STATEMENTS BY SENATORS
Senator CADELL (New South Wales—Nationals Whip in the Senate) (13:57): There's a tower being built in New South Wales, and the comments around it are quite amazing. They are: 'This is ruining our lifestyle,' 'This is ruining our lookout,' 'We weren't consulted properly,' and 'The government's doing something we don't support.' There's outrage everywhere. The teal state member and teal federal member are outraged by this.
They're outraged by a single tower in Paddington—one tower. Let me tell you what we're dealing with in the regions. In the regions, we are dealing with, to get 57 gigawatts of renewable energy, 14,250 wind towers at four megawatts.
If we are dealing with 28,000 kilometres of transmission lines for Rewiring the Nation, between 70,000 and 90,000 transmission towers will be forced on people's properties by compulsory acquisition. That is what we're dealing with in the country. The same people that are complaining about one tower in Sydney are out there saying, 'This is a disgrace.' This is one tower in Sydney, but we are dealing with almost 100,000 towers in the bush.
I was really pleased to have the young Nats representative from the Hunter branch go up to Gundy Pub with Councillor Allison McPhee on the weekend and go around Allison's family farm. They got in the back of a ute after my son Lachlan Cadell managed to get a flat tyre in my car going up there. Well done, Lach, great job!
Thank you to Toby Barry for helping him out, as well as to Abby Usher, John Sharp, Trevor Roth and Jack Izzard. They had a look around the property. They saw the parts of the property that will be isolated.
They saw the roads that will be blocked off. They saw the site of the work camps that will be right next to houses in the bush. So, before we go round and say, 'Let's not have one tower, because it'll spoil the aesthetic of Paddington or wherever,' think about the 100,000 towers that will be built in the bush, where nothing exists like it, ruining way more for way longer.
It needs to be stopped.