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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-10-28 Daily Xml
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Northern Transmission Project

Ms PRATT (Frome) (15:19): The Mid North of the state is my home and it always has been for my family, extending back five generations. Over the years, as farmers, we have diversified our primary production across grains, legumes, wool, sheep and pigs. We have maintained our existence by living off the land. I admire my cousins who continue to farm around Blyth, Barunga Gap and Bute, Pinery, Parndana and Pinnaroo. As farmers we take great care of our natural environment and we love the lifestyle, as hard as it is sometimes.

We steel ourselves against the inconsistencies of the weather but our morale drops when man-made barriers impede our ability to produce the nation's, and the world's, food and fibre. My region of the Mid North is home to some of the best cropping and food-producing land in the state, yet I can see that it is under siege from new housing estates and energy infrastructure.

Currently I am working with all of my farmers and the relevant regional councils to convince ElectraNet that the only appropriate corridor for the installation of proposed transmission lines is east of Goyder's line. That is in pastoral country. Last week in the town of Riverton I addressed over 200 people and gave an update on the 300 submissions that farmers in my community have made via my office where we are all pushing for a fifth, alternative route.

The message is clear. Productive agricultural land cannot become a corridor for high-voltage powerlines. Routing transmission lines straight through this area threatens loss of productive farmland and impacts on homes, communities and tourism and causes environmental and landscape damage. There are better options like routes east of Goyder's line which would avoid high-value cropping land and tourism areas and would impact far fewer homes and businesses.

Farmers are experts in their own terrain and have developed intelligent reasonable questions that are yet to be answered by the Northern Transmission Project team. Our community campaign has been about protecting the land that feeds us and we will continue to demand sensible planning.

More and more rural communities carry the burden of energy infrastructure that is invisible to the city consumer. This point was made in August by Robert Gottliebsen who wrote in The Australian:

The governments believe the best way to achieve emission targets is to plonk limited-life windmills and solar panels in remote locations and then spend countless billions on transmission lines to get the power to markets. And gas power generating stations will still be required to cover times when the turbines and solar farms are not generating…Generating the power where it is used makes a great deal more sense and should trigger economic investment in capital city grids so they can take excess power.

His final point being:

The current renewables thrust, including transmission lines, is not only high-cost but creating a very angry rural community.

That is certainly the case for the Mid North. For a company like ElectraNet, which is a regulated monopoly, to propose a project of this scale requires some non-negotiable elements. It is imperative that any energy project in South Australia receives a social licence to proceed from the community they are courting and we do not feel they have done enough. ElectraNet has repeatedly missed opportunities to accept friendly invitations to attend community meetings and therefore take the opportunity to dispel any myths, put forward facts instead of misinformation and reassure us, the potential hosts of these towers, that they are still in early stages of consultation.

You cannot crop up to the foot of a tower. You cannot seed. You cannot cultivate. You cannot harvest. Every tower footprint is going to nibble away at our productivity, our land, our cropping land and therefore reduce yield. I think it is short-sighted for any part of arable farmland across this country to be taken up with infrastructure or housing where there are other alternatives, which is why we will continue to push for the fifth corridor because nothing else will do.

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