious community. Worse, some farmers had been hit with unaffordably higher insurance premiums, and fire brigades were now struggling to find volunteers because nobody wanted to risk their lives protecting foreign-owned transmission lines, which are known to start or spread fires anyway.

“We just don’t trust anyone any more, because of this,” farmer Bill Baldwin told the IPA. “You’re jut constantly thinking about it all the time and it does mentally wear you down a lot. Me mates — I’m worried about some of them. I honestly don’t know whether self-harm would be the end result of some of this stuff.”

A few farmers committing suicide is a small price to pay for saving the environment, though.

Back in the Central West REZ near Mudgee, farmer Sara Fergusson is worried about the two huge workers’ camps that are being built next to her previously peaceful farm.

City residents are accustomed these days to government infrastructure projects that drag on for years, regardless of the congestion they cause cars and pedestrians.

That’s not the case with this job, though. Construction of the camps is going on 24/7, under lights at night. When the camps open, they will house almost 2000 workers, all from outside the area, some from overseas. There will be bars and sporting grounds on the site, which will ensure there is minimal interaction between the workers and the locals. Why would that be necessary? Nobody knows.

ABOVE: One of the two massive workers’ camps near Gulgong, NSW. Farming land has been cleared, trees felled, water trucked in and energy generated by diesel generators so 2000 imported workers can build “clean energy” infrastructure.

“We have been kept in the dark,” Fergusson says. “I’ve been asking ACEREZ since the beginning where are they (the workers) from? I didn’t get an answer. I asked, will you have a migrant workforce? They said yes. That was last year.”

She is naturally concerned about her safety and the security of her farm. “I get chest pain. I know it’s related to the stress. It’s not anxiety. It’s real. It’s well recognised that stressful life events affect us physically. Your head doesn’t turn off.”

“It’s a legitimate concern,” says Shooters and Fishers Member of the Legislative Council Mark Banasiak. Banasiak has been chairing a review of the five Renewable Energy Zones across NSW and says there is widespread anger among farmers who feel they are being trampled on by the government.

“They feel like they’re under siege,” he says. “Everything seems to be in favour of ramming this through and bugger the cost to the community.”

You could say the same about any aspect of governance these days. Immigration, education, infrastructure, housing, employment — they are all being moulded not for the benefit of Australians but to consolidate the government’s power. Their playbook is not only the same across all levels of government, but is identical to the ones in Britain, Europe, New Zealand, Canada and parts of the United States. This surely can’t be a coincidence.

I’ve said it before but you can’t say it enough these days: It makes you wonder who they really serve.

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