CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS
Mr LITTLEPROUD (Maranoa) (09:54): In the last sitting, I brought the chamber's attention to the abhorrent actions of Vestas, a Danish renewable energy company, that in my electorate of Maranoa put up a wind-monitoring tower outside Tara. This is a 300-foot tower with guy wires coming out of it. They built that at the end of 2024 and did not mark it.
They did not put in any lighting, did not paint it and had no consultation with any of the general aviators or agricultural aviators in that area, putting lives at risk—in fact, so much so that there were near misses. So much umbrage did they take to me bringing this to the attention of the parliament that they publicly made statements after that that they had fixed this 12 months ago, forgetting that there had been nearly two years when they did nothing, endangering the lives of people in western Queensland.
This is a company that is taking taxpayers' money to build renewable energy in my electorate and is showing scant regard for the safety of my people who are out there undertaking agricultural aviation. So you understand what a wind-monitoring tower is, it's a 300-foot tower no wider than 50 centimetres in diameter that has guy wires coming out of it. Unless it's lit, it will be a significant danger to agricultural aviation, particularly to those who fly helicopters to muster cattle and to those who fly fixed-wing aircraft that spray our crops.
If they're not aware of the tower or can't even see the tower, then there is the real risk of them running into it—killing people. Vestas gave three-fifths of bugger-all about the fact that they had endangered anyone's life for more than 18 months before they actually put a light on top of it—a light that previously was only run by a solar panel that ran out before daylight that meant that, when these aviators went up in the morning, they were flying without the guidance of this light.
It is an absolute offence. The fact that we would even allow this company to continue on and think that they could build wind turbines in the Tara district—I believe it shows now that they do not have the social licence to continue. We should strike Vestas from any ability to build anything in this country.
We should send them back to Denmark as quickly as we possibly can. So bad is this company and so little social licence do they have that they are now going to farmers nearby who have landing strips on their property, asking—nearly telling—them to move them so that they can put their towers next to their properties. These are the landing strips that fight the fires that would protect them.
That is the arrogance of a Danish company that we should tell to take a running jump, because they don't give a rat's about Australians lives.