Solar concerns aired

Drama around four solar farm applications in Greater Shepparton was heard in Victoria’s upper house for a second time last week, where an Opposition MP asked whether communities were being disadvantaged by the proposals being ‘‘test cases’’.

A planning panel hearing into four solar proposals for the Greater Shepparton area had its final day yesterday.

State Member for northern Victoria, Liuke O'Sullivan.

Across five sitting days, it heard from landholders, objectors, water authorities, planning experts, Greater Shepparton City Council and the solar developers.

In Parliament on Wednesday, State Member for Northern Victoria Luke O’Sullivan asked Agriculture Minister Jaala Pulford whether Agriculture Victoria would have meaningful input into the development of guidelines to protect high-value irrigated agricultural land.

He also asked what involvement Agriculture Victoria had in the development of guidelines to date.

Ms Pulford said the state’s planning minister was leading the work and that Agriculture Victoria was being consulted in the development of the guidelines.

In a separate question to Ms Pulford, Mr O’Sullivan said the solar developments were ‘‘causing angst among communities in the Goulburn Valley’’, and asked ‘‘what is the government’s policy in relation to the protection of high-value agricultural land from solar developments?’’

‘‘The farming communities of Tatura, Lemnos, Congupna and Tallygaroopna are concerned that they could lose more than 500 hectares of irrigated land because they are the test case and their matters are to be decided by the government prior to the development of the guidelines,’’ Mr O’Sullivan said.

‘‘What actions is the government taking to ensure the farming communities of Tatura, Lemnos, Congupna and Tallygaroopna are not being treated unfairly simply because they are one of the first communities to deal with this issue?’’.

The minister took the question on notice and said she would ‘‘pass it to the minister in the other place’’.

The panel had previously been urged by several submitters on the need for a clear set of guidelines around solar farm proposals to be developed.

The proceedings follow Planning Minister Richard Wynne’s office calling in the four proposals after the council had requested their outcome be determined by the minister’s office; an outcome the council had welcomed as ‘’sensible’’.

The panel is also set to be providing advice to the energy minister about how future solar farm applications will be assessed in Victoria, the News understands.

The applications constitute hundreds of millions of dollars in development costs and the projects are estimated to produce hundreds of megawatts of power.

But there are concerns about the best use of prime agricultural land and fears large-scale solar farms could have an impact on nearby farming practices.

Following recommendations being handed down by the panel, the minister can approve, reject or green light the permits, with conditions attached.

Story from the Shepparton News - “Solar concerns aired.”

The 'downing' for flight MA17 is an inconvenient distraction, but not for our PM

Australia's climate change
denying PM,Tony Abbott.

The recent ”downing” of flight MA17 in the Ukraine is a distraction of consequence beyond imagination.

Australians, governed by a climate change denying government, have been subjected to a media-led deluge about the downing (the convenient and non-committal description given to the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner), which has been such that the vastly more important, certainly in the medium to long-term, scrapping of the carbon charging mechanism has been publicly almost forgotten.

Tony Abbott and his coalition cohort have rushed to become identified as the international white nights of the MA17 drama.

The Australian Government’s initiative is to be applauded, but never must we forget that governments around the world, including our own, have a bigger responsibility than becoming party to something compared to potentialities of climate change is a minor event.

True, flight MA17 came to a rather grimy conclusion that was the product of uninvited, unannounced and unmitigated violence; violence to which the victims made absolutely no contribution and so certainly on the face of it where innocent in every way.

As other international flights were just 90 seconds both ahead and behind, it must be pointed out that they (the passengers, crew and plane) were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The untimely termination of flight MA17 is a powerful emotive issue and conscious of that, the Australian news media, not to mention, almost every form of social media, had been alive with the latest developments of what is, and isn’t happening in the Ukraine and now Holland that has become the immediate destination of bodies recovered from the plane’s wreckage and the wide crash area.

The Abbott-led coalition has soaked up this tragic event, actively feeding the media with every detail of its commitment to resolving the dilemma as that has fed the public “mania” for the latest news about what is happening with regard the downing of flight MA17.

The government understands and knows quite well that the public mind will always switch onto something that is immediate, can be resolved quite quickly and easily (it hopes) and brings with it asking nothing in the way of a personal demand, other than a little sympathy or empathy.

Climate change is hugely different.

Locked into our procrastination and denial we are quickly leaving the moment in which we could something about resolving climate change and now were standing on the brink of a time in which we will seriously need to consider adaptation rather mitigation.

We are quickly passing the time when mitigation would have been possible and now we have entered an era when we will have consider how we adapt to climate change and within that what are the ethics of that adaptation.

Just a section of the remains of
 flight MA17 in a Ukrainian field.

The downing of flight MA17 was in the eyes of most bereft of ethics, but ethics are value and content laden and if you were to talk with those who pulled the trigger, or pushed the button, you would find they were, in their view, quite within their ethical rights to do what they did.

The market-driven society that created climate change, was, despite the protestations of many who successfully exploited and successfully profited from it, devoid of ethics and so to emerge from this never-seen-before era as unscathed as possible, we need to reignite our interest in and concern for ethics.

Climate change and its consequences is going to have a far greater impact on far greater number of people than the untimely demise of flight MA17 and so in whatever way we can, we need to have our responsible men (that’s men and women) again thinking about, deciding and acting on changing our lives with the aim of slowing the damage to or climate and there reducing, wherever and however possible our need to adapt to what is evolving.