ADJOURNMENT

Senator WHITTEN (Western Australia) (20:57): Non-government enterprises are strongly influencing all levels of Australian government, and they are doing so at arm's length from the checks and balances that tend to keep government accountable. Together, these organisations influence government at a local, state and federal level. The Shire of Augusta Margaret River is an example of how local governments are behaving across Australia.

Local communities are being ambushed and blindsided by their own local shires. The Shire of Augusta Margaret River uses a network of external organisations to support the adoption of its policies. These organisations pretend to be real community groups, but, in reality, they act as extensions of the shire.

The memberships of these groups commonly include public officers and councillors from the shire itself, and the organisations receive the lion's share of the shire funding. Well over $1 million in ratepayers' money has gone to the shire's favoured organisations in the last few years, while community clubs and iconic infrastructure like the Turner Street Jetty miss out.

There is no better example of this than the Shire of Augusta Margaret River, through its involvement with a community group known as Augusta Margaret River Clean Community Energy, or AMRCCE for short. Ten years ago, the same public officers who embedded a wind farm into the shire's corporate plan of 2016 then outsourced the project directly to their own private not-for-profit incorporation only months later.

This is the AMRCCE, and it's a registered charity. From 2017 to 2024, AMRCCE led the wind farm proposal for Margaret River. The project is known today as the proposed Scott River wind farm, and its planned location is in the Margaret River's southern wetlands, near the Scott and Blackwood rivers.

During the eight years from 2017 to 2024, 22 members of AMRCCE were also active public officers at the shire. They controlled the shire's governance structures across the shire council, advisory committees and reference groups, which included shire staff and members of the shire's executive. AMRCCE's complete control of the shire peaked in 2019, when these 22 individuals held over 35 roles at the shire.

Given AMRCCE's main objective was their wind farm, this then quickly became the shire's main objective too, and together the group of 22 behaved like a cartel. They exploited their roles in the public office to provide AMRCCE with public policy and public funding. They defrauded community consultation in several policies supporting AMRCCE.

They made deliberate efforts to exclude community participation through their use of closed-door meetings. They repeatedly restructured formal committees into unregulated reference groups, and they used every local government resource available to them to ensure their private wind farm and AMRCCE were supported. For seven years, spanning 2016 to 2022, at least 11 different publications by the shire and AMRCCE only ever disclosed aspirations for a small community-owned wind farm project consisting of just three turbines, each around 100 metres tall.

This spiel of a community spirited project was used by the shire to justify providing AMRCCE with public money and was also leaned on to fundraise within the broader community. Over $280,000 of donations was received by AMRCCE for its community wind farm, mostly from the shire itself. In February 2024, Western Australia's state-owned energy retailer, Synergy, not only announced that it had purchased the Scott River wind farm from AMRCCE but also increased the project's scale more than tenfold.

Synergy's Scott River wind farm would now include up to 30 turbines, each 250 metres tall. The stake of community ownership, used to justify community fundraising, vanished and AMRCCE's community funded development work was handed over to Synergy in exchange for $352,000. Given AMRCCE is a not-for-profit, we are still investigating where the money has gone.

The three-turbine project was always going to be a commercial-scale wind farm, and it appears the AMRCCE was just a front for Synergy. The same lawyers Synergy used to lodge caveats over host property titles in 2023 and 2024, Herbert Smith Freehills, had also provided AMRCCE free legal support over six years earlier. This support helped AMRCCE register as a charitable organisation and exempted AMRCCE's 22 members who held roles in public office at the shire.

The three-turbine project advertised by the shire and AMRCCE for seven years would have been small enough to fit on a single property title, but when AMRCCE handed the project over to Synergy, AMRCCE had already established multiple landowner agreements for Synergy. That is why the shire outsourced the wind farm to AMRCCE to begin with—so the AMRCCE could bypass the obligations a government body like the shire would have been held to.

The Margaret River community has been deceived. Take a moment to consider the local landowners that spent 2016 to 2024 investing in their livelihoods only to be blindsided by a high-impact, industrial-scale energy facility at their door. Synergy has recently lodged its proposal for the Scott River wind farm to the Western Australian EPA.

The submission included 22 documents—over 3,400 pages—and the community was offered only seven days to respond. Almost every one of these documents is deliberately deceitful and inaccurate. The project's bird and bat risk assessment study recorded over 23,000 birds and bats in and around the project.

This included over 100 different species—protected migratory birds, bandicoots, a range of threatened black cockatoo species, birds that forage in the open wetlands and nest in the hollows of the remnant forest—but Synergy claims the area is of little to no value to the sacred birds. The community and social values assessment is equally shocking. Almost half the key stakeholders that Synergy consulted with have an interest in the project going ahead.

To an outsider, these stakeholders would all present as a healthy snapshot of the community, but to anyone who has done their homework, these parties all share multiple layers of affiliation, and that is exactly why Synergy chose to consult them—to present a strategic facade of community support for the project. Synergy only owns 20 per cent of the Scott River wind farm.

The remaining 80 per cent is owned by foreign oil and gas companies through a joint venture named Bright Energy Investments. So WA's supposedly state owned wind farms are majority owned by INPEX from Japan and Enel from Italy. The state of Australian government and politics is influenced by local government associations in each state and territory.

It is important to understand that these are non-government organisations. In WA, it's the Western Australian Local Government Association, known as WALGA. For Queenslanders, it's LGAQ; for Victorians, it's the MAV; and in New South Wales it's LGNSW.

Together these associations control all substantial local government spend and procurement across the country. In Western Australia, almost half a billion dollars of local government spend already goes through WALGA's books each year. WALGA determine which of their suppliers get the contracts, while WALGA take their own cut—all without the transparency requirements of government.

At a national scale, we estimate around $4 billion annually of local government spend is already going through these association books. As Australia's energy transition continues, the amount of money these associations will make quickly becomes astronomical. These associations have existed within our shores since the birth of the UN, and because of their longstanding existence their favourite servants from local governments now populate the state and federal government.

They act as white-collar unions, and they don't care which party is in power. They associate with whomever will ensure their power over Australia is maintained. The renewables policy of today started over 20 years ago.

These associations were already injecting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals into our local governments. These UN frameworks underpinned the Cities for Climate Protection program of the early 2000s. This program effectively grew into the Cities Power Partnership of 2017.

Over 240 local governments around Australia signed up for this partnership and signed their energy purchasing authority over to these non-government local government associations. So they not only have their fingers in the policies; these associations stand in line to take a fistful of the profit from Australia's energy transition—a multitrillion-dollar fraud funded by the taxpayer over the next 30 years.

We're witnessing the privatisation of our energy supply through these non-government associations, and soon we will depend on the foreign owners of our energy projects. The same associations who pushed the public sector towards the energy transition also stand to make tens of billions of dollars from it. Birds of a corrupt feather work out how to make profit together.

Senate adjourned at 21:0 7