Throughout my career in public health I have upset powerful interest groups and impassioned activists for several health-related causes. Since the late 1970s, when I worked successfully with others to have actor Paul Hogan removed from Winfield cigarette advertising because of his appeal to children,1 I have often been attacked by those who stood to lose by having the full glare of media attention being trained on their activities, nonsense or lies. Sunlight is a powerful antiseptic and, like cockroaches that can carry disease, many exponents of mendacity and nonsense have a strong dislike for the glare of sunlight on their activities and react badly to it.

Over the years I’ve published research papers and books that have challenged the position of interest groups in several areas. These include the anti-vaccination movement, the gun lobby, those opposed to mandatory fences around domestic swimming pools, the tobacco and e-cigarette industries and their supporters, those arguing that mobile phone towers and wi-fi cause cancer, and, most recently, opponents of windfarms who invoke health concerns in their arguments.

In this chapter, I’ll describe some of the attacks that have been made on me by opponents of windfarms: by activists, their political barrackers, and by various journalists employed by the Australian. As will be seen, those opposed to windfarms are determined, aggressive and sometimes unprincipled. The attacks I received can be seen in the context of the global movement to discredit concern about anthropogenic global warming and renewable energy.

My first sense that I could expect vigorous pushback from the anti-windfarm camp if its claims were ever challenged came within hours of publishing my first contribution on the issue. In February 2010, I had begun following various stories about windfarms allegedly causing health problems and decided to write a piece for the blog Croakey.2

Shortly afterwards, the comments page began brimming with responses, with 53 landing in the next three days. Many of these were from a small number of people who quickly became heated and hectoring.

The volume and intensity of the responses sent me a very strong message that this was an issue heavily pregnant with emotional intensity and pseudoscience, and was likely to become a fascinating case study of how networks can be used to promote highly dubious claims. It was an issue right up my street.

My next encounter with apoplectic windfarm opponents came at a meeting I had been invited to attend in June 2011 at the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) in Canberra. In 2010 I had been invited by the NHMRC to review a draft of its forthcoming rapid review of the evidence.3 I wrote a few pages about the importance of any review needing to consider psychogenic factors in understanding why small numbers of people complained about some windfarms while most were indifferent. At the meeting, I joined a panel in the morning and gave a brief presentation to the meeting, summarising these considerations.

Those attending the meeting included windfarm opponents, government public and environmental health experts, and wind energy company employees. Several presentations were made, including two via video by the English acoustic scientist Geoff Leventhall (who had also reviewed the NHMRC report)4 and Mariana Alves-Pereira,5 a Portuguese researcher who identifies wind turbines as one cause of the unrecognised disease of ‘vibroacoustic disease’ (see Chapter 2).

In the afternoon we were allocated to different tables and asked to discuss future research priorities, in the unlikely chance that any consensus might emerge from such wildly different interest groups. At my table there was a wind industry representative, a state government scientist, and a Waubra farmer, Donald Thomas, who opposed the local windfarm and claimed that he and his mother were badly affected by the local wind turbines. Also at my table was Peter Mitchell, the founder and then chair of the Waubra Foundation and a long-time windfarm opponent (see Chapter 6).

Thomas told me across the table that the location of his property in the Waubra district made it unsuitable to host turbines. He made the same comments when he was interviewed for an anti-windfarm film: ‘We live in the valley where we were never going to get the turbines.’6 I saw Mitchell stiffen when he heard the comment, perhaps concerned that others at the table might wonder if envy and resentment may have conditioned Thomas’ negative reaction to the turbines.

Discussion was fairly civil until Mitchell, sotto voce, leaned forward and told me that I was a disgrace and that someone who had been as influential as I had been in the field of tobacco control should get myself informed about the real health problems arising from windfarms and join in opposition to them.

Mitchell, a company director with extensive oil, gas, and other mining interests, seemed to me to have the patrician air of a wealthy man used to getting his way with perceived underlings. If he harboured the slightest expectation that his theatrical, clenched-teeth advice would cower me into joining his cause, he was going about it in a decidedly strange way.

Ever since those early days, my participation in public discussion about windfarms has drawn the ire of those opposed to them. The attacks have concentrated on three main themes. First, as a social scientist, it was surely self-evident that I was totally unqualified to make any informed comment about any matter to do with windfarms. Second, my growing scepticism about the alleged health risks of wind turbines could only be explained because I must be a paid agent of the wind industry and, worse, had not declared this. I must therefore also be a deceitful liar whose every word should be discounted. Third, I am a coward because I have allegedly continually refused to meet with windfarm complainants, because such meetings would clearly show me that I am utterly wrong about windfarms not being a direct cause of health problems in those exposed.

I’ll now look at each of these accusations and describe the various strategies windfarm opponents have used to undermine my and others’ work.

I am by no means the only person who has been vilified by these opponents. We are aware of others who have spoken out about this issue who have been subjected to racist name-calling, or whose employers have been petitioned with threats of reputational risk. Employees of several wind energy companies have told us about vandalism to their cars and months of personal abuse. The then Victorian energy minister, Peter Batchelor, even suffered physical assault when his leg was jammed in a car door as he tried to exit a community forum in Colac in August 2009.7

Unqualified to contribute

On many occasions during my career, those who dislike an argument I am making have sought to discredit it by arguing that as a social scientist, despite being a professor with nearly 40 years of postgraduate teaching and research in the School of Public Health within the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Sydney, I am unqualified to be advancing the arguments I am making. The problem, apparently, is that only a narrow range of expertise can ever be relevant to advancing evidence in health matters. It doesn’t matter what the evidence in question is. What is critical is what undergraduate degree was obtained by the person making the argument at the very start of their career: in my case, 45 years ago. The 2015 Senate majority report on wind turbines set out which qualifications it considered relevant:

Apart from the awkward observation that none of the members of the Senate committee making this call had any of these qualifications either (but nonetheless felt themselves suitably qualified to make judgments on the evidence they received), most of the witnesses they cited in their final report also had none of these qualifications. In addition, the list of 78 concerned ‘professionals’ around the world whose names can be found on anti-windfarm websites contains 11 people who also don’t make the cut, including two sociologists (see Table 7.1).9 For windfarm opponents, sociologists are apparently legitimate experts if they express concerns about wind turbines and health, but are to be dismissed if they do not.

In particular, the chair of the Senate committee, John Madigan (who was a blacksmith before entering parliament) appeared to be quite obsessed with my qualifications. On 15 April 2014 I gave notice of potential legal action for defamation against him, following public remarks he made about me on Alan Jones’ radio program on 27 March 2014. My notice referred to a statement made by Madigan, following a remark by Jones:

My lawyers wrote to Senator Madigan about what he had said:

Amazingly, Madigan replied denying that his words referred to me, but said that they were in any case true and justified. He also stated in his reply that I was a ‘paid advocate of the wind industry’ and that if this matter proceeded to court he would seek to expose this in court and under parliamentary privilege. My lawyers advised Madigan that I had never sought or had any paid advocacy role with any wind company nor any agent acting for them. They added:

Radio station 2GB appeared to take a different view of the comments and quickly published the statement below on their website, shortly after receiving a similar letter from my lawyers:

Following receipt of my lawyer’s letter, Madigan made a speech on 17 June 2014 to an apparently near-empty Senate chamber. Over 19 minutes, under parliamentary privilege, he made blustery accusations about my qualifications, my character, and my financial arrangements with the wind industry. The video, available online, is well worth watching.10 Having now been defamed under the protection of parliamentary privilege, I was entitled by the rules of the Senate to have a reply published in the parliamentary Hansard record setting out responses to each of his attempted slurs.11

​The Australian goes on the attack

On 20 February 2015 and again three days later, the Australian’s Gerard Henderson and Simon King spent a lot of ink explaining to readers that I had ‘as much authority to discuss health affairs as I [Henderson] do. Namely, zip.’12

Their readers needed to be told this because the previous week, ABC television’s Media Watch program had tipped a critical bucket over the Australian’s reportage of acoustic engineer Steven Cooper’s study (see Chapter 4), which involved just three households consisting together of six long-time complainants about the Cape Bridgewater windfarm.13

I was one of four people quoted by Media Watch, and this got Henderson very excited. He wrote to the program:

Simon King, a journalist for the Australian, went one better on 23 February with his discovery that I do ‘not have a PhD in Medicine’. This was news to me because I do have a PhD in medicine. I do not have a PhD in sociology. My official transcript from the University of Sydney shows that I graduated in 1986 with … wait for it … a ‘PhD in medicine’. The degree transcript states it no less than eight times, lest anyone might miss seeing it. I did my PhD, examining tobacco advertising, in the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine, in the Faculty of Medicine. A scan of the transcript can be found on the last page of my curriculum vitae.15

Madigan, King and Henderson appeared to know little to nothing about the nature of contemporary expertise and how nearly all complex problems in health and medicine today involve researchers from different disciplines working together. In the School of Public Health in the Faculty of Medicine where I worked, there are biostatisticians, historians, psychologists, ethicists, economists, epidemiologists, and social scientists. Only some – probably a minority – have undergraduate degrees in medicine. Of those who do, most have long not practised clinical medicine since developing careers in research. Henderson’s primitive understanding of expertise apparently begins and ends with the possession of an undergraduate degree. It is rare these days for research grant applications to be submitted by people all from the same discipline. Sydney University’s massive new investment in obesity and chronic disease research, the Charles Perkins Centre, epitomises the importance of contemporary trans-disciplinary research. Arguably the most renowned epidemiologist in the world, Oxford University’s Sir Richard Peto, has no medical undergraduate degree. His undergraduate degree was in natural sciences.

There are many fools other than those at Media Watch who have also fallen for my fake expertise about windfarms and health. They include the nincompoop editors of eight specialised international research journals (Noise and Health, International Journal of Acoustics and Vibration, Journal of Low Frequency Noise, Vibration and Active Control, Environmental Research, Environmental Pollution, Journal of Psychosomatic Research and Energy Policy) who asked me to review research submissions about windfarms and health for them in recent years; the editors and reviewers of the papers I published on windfarms and health listed at the end of the Introduction; the National Health and Medical Research Council, which appointed me as an expert reviewer of their 2010 rapid review of the evidence on windfarms; and the dazed incompetents running the Australian Acoustical Society, the Australasian College of Toxicology and Risk Assessment and the Clean Air Society of Australia and New Zealand, all of whom asked me to give plenary session talks to their scientific meetings of acousticians and environmental health specialists in recent years.

The duffers on the Order of Australia awards committee also seemed to believe that I contribute to health and medical research. My 2013 citation reads ‘for distinguished service to medical research as an academic and author’.

The first prize for monumental ignorance about research, however, must go to the late Alby Schultz MP. Schultz told the Australian House of Representatives on 30 May 2013 that I was ‘a person who is not lawfully permitted to conduct any form of medical research or study in relation to human health’.16 This claim was faithfully parroted by Senator John Madigan in the Senate in 201417 and dutifully included in an article by journalist Graham Lloyd in the Australian on 19 August 2015.18

Since learning nearly four years ago that my entire research career has apparently been unlawful, I wait anxiously each day for the knock on the door from law-enforcement officers. There must also be a very long line of employees in the research grant agencies that have awarded me competitive research grants over the last three decades who are now also nervously awaiting police interrogation for awarding me research money. These include the NHMRC, the US National Cancer Institute, the Cancer Council NSW, the Heart Foundation and the Cancer Institute of NSW.

Fiona Crichton, the co-author of this book, had a related experience, which she describes in the boxed text below.

A wind-industry stooge

Since I began writing and speaking about wind turbines and health in 2010, it has become almost standard for those who do not agree with me to say or insinuate that I am somehow being paid by the wind industry or parties acting for it. This is completely untrue and I have said this repeatedly to journalists and interviewers whenever the question has been asked. Those who continue to make this claim, particularly from the supposed protection of anonymity or parliamentary privilege, are either ignorant about my lack of competing interests or are knowingly lying.

Neither I, nor anyone acting for me, has ever sought or received any research funding, ‘unrestricted educational grants’, hospitality, shares or any other consideration from any wind-energy company or agent acting for them.

Madigan was clearly utterly convinced that I was deep in the wind-industry trough. When he replied to the letter from my lawyers claiming that he had defamed me on Alan Jones’ radio program in 2014, he wrote that should the matter proceed to court, he would:

Madigan could, at any time, have requested from my then employer, the University of Sydney, the details he was seeking about any funding being nefariously channelled through the university. It would have been only too happy to be fully transparent as it always is on research funding and donations. I have no knowledge that the university had any such grants or donations from wind companies. If they did, none of it ever came to me. So the reply from the university would have almost certainly been a one-sentence letter.

​Expert witness in legal case

In late 2012, I was approached by lawyers acting for the wind company Infigen. Infigen was planning a windfarm, Cherry Tree Hill, on top of a large hill near Seymour in Victoria. Windfarm opponents from outside the district had been in the area and spread anxiety among residents living several kilometres away from the planned site (as we described in Chapter 2). Infigen was taking the local council to the Victorian Civic and Administration Tribunal (VCAT) after the council opposed the development.

The Infigen lawyers asked me to provide an expert statement on the psychogenic aspects of windfarm complaints in preparation for the VCAT case. To prepare my statement, I attended a meeting in Melbourne with the law firm, visited the proposed windfarm site and spent two days writing a report during my Christmas break. I was paid $2399.90 for my time in preparing the report, including my travel costs. 

I expected that windfarm opponents would henceforth attempt to argue that this reimbursement of travel costs and payment for two days of my time meant that I was now forever tainted as being ‘paid’ by the wind industry.

However, expert witnesses have a general duty to courts, not to any party in proceedings. This was made clear by a chief justice of the Federal Court, who wrote:

I was well aware that windfarm opponents would try to frame my professional fees for providing expert testimony as a sign of competing interests, but accepted the commission because my research was specifically relevant to a matter of public interest and I was aware of the above guidelines on the duties of expert witnesses to courts.

In the highly unlikely event that an anti-windfarm group had invited me to provide expert advice to them on the same issue, my report would have made the same points. I claimed travel expenses and two days’ writing fees because I am not in the habit of making donations to large commercial enterprises such as energy companies.

Until my retirement from the university in early 2016, I had a tenured academic personal chair in public health at the University of Sydney, where I have worked continuously since 1986. Throughout all that time, my salary was paid for entirely by the university, where I have teaching, research and research scholar supervision responsibilities. My curriculum vitae has a section near the end which lists every research grant I have ever received. None of these grants benefit me personally: they were principally used to employ staff and for running the projects described.

Having been an editor of an international journal for 17 years, where I handled thousands of research manuscript submissions, and head of research in my school between 2007 and 2012, I have long been extremely aware of issues to do with competing interests and the importance of declaring them. I have a long history of researching and writing about corporate influences on science. My most recent paper on the importance of declarations of competing interests was a survey of all Australian universities’ practices in requiring staff to make and update declarations of competing interests.22

Against this background, the idea that I would secretly be accepting payments from the wind industry, and therefore publicly lying every time I said I was not in such a relationship, is ludicrous.

On 29 June 2015 I publicly offered Madigan the opportunity to inspect my banking details if he revealed the identity of the anonymous authors of the Stop These Things website.23 No reply was ever received.

​An ivory-tower academic who refuses to meet with windfarm victims

On many occasions I’ve read taunts that I have refused to meet windfarm complainants and that therefore I can have no understanding that they are genuinely suffering the direct impacts of wind turbines. In fact, I have never received any invitation to meet with such people, although I have quite often received hostile emails asking why I haven’t.

I am aware of at least one fellow wind turbine syndrome sceptic who corresponded with two prominent long-time complainants and expressed willingness to visit their properties and, in one case, to stay overnight. He was firmly rejected both times. I have no illusions that any overtures from me would meet the same fate.

Simon Holmes à Court is a Melbourne entrepreneur who has a property near Daylesford in Victoria. Being interested in renewable energy, he worked with others to set up Australia’s first community-owned windfarm, the Hepburn Community Wind Farm. He chaired the windfarm’s co-operative until 2012. The two-turbine farm is located at Leonards Hill near Daylesford and commenced generating power on 22 June 2011.

His role in helping to realise a community’s positive wind vision made Holmes à Court a very public figure in the small world of the anti-wind movement. He was one of the first people to have his face placed on a ‘hate wall’ on the Stop These Things website, showing Australians who have supported wind energy.

Holmes à Court approached two windfarm complainants multiple times, asking to visit their properties so that he might try first-hand to get some perspective on the noise or vibrations being experienced. He has supplied me with copies of the two email sagas that followed. These excerpts suggest that calls by windfarm opponents for sceptics to meet with complainants are little but posturing, and that barriers are firmly put down when such meetings are attempted.

In May 2013 Holmes à Court asked a prominent complainer, Mr J,  if he could visit when he was next in the area and was warmly welcomed with the response, ‘Simon you are more than welcome to visit.’

As Holmes à Court attempted to firm up the logistics of a visit, Mr J began to backtrack on his invitation. Holmes à Court wrote:

Mr J replied the same day:

Holmes à Court responded that he was going to be visiting a friend who lived in the area and that they’d see if he could experience the windfarm noise at such a distance themselves. Upon hearing that Holmes à Court had a friend in the area, Mr J softened his tone considerably and agreed to a meeting of the three.

However, when the third party was eventually unable to make it during the window of time when Holmes à Court would be in the area, Mr J cancelled the meeting. Simon wrote:

Mr J replied:

Undeterred, Holmes à Court was in the region again three months later and again asked Mr J if he might show him locations where the noise was loud. Mr J replied:

In a subsequent email, he wrote

If at first you don’t succeed …

Shortly after, Holmes à Court met with the outspoken anti-wind MP Craig Kelly (who would go on to chair the Coalition’s Environment and Energy Committee in 2016). Kelly further encouraged Holmes à Court to spend time with the windfarm complainants he was hearing from.

Heeding this advice, on 24 August 2013 Holmes à Court wrote to a prominent opponent of a Victorian windfarm, Mrs W. He told her that he was involved in the Hepburn Community Wind Farm. He explained he was ‘not formally a part of the wind industry, but in building the Hepburn Wind project I’ve become quite familiar with the sector and have met with people on “both sides of the debate”.’ He asked Mrs W whether she would meet with him and whether she might ‘even possibly allow me to stay overnight to experience a night among the turbines’.

Mrs W wrote back that night. Here are excerpts from her letter:

As she continued, the prospect seemed to dawn on Mrs W of something far larger than a media contingent and five national politicians including a cabinet minister. She suggested:

Holmes à Court replied:

Three days later Mrs W replied:

Holmes à Court replied:

Mrs W then slammed the door firmly shut, writing:

This exchange reveals either Mrs W’s profound naïvety (as if a busload of the nation’s most senior politicians and media would be able to take a week out of their schedules as she demanded – global summits on climate change like that held in 2015 in Paris saw politicians typically spend a couple of days there), or it suggests that she set such conditions knowing that they would never be met, thus allowing her to be able to claim that Holmes à Court refused to meet the conditions set.

Similar stories can be told by those who have reached out to vocal opponents of another Victorian windfarm. I have no doubt that were I to accept any such invitation that might be issued to me, there would have been complaints to my university that I was engaging in research without ethics committee approval (see below), harassing sick and vulnerable people, and so on. Yet if I don’t visit, the rhetoric that I am ‘refusing to visit those affected’ allows windfarm opponents to frame sceptics like me as ‘ivory-towered’ and indifferent to real people’s suffering. But there is a more fundamental reason why I have had no interest in visiting complainants. Any such meetings could do little to confirm or refute hypotheses about whether or not their claims have substance. Quite obviously, there are millions of people globally who have lived and worked for years near wind turbines and do not complain or suffer any health effects.

On 22 July 2015, following my written submission and oral evidence to the 2015 Senate committee on windfarms, Senator Madigan sent me 62 written questions on notice. He wanted answers within four working days.24 One question went directly to this issue. Here is part of the answer I provided.

I have no doubt that visiting the homes of complainants would allow me to confirm that such people were both distressed by turbines and convinced that they were being harmed by them. But having been ‘up close’ to turbines often in Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain and Portugal, and taken note of the many thousands of people living adjacent to those windfarms who could also hear them but do not complain, I would be confirmed in my view that psychogenic factors explain noise complaining and that this is a phenomenon that can be ‘spread’ through communities, as we detailed in Chapter 5.

​Tactics used by anti-wind interests

We have considered some of the common discrediting themes that windfarm opponents use in attacking their opponents. We turn now to some of the tactics they have used.

​Defamatory emails to politicians

Having worked in public health for nearly 40 years, I have often developed good working relationships with politicians and their staff who have sought advice. I often provide them with briefings and information and they generally reciprocate.

In July 2014, a serial agitator against windfarms, Jackie Rovensky, who is a very frequent commentator on posts on the Stop These Things website, sent an email to a large number of federal politicians, one of whom forwarded it to me minutes after having received it. The email showed the full list of politicians who had been sent the email. Typical of the many communications to politicians from anti-windfarm advocates I have seen, this one rambled on for many pages. But it contained the defamatory statement that I was ‘incapable of utilising ethical unbiased standards’.

At 11.55 am on the day I received it, I emailed its author:

At 12.41 pm Rovensky emailed all the recipients and apologised. I took no further action.

However, two months later, she seemed unable to help herself and was at it again. This time she had written to 13 senior officers of Australian public health and medical associations making false and defamatory allegations that I had conducted research without Human Ethics Committee approval when researching my paper examining Sarah Laurie’s public statement that ‘more than 40’ Australian families had abandoned their homes because of wind turbine noise.25 She had written, ‘It has subsequently emerged from inquiries made by Senator Madigan’s staff, that at the time Professor Chapman conducted his inquiries, he did not have in place prior ethics committee approvals from the Sydney University Ethics Committee.’ I look in more detail at this accusation below.

This time, I engaged specialist defamation lawyers to demand a retraction, which she duly issued. She also paid my legal expenses in full.

These incidents revealed both the intransigence of this person’s conviction that I was an unethical researcher, her lack of elementary diligence in fact checking, and her naïvety in imagining that she could spray around such malicious accusations without me being quickly alerted to it. Presumably, her decision to distribute this material rested on her faith that the information was reliable; she stated it had been obtained from Senator Madigan’s staff.

I wonder if those staff assisted her in paying her legal expenses?

​Complaints to my university

Several anti-windfarm activists took to writing lengthy, often verbally incontinent letters of complaint about me to various authorities at my university. Having worked at the University of Sydney for two extended periods totalling 32 years, having a high media profile, and having served as a staff representative on the university’s governing Senate for four years, I know many staff at all levels in the university.

Recipients of these complaints included the chancellor, the vice-chancellor, all members of the academic board and the Senate, the dean of the Faculty of Medicine and my departmental head. Rarely were these complaints ever copied to me by their authors, and none ever tried to make contact with me to discuss their complaints before firing them off. I would have been delighted if they had done so. They were instead clear efforts to try and have me disciplined from on high.

However, I got to read many of these complaints because those receiving them would often send them to me, as is normal practice anywhere. Several asked me to draft replies for them (also very normal) and various support staff to senior staff would pat me on the back good naturedly, saying that the work I was generating for them would surely guarantee them overtime pay.

The complaints I saw were profoundly ignorant about and, again, naïve to the nature of university research and enquiry. They assumed that anything an academic said must reflect the university’s ‘position’ on an issue. So what I might have written or said in the news media was tantamount to the university also having said it.

I repeatedly read that I had been invited to visit families who were being affected by wind turbines in their homes. As I have explained, I had never received such invitations.

​Allegations of unethical research

As described above, Jackie Rovensky alleged that my research into ‘abandoned’ homes had not been given clearance by my university’s human ethics committee. At least two parties made the same allegation directly to university authorities. The university provided me with a copy of its reply to one serial complainant, but was reluctant to reveal the identity of the other. Body language in response to queries made to various people at the university made it obvious that it was a complaint from an anti-windfarm federal politician. Whoever it was, it was someone very ignorant about research practices and human ethics oversight.

As I described in Chapter 3, my research involved using six sources to try and corroborate the statement that ‘over 40 homes’ had been abandoned. Three of these sources were public records (parliamentary submissions; the Stop These Things, and media reports). No human ethics committee approval is required to report on information obtained from such already public sources.

I also used three other sources:

• I invited three senators who had made public statements about ‘abandoned homes’ to provide me with any information they might have;
• I emailed known anti-windfarm activists and asked them for any such information;
• I asked colleagues and associates also interested in windfarms and health if they had any relevant information about home abandonment claims.

Moreover, I submitted to the university’s human ethics committee, which was obliged to respond to the complaint. In my submission to the ethics committee, I argued that my research for the paper in question was not ‘human research’ as described in the Australian Vice Chancellors’ Committee/Australian Research Council/National Health and Medical Research Council National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research 2007.26 Namely, it:

• did not involve any approaches to individuals claiming to be adversely affected by wind turbine noise; and it
• involved no risks to any person.

The National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research lists the types of research it applies to. It says:

I argued, and the human ethics research committee agreed, that my research for this paper did not involve any of these things and so did not require prior approval from the committee. The complaint about my ‘unethical’ research was formally rejected by the university.

​Threats of intimidation

On the morning of 15 June 2015, my attention was drawn to a publicly accessible post published late on the previous evening by Helen Dale on her personal Facebook wall. At the time, her Facebook page identified her as ‘Senior Advisor to Senator David Leyonhjelm, Liberal Democrat Senator for NSW at [the] Australian Parliament.’ Leyonhjelm was a member of the 2015 Senate committee on wind turbines, to which I had made a submission.27

Helen Dale is the latest name used by a woman born as Helen Darville, who for some time also used the pen name Helen Demidenko. As Demidenko, in 1995 she won the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award in highly controversial circumstances.

Her Facebook post read:

Dale would have known that I might be called as a witness to the Senate committee. On 16 June 2015 I wrote to Senator Madigan in his capacity as chair of the committee, stating that I believed Dale’s post was in contempt of the Senate. I wrote:

On 29 June 2015 I appeared before the Senate committee as a witness, to speak to my submission and answer questions. Leyonhjelm sat mute throughout my evidence and did not ask any questions.

On 3 August 2015 Senator Madigan wrote to me on behalf of the committee, confirming that threatening witnesses was in contempt of the Senate and that Dale has been asked to explain her Facebook post. He stated:

I had expected no more from this group. As I had explained in my letter to Madigan, I had made no submissions to any other Senate committee other than to the wind turbine committee. So Dale’s words on Facebook – ‘Getting minced by a Senate Committee is a lot less fun, I can assure you’ – could only have referred to the wind committee.

I therefore regarded their dismissal as a travesty of parliamentary process and appealed to the president of the Senate to refer the matter to the Parliamentary Privileges Committee. In the meantime, the wind turbines committee had been dissolved with the publication of its report, so apparently nothing more could be done. Dale stopped working in Leyonhjelm’s office during the 2016 election campaign.

​Defamation proceedings

I have twice received letters from lawyers claiming defamation in regard to windfarm matters.

As noted in Chapter 4, in 2015 I received a threat for defamation from lawyers acting for Steven Cooper, an acoustician who has long been championed by anti-windfarm activists. Cooper complained that my public comments about one of his reports on ABC TV’s Media Watch,29 and in the comments section of an article in The Conversation, were defamatory about his contracted research for Pacific Hydro, a windfarm operator that ran the Cape Bridgewater windfarm in Victoria. His lawyer set out a long laundry list of all the ways his client claimed to have been damaged by my comments. They sought $15,000 plus costs and an apology.

I wrote back denying most of the claims, and agreeing with some that concerned criticisms I had made about aspects of Cooper’s report. I explained that:

I never heard back from them.

When I gave evidence to the 2015 Senate enquiry at a hearing held at the New South Wales Parliament on 29 June 2015,30 Senator Nick Xenophon concluded his questions to me by asking:

On 13 July, some two weeks later, I received a letter, not from Senator Nick Xenophon, but from Nick Xenophon & Co. Solicitors. The letter alleged that by retweeting a tweet that falsely stated that Sarah Laurie was a ‘deregistered’ doctor, I had defamed her. She sought $50,000 in damages and a public apology (the text of which had been prepared), which I was to arrange to be published in a variety of places.

Similar letters of demand were received by the person who had made the original tweet (Ken McAlpine); by Ketan Joshi, who while watching the committee hearing online had tweeted about Xenophon’s question; and by the Sydney Morning Herald journalist Peter Hannam, who had been in the Senate committee room to report on the proceedings and simply retweeted Joshi’s tweet.

 As I had said under oath in the committee hearing, I regretted my retweet because I knew Laurie was unregistered, not deregistered. I genuinely did not recall clicking the retweet button, something I have done thousands of times since joining Twitter in 2009. I have always been fastidious in describing Laurie as an unregistered doctor. So when Xenophon produced the text of the retweet in the Senate committee, I was embarrassed and without hesitation said that I would apologise to Laurie.

I later checked all of my publications, including tweets, in which I had ever mentioned Laurie, which confirmed I had never referred to her as being ‘deregistered’ in the past.

On receiving the letter of demand I was immediately curious about how many people would have seen my retweet. This would have been relevant to the claims being made of damage to Laurie’s reputation. I located it in my Twitter archive and took a screenshot. The tweet had only received six ‘impressions’ and four ‘engagements’. Impressions count those who see a tweet, while ‘engagements’ count those who retweet (in this case, three) or ‘like’ (one) a tweet.

I searched for the four who had engaged with tweet. One was obviously me. The others were Ray Walker @funkygibbing (unknown to me and not someone who follows me on Twitter), and two anonymous parties who had set their security settings so as to keep their identities secret.

Ray Walker retweeted the McAlpine tweet on 29 June 2015, the day Senator Xenophon publicised the tweet in the Senate. That coincidence points to the strong likelihood that Ray Walker may have been watching the committee broadcast, searched for the original tweet and retweeted it. There was no evidence that anyone else had further retweeted (or had even seen) my retweet.

My lawyers may have conveyed that we had this evidence and soon afterwards, the demand for $50,000 in damages dropped to less than a tenth of that amount. I had no problem at all apologising, as I had been careless in retweeting the original tweet and the imputation that Laurie had been deregistered was both wrong and potentially harmful to her reputation, despite it being already subject to correction in the Hansard record. My lawyers recommended closing down the case by settling for the reduced amount and issuing the apology, which I was happy to do.

I was more than astonished that Xenophon had not declared, when asking his question about my retweet under parliamentary privilege, that his legal firm had a professional relationship with Laurie. The letter I received from his company indicated that they would be demanding that I also pay Laurie’s ‘legal costs to date’, thus benefitting his private legal practice. It also referred to evidence that I had given under parliamentary privilege.

Xenophon’s firm has also worked pro bono representing the Waubra Foundation in their appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal over their problems with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission over the revocation of the foundation’s charitable status.31

Laurie published my apology on the Waubra Foundation website, noting that ‘the wind industry and its supporters have stooped to new lows, including wrongly publicly describing the CEO as a “deregistered” doctor despite knowing full well that was untrue. This is grossly and deliberately defamatory.’ Anti-windfarm websites were cock-a-hoop at my apology and Graham Lloyd in the Australian dutifully wrote it up.32

Laurie was fully aware that I had never before ‘stooped’ to calling her deregistered (because I knew it was untrue). Indeed, on her own website in September 2014, she published a lengthy article by anti-windfarm activist Jackie Rovensky, who wrote about Laurie’s medical registration status:

I started writing this book in the months following the publication of the 2015 Senate report on wind turbines, which we have discussed many times throughout the book. In the nearly two years that have passed, other than the continued anonymous never-say-die flailings of Stop These Things, anti-windfarm activists in Australia have been extraordinarly muted and all but absent from news media. The Wind Farm Commissioner has not exactly been inundated with work. State governments of both political complexions have taken enlightened attitudes to windfarm developments. Three of the most virulent critics of windfarms (Madigan, Day and Back) are no longer in parliament. And globally, wind energy developments are moving like a brakeless train, making those agitating against them look like relics of a time that is fast disappearing, as nations embrace renewable energy.

In the final chapter of the book, we consider principles and best practices in efforts to reduce pockets of community anxiety about windfarms.