I would like to very much thank the Regional Australia Institute for hosting this Summit – what a vision, what an institution, the Regional Australia Institute, a thinktank for us in rural and regional Australia I’d very much like to thank their Chair Christian Zahra AM, the RAI Board Directors, and your marvellous CEO Liz Ritchie.

And of course I want to acknowledge the each and every one of you leaders from across regional Australia in the room.

I was glad to see this year’s summit theme is A New Frontier – as it reflects the moment I believe we are at in regional Australia.

A feeling of possibility, of opportunity, the need for bold vision and for a strength of conviction to see a vision through.

But with any frontier there also comes uncertainty, there comes challenge, the need to make sure that each next step we take is the best one. That we plot a path, that we create a map. That we have a vision of where it is we actually want to go.

For me right now, at the heart of this moment, on the precipice of this new frontier, is indeed the transition to renewable energy and what that means and could mean for regional, rural and remote Australia.

There is a real feeling in my electorate right now that a truly significant change is happening – a truly significant change in the energy space. New grid scale solar, wind or battery storage projects are being proposed every week.

And for the many people I meet when I’m walking the streets of rural townships of Indi, the size and speed of this has come as a surprise. It’s as if a sleeping giant suddenly has awoken.

Before I go any further, I really want to state my absolute support of the country’s shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy, of our goals of net zero emissions by 2050 and for 82 per cent of Australia’s energy to be powered by renewables by 2030.

The two major parties have agreed that we must be net zero by 2050. That particular argument is settled.

These goals are absolutely vital if we have any hope of avoiding the worst effects of climate change. And as rural Australians, we know better than anyone the devastating impacts on our landscapes and livelihoods because of climate change.

SO while these net zero emissions goals are without a doubt a huge national challenge, they are also a massive opportunity. A new frontier to achieve a thriving regional Australia. That’s what we all want.

Not a regional Australia that only aspires to “get by” or a regional Australian that just wants to keep up with the major cities, that’s not for us – but regions that aspire to thrive in our own right. Regions that are a powerhouse of people, production, possibility, sustainability.

Now as a country, we have been in moments like this before.

I want you to cast your minds back and for many in the room I can see many young people this is an exercise in history. But think back to 1949, when construction of the Snowy Hydro Scheme first started. It’s now described as ‘one of the civil engineering wonders of the modern world’. With eight power stations, including two underground, tunnels, transmission lines, dams. Huge innovation. Huge transformation.

Whole towns were flooded and moved! One I cycle past in my electorate. This was no small feat. Can you imagine us now flooding a small town or even a large one.

Snowy Hydro holds a special place in our national history, our identity, our story. We are proud of the 100,000 people who worked on it, we’re proud of how their immigrant stories have contributed to our own stories, we’re proud of what a project like that says about us as a nation.

So I want us to think about the transition to renewable energy in a similar way.

What will this transition say about us as a nation? What will it say about regional Australia?

In answering that question, we must fully appreciate the size of the challenge and therefore the size of the opportunity before us.

The Snowy Hydro scheme, which had a lasting impact on our history, on our landscape, and our energy grid, has a total generating capacity of 4.1 gigawatts.

Last year alone, more than 5.9 Gigawatts of renewable energy was added to the grid, and the year before that it was 5 Gigawatts. We added more than two Snowy Hydros’ worth of energy in two years.

Last year renewables provided 39.4 per cent of Australia’s total energy generation – so we clearly, still have a long way to go for that 82 per cent target.

We know the scale of energy that will be produced is so much more than the Snowy Hydro scheme. So in my mind, this moment, this opportunity and this vision, must also be multiplied – for us in regional Australia and indeed in our whole nation.

But right now in Australia, we don’t feel like we are being set up to benefit or thrive at all.

I hear and share the legitimate concerns of regional communities – including in my electorate of Indi – about how renewable energy will impact them – concerns about fire risks, insurance premiums, concerns about the local environment. I hear my constituents ask that with these worries and this massive change – where is the long term benefit for regional communities?

There is a lot of work we need to do to answer these questions.

But there are some people in regional Australia who started asking, and answering, these questions years ago.

They’re models of leadership, innovation and vision that we can and must look to in forging the path ahead for the ‘new frontier’ for regional Australia.

One such example, is the Kiewa Hydro scheme in my electorate of Indi. I know I have spoken about Snowy, but let me be parochial here, the Kiewa scheme was built around the same time, and is our second largest hydro scheme.

The township of Mt Beauty was constructed by the State Electricity Commission of Victoria to house workers for the Kiewa Hydroelectric Scheme. To this day you can still see the impacts of the hydro right across town – people are still living in those houses, they built decent houses when they brought the workforce in, it’s still a major employer, and the current owner AGL is a significant contributor to the local economy and the local community. They do things like sponsor the annual ski event – the Kangaroo Hoppet – up at Falls Creek Ski Resort, they have installed solar panels and batteries on the Neighbourhood Community Centre, they have a significant community benefit fund that does, amongst other things, maintain the local swimming pool. How many people from the regions out here are trying to desperately hold onto their local pools?

The Hydro is a part of the town’s identity and it is part of the pride – because it contributes to the town, because people benefit from it, it is of the town, not separate from it, or foisted upon it.

Because of the hydro, the whole Mt Beauty town was built and stands to this day as a thriving rural town.

The Hay Shire Council have demonstrated how local government can also be on the front foot of renewable energy.

When they found out they were to be in a renewable energy zone, declared by the NSW Government, in 2022, and I guessing there is someone from Hay right here, big shout out good on you Hay, they held a meeting with well-known, local leaders, from different backgrounds, to figure out a plan to not just respond, but to benefit from it. They held community meetings, chaired by RE-Alliance, an organisation that works with regional communities on managing the transition. From that process, the council produced a set of principles to guide negotiations with renewable companies, and a ten-year strategy for the region. It included a strong ask for cheaper power, and proposed ‘generational change’ projects in education, health, aged care. When Hay Council invited developers to back the strategy, they agreed. A whole renewable energy park – with solar and wind – has just been approved without one objection lodged.

Now other councils are undertaking a similar process – Wellington Shire Council in southern Victoria, (anyone from Wellington? ok next year,) have undertaken a renewable energy impact and readiness study, the which identifies housing, roads, and jobs as key community opportunities. The Mid-Western Regional Council in NSW have also commissioned a report on managing the impacts of renewable energy projects, to be used as a starting point for informing future projects.

It’s not just power companies or local governments that have a role to play.

Community energy groups exist all around Australia, often formed by a small number of individuals who help businesses, households and community buildings decarbonise through the installation of solar panels, batteries and home efficiency measures.

In the midst of COVID-19 lockdowns, I brought these community energy groups from across right across rural Australia together in online forums to talk about the work they do, why they do it, and what support they need to keep doing it.

These 2020 online forums informed the Local Power Plan – a blueprint to bring new jobs, new opportunities and an infinite supply of cheap, clean, local power in regional Australia. The Plan demonstrated that in the regions, everyday people are hungry for practical ideas about how to seize the momentous opportunity before us in achieving net zero and utilising renewable energy, building a generation of shared prosperity.

These community energy groups show that when communities decide that they want a battery, or solar panels, when they see their power bills go down and understand why, and when they feel like they are playing a role in emissions-reduction, renewable energy is not only accepted, its embraced.

Community energy has led to partnerships between big companies and small communities.

Corryong in the Upper Murray of my electorate is a promising example of community energy success. After the terrifying bushfires in 2020, when Corryong was without power for up to three weeks impacting critical services like health, partnerships were formed between the local council, an energy retailer, the Victorian and Federal Government, and more, to develop a simple microgrid using solar and batteries. This microgrid will make that town ‘islandable’ when the next bushfire comes along because there surely will be. It will provide better energy certainty to the community especially in times of catastrophe. This is absolutely life-changing and life-saving. This shouldn’t be a unicorn, we should be doing this all over our vulnerable towns.

These are just a couple of examples of reversing the standard practice of developers approaching landholders and engaging with the community mid-way through a planning process.

Instead of landholders getting a letter in the mail that a planning application is potentially months from being submitted, these communities members are coming together, with other community members, to tell developers what they want.

They are on the front foot of renewable energy development, they have some autonomy and control over what they want to see and how they want to benefit. They know their community they understand what the legacy project should be.

I want to see this be the standard for renewable energy development, not the exception.

Now to achieve that, it’s time for Governments – both federal and state – to come to the table and support regional communities, to support community energy groups, farmers, local councils and all the other key regional stakeholders and leaders.

The Government have a choice – to back in these vital players, or keep pushing them to the sidelines.

So during this term of Parliament, I have tried to work with the Government to help them understand that regional community benefit is a necessary part of the renewable energy transformation puzzle.

With Senator David Pocock, I went to the Minister for Climate and Energy, Minister Chris Bowen and asked him to commission an independent report on community engagement for renewable energy projects. I didn’t know how I’d go. He said yes. This resulted in a report by the former Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner Andrew Dyer, who definitively found that communities are dissatisfied with the way project developers undertake engagement, and that the transition cannot succeed without the participation of these very same communities.

Professor Dyer made a series of recommendations about how to regain community trust, including that the Federal Government set up a developer rating scheme, undertake a communications program, and proactively work with community groups to identify opportunities for the broader community’s benefit.

The report now sits in a prime position on the Department of Climate Change and Environment’s website, sitting there on the front page, a report they didn’t know they needed but it’s there and I’m sure you have all heard Minister Bowen refer to it frequently.

I called for Professor Dyer’s recommendations to be included in the federal budget and put on the agenda at the Energy and Climate Change Ministerial Council – the National Cabinet for state, territory and federal ministers. Both of these asks have been achieved, with around $20.7 million now committed to improve engagement with communities impacted by renewable energy projects, movement on national developer standards and a package to realise community benefits.

However, I think the Government must do more to respond to the report’s recommendations, and in particular to provide tangible support to regional communities that have never experienced energy generation before.

It’s because of that that I attempted to amend the Government’s Net Zero Economy Authority Bill – what the Government describes as ‘historic’ legislation to ‘ensure Australian regions realise and share the benefits of the net zero economy’. I have got no argument with that, none of us do.

But when introduced, the Bill referred only to communities transitioning away from coal- and gas-fired power stations.

Now to be clear, I support that intention, I support those communities whole-heartedly. We must replace jobs in these communities as they transition out of fossil fuel generated electricity to a renewable economy.

When the Bill was before the House of Representatives however, I argued that we must, in parallel, consider the communities who have never been associated with electricity generation and are now being asked to host wind, solar, hydro, batteries and transmission lines to power our future energy systems.

My amendments were there to ensure we have a bottom-up, not top-down, approach when it comes to figuring out what communities want from this new economy.

The Government did not support my amendments in the House of Representatives – the Bill is currently before the Senate so there is still a chance, I hope the Senators in the room will back that those endeavours.

In the meantime, we still don’t have a system, supported by government, for regional communities, like mine, or like yours to work out what they want and need from the regional energy transition.

As we face this new frontier, I am concerned that not only are some political leaders failing to ask how regional communities can truly benefit, or grasp the scale of the challenge, but that some are purposefully turning away from these difficult questions and actively working against the conversation we need to have as a nation.

And make no mistake – there are difficult questions and there are difficult discussions to be had.

We must confront the questions of how we balance the demands for our agricultural land – our invaluable food and fibre production the opportunity to diversify that income with renewables as well. We must address the real concerns people have around fire, around the loss of amenity and the change of the landscapes they love. We have to.

We must be upfront with people and speak plainly about the changes, the tradeoffs that will be needed.

I can understand why people in this room would hear all this talk about challenge and uncertainty and might be attracted to the prospect of nuclear power.

The idea that nuclear power stations can replace coal-fired power stations and produce clean, cheap power with no impact on regional communities appears to be neat and simple.  But of course nothing is neat and simple in this space. We can’t just plug and play. I wish we could be we can’t.

Under the plan announced by the Coalition, the seven nuclear reactors would eventually produce six gigawatts of energy – only replacing a fraction of the current 21 gigawatts of coal-fired energy in the grid.[1]

Those seven reactors – at a cost of billions and with a timeline of more than a decade at best – would provide just slightly more energy than we added to the grid through renewables in the last year alone. That’s just a fact.

It won’t lower power bills and it certainly won’t sidestep the challenges that come with the renewable rollout. We have to face this.

In the decades to come, when I am long gone, I want Australians to speak about this moment as a second chapter to Snowy Hydro in our nation’s history (and I want to guarantee that we shouldn’t call it Snowy 2.0, I don’t want that). I want us to reflect on this frontier as one of pride and achievement.

I want future generations to be able to point to safe roads, available healthcare and housing, affordable childcare, a skilled workforce and say we achieved this, in large part, because of the way we shaped the renewable energy transition in our patch.

As you have heard I have big asks of government to support regional communities, that’s my job, I am in there batting for us, I want governments to realise this vision, to create a system where community benefit is at the start, middle and end of every conversation about the renewable energy transition. But as I have laid out through the examples of success that already exist, the power here doesn’t just lie with governments. You know that. This room is full of the leaders from right across regional Australia. You have a role to play here.

I want you to leave this Summit and ask yourself the following questions so I’ve got homework for you:

How could the renewable energy transition help my community to thrive and to benefit?

What are the legacy projects that my community will point to from the renewables boom?

Who should be at the table in my community to plan our local strategy for long term legacies?

How will I empower my community to take this opportunity, to have difficult but respectful conversations, ones that don’t separate us, ones that bring us together?

How will I make sure my children and grandchildren look back on this moment with pride?

So I say tonight, let’s work together. Work with your members of Parliament too, work with each other. In regional Australia, the challenge is ours but the rewards are ours too. Let’s write our own ticket.