Council & Politics
19 August, 2025
Farmer’s windfarm warning
ROKEWOOD woolgrower Russell Coad spoke out at a National Party community outreach event in Beaufort last week with an ominous warning for farmers in our region that have renewable energy projects going up in their communities.
Mr Coad was among 70 people who crammed into the Golden Age Hotel last Tuesday for a ‘Pollies in the Pub’ gathering, featuring Nationals leader David Littleproud and Nationals senator for Victoria, Bridget McKenzie.
The sprawling Golden Plains Windfarm at Rokewood is one of Australia’s biggest and has been in the news numerous times, most notably following the death of a worker crushed by a turbine blade last year, which occurred after Worksafe had already dished out 22 compliance notices to the operators.
Mr Coad’s farm has been in the family for over 70 years but since their neighbours came to town, they’ve been powerless to curb the detrimental impact of having such a massive project beside them.
“I’ve got a lived experience that I want to share with everyone here today,” said Mr Coad.
“We live next to the Rokewood windfarm, we’ve got a turbine 100 metres from the edge of our property that has been shedding pieces off the turbine, onto our property, and another roughly 300 metres away.
“We’ve had these pieces fly 700 to 800 metres into our farm, we’ve had exclusion zones put onto our property because of the pieces coming off the windfarm.
Mr Coad expressed that apart from the obvious safety hazard of serrated-edge pieces of turbine blade flying across the paddocks, he’s also concerned about chemical contamination from the windfarm.
“I’m really concerned about PFAS coming off these bloody things and how it’s going to compromise my livestock enterprise going forward,” he said.
“We’ve lost out free-to-air television, our mobile telephone service has been totally disrupted by the bloody thing, we’re not very happy about it.”
We’ve got the 500kVA transmission lines that traverse our property, there’s five kilometres of it, it’s been there since the 1980s.
“I understand we’re gonna get another one beside it that’s 1000kVA, the pylons will be 100 metres for that, so here we are facing another battle where we fought so hard in the ‘80s to get some sort of compensation or recompence out, which was bugger all, the disruption to the farm at the time was horrendous, I could imagine now if-and-when it goes ahead, it’d be even worse.”
Mr Littleproud didn’t hold back with his reaction to Mr Coad’s story, expressing some strong views about state and federal Labor policies.
“This is symptomatic of a reckless race without the proper planning,” said Mr Littleproud.
“And you’ve even got now, the government’s own renewables czar Tony Mahar, calling out the Victorian government for the lack of consultation and process that you’ve got here in Victoria.”
Mr Littleproud said the state government lets all these projects go through no matter what the impact might be because “The federal government has basically said, we’re going an all-renewables approach” and had some scathing remarks about the Albanese government’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy of Australia.
“Chris Bowen tells us it’s (wind) the cheapest form of energy, yet only last week he increased this thing called the Capacity Investment Scheme, what that does is it underwrites the price that these renewable companies get for the price of energy they generate,” said Mr Littleproud.
“If it’s the cheapest and most efficient then I wouldn’t have thought the Australian taxpayer would have to subsidise that to any extent whatsoever.
“There is also this toll that we’re going to see on food security of our country, when already on your vendor declarations, you are having to declare whether you have renewable projects in or near your property and any impacts they have.
“Where that lands in terms of the science, is still unknown and you’re being expected to pay the price of that, along with the transmission lines coming through that impedes your ability to produce food and fibre in this country, this is where they’ve lost their social license.”