Tuesday, 29 October 2024

Electricity infrastructure

Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (22:34): (1220) My adjournment debate is for the Minister for Energy and Resources and concerns the additional landholder payments which landowners will receive when they are forced to accept transmission line infrastructure on their properties. This figure – $8000 paid for 25 years – has rightly been criticised. For the landowners, many say that no amount of money is enough to compensate for the damage which will be done to their lives and businesses, some on properties which their families have farmed for generations. Neighbours, who may suffer every bit as badly from the visual blight, will not be eligible for these payments. But the action I seek from the minister is comment on a potential error in the recent National Electricity (Victoria) Amendment (VicGrid) Act 2024. According to the Weekly Times, this legislation, passed in May:

… failed to index all payments from the day the scheme was announced.

While it does index-link the $8000 annual compensation per kilometre from the time that the payments begin, the $8000 figure will not rise at all until the first payment is made. Even at current very low rates of inflation, if the first payment is made in five years time, the real value of compensation will reduce to $175,000 per kilometre over the 25-year period. So I ask the minister to review this situation, to confirm if this understanding is correct and to implement a remedy if so.

While I am on this subject, there is an important contrast to draw. As I noted in Parliament two weeks ago, the Labor government will extract in this financial year $256 million from Victorian energy bill payers purely through the land tax bill payable on transmission line easements. That is an incredible sum for one company; it is 5 per cent of the entire state land tax bill. And it contrasts with the compensation I have just discussed – that is, $8000 per full kilometre per year, falling to $5900 if compensation is started in 10 years time. The easement land tax will be $177,000 per kilometre per year, and we can be sure that that will not just be inflation linked but likely hiked up by future treasurers. That is $8000 or less in compensation versus $177,000 annually in land tax alone, and unlike the compensation, the tax is indefinite, not a 25-year payment. It starts to look like a serious incentive for the government to approve new easements: AusNet gets an expanded regulated asset base and therefore greater income, the Victorian government gets increased taxes. Is this why Labor ministers are trying so hard to push through unsuitable projects like VNI West and the Western Renewables Link?