General News
25 June, 2025
Birchip community event
The community of Birchip, an epicentre of three wind farm proposals and four significant mineral sands mining retention licences, played host to a community meeting addressing turbines, lines, mines and property rights on Sunday, June 1.
Three key speakers addressed an audience exceeding three hundred people from across Western Victoria, who filled the Birchip Leisure Centre to capacity.
Birchip community member, Marian Haddrick, emceed the afternoon’s events, bringing the crowd up to speed on the latest developments whilst demystifying the dizzying array of acronyms that landowners and communities are presently dealing with.
These included Australian Energy Market Operator, Transmission Company Victoria, Renewable Energy Zone (REZ), Western Renewables Link, and VNI West.
Ms Haddrick outlined the purpose of the information gathering event to the diverse crowd.
“We want today to be about knowing your rights as landholders and community members,” she said.
“We want to help you to advocate for your best interests.”
VicGrid’s Draft 2025 Victorian Transmission Plan, released last May, no longer includes Buloke Shire as a REZ due to the lack of existing transmission lines.
Intense landholder opposition to both the Western Renewable Link and VNI West transmission lines has seen both projects significantly delayed.
VicGrid’s draft map fails to acknowledge the three proposals of West Wind Energy’s Wilkur Energy Park, Cubico Sustainable Investment’s Curyo Wind Farm, or ACEN’s Corack East Wind.
The plethora of mining overlays across prime agricultural land has many Victorian farmers worried.
The link between critical mineral mining and the production of turbines, solar panels and batteries has been confirmed by Victorian Government’s Critical Minerals Roadmap and has recently featured on the Minerals Council of Australia’s billboard campaign in Melbourne.
In contrast, Marian discussed the community-produced No REZ Map.
“Volunteers went out into the community and sat down with people in cafes, or rang them on the phone, and then they asked the question, ‘Would you be happy to host transmission lines or renewable energy zones on your land’,” explained Marian.
The vast swathes of land marked in red for “no” shows that, of the landholders contacted to date, the overwhelming majority do not support the use of rural areas as renewable energy zones.
“This document is a powerful tool and has been used to advocate to government,” Marian said. “This is what true community consultation looks like.”
Dominica Tannock, Principal Lawyer at DST Legal, shared her wealth of experience with the audience.
Her professional achievements have included negotiating deals for neighbours of the Bald Hills Wind Farm under nuisance laws and reducing the number of turbines at Golden Plains Wind Farm, due to its significance as a brolga habitat.
Members of the Goshen district’s ‘Mine Free Mallee Farms’, for whom she has acted, were among those in attendance.
Dominica explained that wind farm corporations are property developers proposing to, in the short term, monetise and industrialise prime agricultural land.
Wind farm noise levels were of particular concern to the audience, prompting Dominica to share strategies being used around Australia to hold developers to account.
Frustratingly, the Victorian Government’s recent changes to the Public Health and Wellbeing act now exclude people from making nuisance complaints in relation to wind farms.
Will Elsworth, Smeaton Farmer and advocate against the WRL, was refreshingly honest as he recounted the “slow moving train crash” that saw his local community implode in the face of the proposed Tuki Wind Farm.
The lure of money, especially to community organisations, proved to be a short-lived developer strategy as the town’s social cohesion rapidly plummeted.
Fortunately, the proposal was no match for local resistance to the project, and the developer scrapped the proposal in late 2012.
Will, along with many in the community, worked hard to save the social fabric of Smeaton, though many wounds have been slow to heal.
Ironically, overwhelming resistance to transmission lines is proving to be one of the most uniting factors in restoring the local community of Smeaton.
Mining was the final topic of the day as Ouyen Farmer, Scott Anderson, spoke of his experiences living with Iluka’s Woornack, Rownack, Pirro WRP Mine on his own, and neighbouring, farmland for the past fifteen years.
The WRP Mine, a strip mine, has operated twenty four hours a day with lights, rivalling the light towers at the MCG, visible from a distance of more than ten kilometres at night, since it commenced.
While many of the affected landholders sold their land to Iluka due to inability to stop the project, Scott and his family, who had recently come home to work on the farm, stayed and commenced the lengthy process of working with lawyers and ensuring that the terms of the contract were as agreeable as possible.
With a long family connection to the land, Scott has worked hard to ensure that the land is rehabilitated correctly, providing detailed examples of challenges in doing so, including the redistribution of sub and top soils, along with ongoing salinity issues.
Scott, a long-standing member and past Chairman of Ouyen Inc., was fair and balanced in his assessments of where the community has and hasn’t benefited from the mine over the life of the project.
The well attended event, funded entirely by members of the Birchip Community, exceeded the expectations of the organisers and provided a timely update on the current state of renewables and mining in Victoria.
