In this chapter, we will take a close look at some of the leading opponents of windfarms in Australtia. We will first consider the two main interest groups (the Waubra Foundation and the various whack-a-mole ‘branches’ of the Landscape Guardians) that have most often led the small chorus against windfarm development. We will also touch briefly on several other groups that have had a mainly local focus on particular windfarm projects, and on the anonymous, openly defamatory website Stop These Things. We will then profile some of the most prominent Australian individuals who do whatever they can to demonise windfarms, including Sarah Laurie, the indefatigable public voice of the Waubra Foundation.

How widespread is opposition to windfarms in Australia?

The organised anti-windfarm movement in Australia is very, very small. There is no de facto register of the individuals involved but browsing through the lists of public submissions to various government inquiries or calls for comments, anti-wind blogs, and media monitoring records, it is hard to avoid the same few names appearing repeatedly.

In our 2013 study of windfarm complaints across all (at that time) 51 Australian windfarms, we found records of only 129 individuals across Australia who had ever complained. Even if all of these individuals lived within five kilometres of a windfarm, this figure would equate to just one complaint for every 254 residents living in the vicinity of wind turbines. In fact 94 of the complainants (or 73 percent of them) lived near one of six particular windfarms targeted by anti-windfarm groups. There were no complaints from either Western Australia or Tasmania.1

The main outcome of the 2015 Australian Senate Committee on Wind Turbines report was the establishment of a National Wind Farm Commissioner charged with investigating complaints about windfarms. In March 2017, the commissioner, Andrew Dyer, released his much anticipated first report.2 In its first 14 months of operation until 31 December 2016, the commission received:

• 46 complaints relating to nine operating windfarms (there were 76 operational windfarms in Australian in 2015)
• 42 complaints relating to 19 proposed windfarms
• two complaints that did not specify a windfarm.

Of the 90 total complaints about operational or planned windfarms, 40 came from Victoria, and 23 each from South Australia and New South Wales. Just two complaints were received from Queensland about planned farms.

As of 31 December 2016, 67 of the 90 complaints had been classified as closed, with the remaining 23 matters still in process. Of the 67 closed complaints, 31 were closed because the complainant decided not to progress the complaint. Another 32 were closed after the complainant was sent relevant information. This left only four in need of any sort of ‘negotiated’ resolution. According to the report, two of these were settled after negotiations between the parties; the other two were classified as ‘other’. Some of the 23 complaints still in process may require similar negotiation, but the numbers remain small.

These desultory figures are frankly devastating to the case that was pushed by the Senate committee. We now have a complaint-investigating mechanism that will cost taxpayers undisclosed millions of dollars, to deal with a problem Madigan and his group swore was widespread, urgent and unacceptable. But the hordes of complainants who apparently needed such a mechanism have mysteriously now gone all shy.

Shooting themselves in the foot

The anti-windfarm movement’s jubilation over the establishment of an independent investigative commissioner was a classic example of the need to be careful in what you wish for.

What has happened has put egg all over Stop These Things’ anonymous visage. Simon Holmes à Court, who chaired the community-owned Hepburn Community Wind Project in Victoria, told us:

The senators and ex-senators who were so enthusiastic about getting the commission established may today be reflecting that they might have kicked a massive own goal. The commission has the authority to investigate complaints and require complainants to furnish corroborative information, such as medical records and utility bills (which would allow claims about abandoned houses to be checked). If complainants refuse to co-operate, the commission can decline to investigate the complaint.

These men must be embarrassed by the small number of complaints received so far. It will be extremely hard for anti-wind advocates to get any further parliamentary indulgence for their cause. The low numbers, however, should come as no surprise. A 2007 UK report based on 100 percent returns from all local government authorities found that of 133 windfarms in the United Kingdom, only 27 had ever received a noise complaint since the first farm commenced operation in 1991. The complaints that had been received came from just 81 households across the entire country.3

A 2012 CSIRO study of community attitudes to windfarms found there was ‘strong community support for the development of windfarms, including support from rural residents who do not seek media attention or political engagement to express their views.’4 Public opinion over the last decade has also showed consistently high levels of community support for renewable energy. In September 2016, 65 percent of Australians thought the nation should take a global leadership position in the roll-out of renewables, and 77 percent agreed that climate change is happening.5 Australia has the world’s highest rate of household uptake of solar energy, with 15 percent of houses having installed solar panels by 2015.6 Against such a backdrop, it would be surprising if anti-windfarm sentiment were anything but a fringe phenomenon.

A failed rally

A 2013 event organised by Stop These Things (STT) illustrates this perfectly. In the early months of 2013, the people behind STT began organising a protest rally for 18 June on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra. The master of ceremonies would be the prominent Sydney-based radio announcer Alan Jones. Jones and the STT website relentlessly promoted the rally in the months leading up to it, with those behind STT clearly very close to the planning for the big day.

Brave, anonymous bluster like this was published for weeks on the STT website:

(The Liberal–National Coalition was then in opposition, but heading towards an election victory in September 2013.)

In the end, the day was certainly one STT would have liked to forget. It was an embarrassing fizzer. I was sent the photograph in Figure 6.1 by an observer in attendance. He suggested that there were probably as many journalists and security staff there as anti-windfarm protestors. The Australian, known for its anti-wind stance, put the attendance of the rally at ‘only about 100’ and reported that a counter pro-wind rally on the other side of Canberra attracted more than 1000 attendees.8 Even STT’s own photographers could not put lipstick on the pig. A series of photographs of the ‘throngs’ in attendance is a sad spectacle.9 It is unlikely Jones had ever acted as master of ceremonies to a smaller gathering. Not surprisingly, no other rallies have been attempted since. 

The Landscape Guardians

The very earliest objections to windfarms in Australia were voiced by spokespeople for ‘branches’ of the Landscape Guardians (for example Prom Coast, Spa Country,10 Grampians-GlenThompson,11 Western Plains, Daylesford and District, Leonards Hill). A 2010 report in the Ballarat Courier stated that there might have been some 70 branches of the organisation in Australia at the time.12 Key figures in the Landscape Guardians have had links with the nuclear energy, mining and fossil-fuel industries.13 Predictably, the Landscape Guardians have never tried to guard our landscape from open-cut coal, coal-seam gas mining or even residential developers. Such developments involve incomparably more destruction and ongoing pollution of the areas in which they are located than do windfarms. Yet these virtuous people seem only concerned to protect communities from windfarms.

The Landscape Guardians Association Inc. was registered in 2007 by Andrew Miskelly, possibly in preparation for legal proceedings.14 The Taralga Landscape Guardians failed in a court action in 2007 in which they sought to stop the construction of a windfarm near the NSW southern tablelands town of Taralga. The windfarm was eventually constructed from 2013.15

A 2006 Sydney Morning Herald report noted that:

The Landscape Guardians are something of a peripatetic organisation, announcing and re-announcing themselves to the world, often with many months or sometimes years between appearances, with the same individuals bobbing up as representatives of different branches. Journalist Sandi Keane described how Kathy Russell, a registered director of the Waubra Foundation, was:

It has been claimed, and seemingly with justification, that the various Landscape Guardians groups have more officials than ordinary members. Russell opposed the Mount Pollock windfarm near her property (now renamed the Winchelsea Project). Those opposed argued that ‘the development would restrict views, create a traffic bottleneck on Mount Pollock Road, devalue neighbouring properties and detrimentally impact on flora and fauna in the area’. She has written a detailed critique of renewable energy for Quadrant.18

The Waubra Foundation

The Waubra Foundation has been Australia’s most prominent anti-windfarm group. Since late 2015, its public activities have been greatly diminished – Google Alerts now produces only rare notices of any media or website activity. At one point it was posting several news articles a week on its website, but at the time of writing it had posted just six articles in 12 months.

The foundation was set up in March 2010 by Peter Mitchell, a Victorian mining, oil and gas investor, who chaired it until January 2015, then spent some 14 months as its patron. He ended his office-bearing involvement in March 2016. Mitchell’s antagonism to windfarms sprang from a proposal by Origin Energy to build a windfarm near his country estate:

Mitchell wrote at least one submission to parliament for the Landscape Guardians using the South Melbourne post office box of Lowell Capital post office box address, the same address later used by the Waubra Foundation. Sarah Laurie from the Waubra Foundation explained this arrangement, writing on 22 September 2011:

Things must have been tough for the foundation: a post office box at that time cost about 50 cents a day. Perhaps stung by public exposure of this intriguing interconnectedness, the Waubra post box was changed in 2013 to one in Banyule, near the home of the foundation’s honorary secretary.

The Waubra Foundation’s first patron was the late Alby Schultz, federal member of parliament for the seat of Hume in New South Wales from October 1998 until August 2013. Schultz was an implacable opponent of windfarms, but his electorate hosted a number of them. On 27 July 2011, the Daily Telegraph reported Schultz as saying that after surgery to have a pacemaker fitted, his doctor advised him to avoid turbines. ‘The thinking is the electromagnetic field generated by windfarms could shut down my system,’ he said.21 Neither Schultz’s doctor nor any doctor in Australia came forward to support this bizarre statement. In the whole of Europe, where the concentration of global windfarms in greater than in any other region, and where tens of thousands of residents would have pacemakers, there has never been such a report.

As of 27 September 2017, the Waubra Foundation’s website listed four board members: Sarah Laurie (chief executive officer), Charlie Arnott, Michael Crawford, and Tony Edney.22 Past members have included the founder and chairman Peter Mitchell, Kathy Russell, Michael Wooldridge and Tony Hodgson. As of 30 June 2016 the foundation had net assets of just $8050, no employees, and five volunteers.23

However, as of 25 September 2017, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC, the corporate register), showed that Tony Edney had not yet been registered and five of the six founding directors (Peter Mitchell, Robert Tadgell, Kathy Russell, Michael Wooldridge, and Tony Hodgson), as well as Alexandra Nicol (a former staffer for Western Australian Liberal senator Chris Back) and Michael Crawford were still recorded as directors. As mentioned earlier, Michael Wooldridge, a former federal minister for health, was a director until he was barred from serving as such by the corporate regulator.24 This decision was overturned by the federal court on 1 November 2017.

None of the Waubra Foundation’s founding board lived in the Waubra district (see Table 6.1), a fact that has caused widespread anger among local residents who see their town’s name being used to advance a wider agenda.

The foundation is registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) and once held Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status, meaning that donations were tax deductible. However the foundation’s DGR status was revoked on 11 December 2014 after ACNC received a letter from Senator Richard Di Natale of the Australian Greens party challenging the legitimacy of its classification as a ‘health promotion charity’.25 The foundation has since exhausted all internal ACNC appeals processes and in 2016 subjected the Australian taxpayer to a 12-day hearing with the Administrative Affairs Tribunal. At the time of writing the decision was still pending.

If ACNC’s decision to revoke the foundation’s tax-deductible status is upheld, $83,790 of donations made to the foundation will have to be distributed to one or more organisations with DGR status and similar objectives. This will be an interesting one to watch.

​Activities

One of the Waubra Foundation’s governing principles, enshrined in its constitution, is ‘At all times to establish and maintain complete independence from government, industry and advocacy groups for or against wind turbines.’ The foundation may be ‘independent’ of other opposition groups, but their relationships are often close, as we saw with the case of Peter Mitchell.

The foundation runs a website and its principal spokesperson, Sarah Laurie, has done a vast number of radio and TV interviews, submission writing, letters to editors and politicians, appearing in support of anti-wind organisations at planning hearings, and speaking at meetings.

On 29 June 2011, the Waubra Foundation moved its aggression needle up several notches by sending a melodramatic ‘Explicit Cautionary Notice to those responsible for wind turbine siting decisions’ to Australia’s wind energy companies, citing a list of health problems that wind turbines might cause.26 It put the companies on notice that they could be held liable for damages. Predictably, this theatrical bluster has come to nothing over seven years later.

The notice listed a range of very prevalent health problems that collectively are experienced by millions of Australians (sleep deprivation, hypertension, heart attacks, diabetes, migraine, depression, tinnitus, post-traumatic stress, irreversible memory deterioration). The notice stated that all of these conditions ‘correspond directly with the operation of wind farms’ and that the foundation had conducted its ‘own field research’. In the foundation’s 2016 report to the ACNC, it claimed to be ‘facilitating multidisciplinary acoustic field research by independent researchers’.

Another publicity stunt by the foundation in 2012 saw a notice on its website call for volunteers to offer respite accommodation for windfarm ‘refugees’, whom we considered in Chapter 3. Had the stunt met any demand it is hard to imagine the foundation not milking the publicity this would have provided. Unsurprisingly, the notice was quietly removed from the website.

​Stop These Things

As we have seen throughout this book, the anonymously authored anti-windfarm website Stop These Things (STT) has become a mecca for a rag-bag of Australian and international climate-change denialists and frothing conspiracy theorists. The great majority of its obsessed correspondents write bravely behind pseudonyms. Its website domain is registered in the USA, but the registrants are inaccessible, cloaked behind a paid anonymity service.

STT began publishing in December 2012. Since then various attempts have been made to sleuth the names of those responsible, both to expose them and to pursue them for defamation. These attempts have involved using analytical software to compare passages of text published on the STT website with public writings of those suspected of being involved. This has often resulted in matches of unusual and characteristic turns of phrase, with three individuals strongly suspected of being involved.

The STT operator or operators appeared to have a very close relationship with the office of Senator John Madigan before he lost his seat in 2016. Madigan’s speeches would appear rapidly on the STT website. Brendan Gullifer, who was chief of staff in Madigan’s office for several years, is a former journalist who between 2010 and 2012 wrote for the Ballarat Courier. He often covered the windfarm issue in a way that excited wind opponents. In 2011, Nina Pierpont’s partner, Calvin Luther Martin, awarded Gullifer ‘journalist of the year’ for his reports on windfarms.27

Gullifer told me by email in 2013 that he had allowed edited excerpts from an abandoned book he had been writing on windfarms to be published on the STT website but was adamant he did not control the site. The excerpts were not published under his byline. He clearly knew how to contact those operating the page.

The decision by STT’s ‘management’ to hide behind anonymity is a double-edged sword for them. On the plus side, they get to exercise the bravery of the anonymous coward by spraying defamatory abuse. But that’s about where it ends, because anonymity means no one connected with the site can ever publicly defend it or use its content to take their arguments into other media. No politician would ever stoop to acknowledging support for the site, nor to quoting it in parliament. Its content can never be cited by any authoritative report or investigation. Even a cursory browse through its pages shows fanatical hatred of renewable energy and language that would alert anyone other than those sharing the same values that this is clearly a lunatic fringe at work.

​Other opponent groups

Beyond the Landscape Guardians and the Waubra Foundation, other groups that have enjoyed a few moments in the limelight include the Friends of Collector (based in New South Wales near Canberra) and the Flyers Creek Wind Turbine Awareness Group (led by Patina Schneider and opposing the Flyers Creek windfarm development between Orange and Blayney in central western New South Wales). The Noise Watch website, set up in 2014, appears inactive, with no new postings since June 2015.28 The Waterloo windfarm in South Australia has seen one resident, Mary Morris, who lives some 17 kilometres from the turbines, become prominent in activism against the farm speaking for the Waterloo Concerned Citizens Group.29

Prominent individual windfarm opponents

With few exceptions, those who have been prominent in anti-windfarm activism in Australia fall into one of several camps. There is considerable spill-over between these, and they are certainly not mutually exclusive, with some individuals fitting into more than one category.

First, there are those whose hostility to wind power is driven by their contempt for green values and politics. As we wrote in the Introduction, an ideological recoil from climate science, and from wind turbines as totemic reminders of green values, underscores the passion of many objectors. Green politics has polled badly in most rural areas of Australia (with the exception of opposition to coal-seam gas), and for those sceptical or hostile to climate change, wind turbines symbolise values that they reject.

A subset of the anti-green ideologues consists of those with commercial interests in fossil fuels. The journalist Sandi Keane explored this in her 2011 examination of the various Landscape Guardian groups in Australia.30 Their interest in denigrating renewable energy is obvious, as is their willingness to harness health scares in service of that wider objective.

Next, there are NIMBYs (not in my back yarders) – those who may or may not have any antipathy to renewable energy, but whose main objection is that they just don’t want wind turbines anywhere near their properties. Their main objections are usually aesthetic, with other arguments, including health, being pulled in as extra ordinance in their battles with local and state governments. NIMBYism can be expressed by people of any social class or background, but many have remarked on the prominence of a handful of wealthy or well-connected individuals with rural properties who have objected to Australian windfarms.

These include:

Peter Mitchell, now in his 80s, has a long history in mining investment. He has been involved in the Landscape Guardians and the Waubra Foundation, which he founded in March 2010. A submission sent in February 2011 to the Senate inquiry into windfarms, authored by Mitchell on behalf of the Australian Landscape Guardians, is addressed from PO Box 1136, South Melbourne, Victoria 3205, the same address as Mitchell’s Lowell Resources Funds Management Limited, a mining investment company.31 Its portfolio represents ‘a range of commodities including gold, iron ore, coal, oil, gas, uranium, rare earths and strategic minerals, copper and other base metals’.32 Mitchell owns a country estate with an acclaimed garden not far from the proposed Stockyard Hill windfarm, which, after many delays, will proceed to construction in 2018.

Maurice Newman chaired then Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Business Advisory Council, as well as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Stock Exchange. Newman and his wife hosted a meeting of the Crookwell and District Landscape Guardians at their country house, the minutes of which were leaked; they included a discussion among those attending of how best to oppose windfarm developments.33 Newman wrote in the right-wing Spectator:

Charlie Arnott, a cattle and sheep farmer from Boorowa in New South Wales (and great-great-great-grandson of the Arnott’s biscuits founder), has been spokesman for the Boorowa District Landscape Guardians and, since 2013, a board member of the Waubra Foundation.

Tony Hodgson, with Rodd Pahl (see below), co-founded the Friends of Collector opposition group.35 Hodgson was joint founding and managing partner of Australia’s leading corporate and insolvency firm, Ferrier Hodgson. In 2013, he threatened to sue any neighbours who put wind turbines on their properties near his cattle farm.36

Rodd Pahl is the managing director of Bluegrass, a PR consulting firm that has helped to promote opposition to windfarms. Bluegrass’ website once advised: ‘We have developed a set of online tools to augment more traditional advocacy techniques and help you build grassroots movements that result in real action.’37 Echoing the core lesson promulgated by the ‘merchants of doubt’,38 it continued ‘Look to create political uncertainty, strong voices on opposing views leads to hesitation’.

In November 2013, Pahl established the Association for Research of Renewable Energy in Australia Limited (ARREA). Its Australian Securities and Investment registration shows its business address is at Bluegrass’ office in Sydney, with Pahl listed as one of three directors. ARREA commissioned a report that was summarised in a submission to the 2015 Senate inquiry. Its main conclusion was that:

During the Senate inquiry, Senator Urquhart asked another ARREA director, Douglas Bucknell, how many members ARREA had. He responded, ‘Seven’. Senator Urquhart then asked, ‘I understand that spokespeople for your organisation are Tony Hodgson and Rod Pahl – is that correct? And are they also spokespeople for an opponent wind group called Friends of Collector – is that right?’ Bucknell answered elliptically, ‘I understand that to be right.’40

Michael Wooldridge, former health minister in the Howard Coalition government (1996–2001), was a board member of the Waubra Foundation but resigned in 2014 following an adverse finding (subsequently overturned) by the Federal Court about his role as a director of a retirement village company.41 Wooldridge had opposed the proposed Bald Hills windfarm, which bordered his family’s farming interests in Gippsland, Victoria. The Bald Hills project (now operational) was almost scuttled by the Landscape Guardians’ heartfelt concern for the safety of the orange-bellied parrot (see Chapter 1).

Two BRW ‘rich list’ multi-millionaires, Bill James and Michael Crouch, helped to support legal action against a large windfarm planned for Tasmania’s King Island, although neither personally lived there.42 According to BRW, Bill James is one of three founders of the travel giant Flight Centre and is worth $855 million. His family is believed to own land on King Island, but according to locals he does not live there. Crouch, the other major donor, is worth $310 million after founding Zip Industries, says Crikey.43 He owns Waverley Station, a cattle farm on King Island, but also does not live there.

Gillon McLachlan, the CEO of the Australian Football League, commenced legal action in 2016 to stop an approved windfarm on the doorstep of his family’s historic Rosebank property, near Mount Pleasant and Adelaide. The Mount Lofty Landscape Guardians are also involved in the action. McLachlan withdrew his participation in the action in March 2017.44

Ted Baillieu, as Liberal premier of Victoria (2010–13), introduced a range of planning measures designed to shut down wind development, including the establishment of a series of ‘no-go zones’ for windfarm construction zones across Victoria. The only non-coastal no-go zone was in the McHarg Ranges (an area unknown to most Victorians), where Lady Marigold Southey – former Victorian lieutenant-governor and Baillieu’s second cousin – owned an 800-hectare farm and vineyard near the hamlet of Tooborac. Southey had been an active opponent of a proposal for an 80-turbine windfarm in the area.45

​Upstairs–downstairs: the sociology of opposition

There is a fascinating sociological side to the prominence in the anti-windfarm movement of well-to-do individuals. When wind energy companies scout potential locations for windfarms, land exposed to high winds understandably has high priority. Accessible land on mountain ridges has premium attractiveness. Herein we find an interesting dimension to what is often a class-based opposition to windfarms.

Mountainous and hilly land is generally worth far less that flat land. Flat land can be used for cropping and grazing stock, while hilly land and the ridges of mountains are far less economically useful to farmers.

Because of this basic difference, flat land is more expensive to buy than hilly land, with the result that those with properties suitable for cropping and grazing tend to be more well-to-do than those who have only been able to afford hilly scrubland. In rural areas, it is common for there to be old established family holdings of landed gentry who have enjoyed local privileges of wealth and status, as well as more recently arrived city folk who have bought prestigious old country properties and hobby farms and often move between these and their city addresses.

Such landowners may have little interest in earning extra income from wind turbines as for them the property is a lifestyle asset, a ‘bolt-hole’ to escape the city on weekends. By contrast, far less well-off landowners who own less valuable land may see windfarms as manna from heaven: as an opportunity to turn non-arable or grazing land destined to be perpetually marginal into a cash cow. More than that, the guaranteed income they earn from turbines adds to their property value and ‘drought proofs’ their income in dry seasons when their agricultural earnings may be way down.

These differences foment interesting frictions between less well-off local landowners who stand to earn an ongoing windfall of cash from turbine hosting and implacably opposed wealthier ‘upstairs’ landowners who see the good fortune of their ‘downstairs’ neighbours as an affront to the natural social order of things. The landed gentry and weekend ‘Pitt Street/Collins Street’ farmers are outraged that their bucolic vistas might be spoilt by the sight of wind turbines and care little for the good fortune of local farmers who stand to benefit greatly from hosting them.

Members of the wind sector have explained to us that almost every organised opposition group is funded by a wealthy landowner with a country estate. Draw a pair of circles at a distance of one and three hours’ drive around each capital city and the vast majority of opposition to windfarms has taken place between these circles, with very little in the rural areas far from capital cities. (A former staffer of the NSW Office of the Environment and Heritage once remarked off the record that of the six members of one lobby group who attended a meeting, five had their primary residences in the well-to-do Sydney suburbs of Mosman and Balmain.)

Not often appreciated is the inevitable tension between the two socio-economic groups – those who come to the area on weekends for the pastoral scenery and who pine for the charm of 1950s country Australia, and those who live full-time in the community and rely on its economic health not only for their own livelihoods but also for their children’s future prospects in the area.

At the time of writing in mid-2017, the success of prominent anti-windfarm NIMBYs in thwarting windfarms in their districts looks decidedly disappointing for them (Table 6.2).

Perennial victims and professional objectors

In Australia, a small number of individuals and families have long been the public face of anti-windfarm victimhood. They often appear in media reports, and are feted by radio hosts and the few politicians who are opposed to renewable energy. They are invited to tell their stories to public meetings organised by opponent networks, and have been given the limelight at Senate inquiries and administrative affairs tribunals. They get to meet ‘important people’. I have been told more than once by residents who support windfarms that these people appear to ‘like getting their pictures in the paper’, or that opposition to the windfarm has ‘given purpose to an otherwise unremarkable life’. Such attention can be intoxicating and can be hard to walk away from.

Rejected or ineligible windfarm hosts

When a wind energy company announces plans to develop a windfarm in an area, they will already have undertaken extensive land, wind and electricity network surveys before settling on a prospective location. In small rural communities, word spreads quickly that a company is scouting the area, and with potentially lucrative land rentals on offer, some landowners inevitably see dollar signs.

Windfarm developers work through a very complex process to put in place the lease agreements. These include negotiations with landowners on commercial terms and the layout for an optimal windfarm. The developer is optimising the number and size of turbines, the wind resource in the turbine locations (it can vary significantly around the local topography), access to turbine sites (construction roads are a major cost for a windfarm), electricity grid connection costs, planning system constraints, and the developer’s access to capital through its financing.

Throughout this process, which can take many months or even years, the proposed windfarm layout can change many times, with the ultimate result only knowable at the end. Some landowners who believed they were assured of a lucrative annuity may end up with nothing – upon investigation their property may not have been as suitable as expected, a neighbour might have thrown a spanner in the works, their property may never have been in consideration in the first place, planning regulations might have changed, or, all too commonly, the developer may determine that the entire project is not viable and abandon the project.

It is a rollercoaster ride for all those involved and, as with all development, there are plenty of examples of bad behaviour on both sides of the table. In the early days of the sector in Australia there was plenty of money to be made in signing up a number of landowners, securing a planning permit and on-selling the project. Unfortunately, some opportunists ruffled feathers in more than a few communities. Many a developer also inadvertently stirred up long-festering family feuds, which can be caused by big issues such as disputes over inheritance or small issues such as a poorly maintained fence or night-time noise from an irrigation pump.

Savvy wind developers nowadays are careful to engage as often as possible with the community, employ staff in the local area from day one, ensure that all landowners receive equal financial terms, develop benefit-sharing schemes, and, in some cases, offer payments to landowners nearby who miss out. In the past some developers had landowners sign confidentiality agreements, but as the industry has developed it has become generally accepted that such agreements only serve to foment suspicion and jealousy.

Even when there is a contractual agreement that rental payments should remain confidential, rumours of the often large sums involved tend to leak and circulate among local residents. While there are some who might regard the income going to the hosts as simply their good luck, it is understandable that others may deeply resent the apparent unfairness of some residents getting paid while others miss out, especially when community engagement has not been handled well, benefits haven’t been shared, and there is a sense that an outsider has arbitrarily created ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. We take up this issue in Chapter 8, where we look at ways in which this resentment might be reduced.

Before I attended a National and Medical Research Council meeting on windfarms and health in Canberra on 7 June 2011, I had never met any of those involved in the wind industry or those supporting or opposing windfarms. All of these interest groups were present at the meeting. The ‘antis’ kept well clear of me, probably because I had by then already written an article for the Croakey blog that would have greatly displeased them.46

At the lunch break I met several of those representing the wind industry. One of them pointed out one of the ‘antis’. The wind company representative said words to the effect of:

He added that he had kept various correspondence written by the farmer and was looking forward to it finding its way into the public domain, should the farmer’s efforts continue.

In another account I was given, a family not being considered for turbine hosting nonetheless approached the wind company representatives, seeking a deal. The family wanted the company to have their entire house lifted onto a truck and moved to a picturesque lake at the back of their property. The family proposed that the company would pay all costs and erect a jetty so that a boat could be moored near the house. The family threatened to make things difficult for the company if their demands were not satisfied.

This is an extreme example, but tales of families requesting extensive renovations, ostensibly in order to ‘sound-insulate’ their houses, are more common. The proposed renovations are often extravagant and include works that could not be considered noise mitigation. When they are agreed to, word spreads and others join the queue to see what they can get. Local narratives develop about cashed-up multinationals who will bend to such demands given what is at stake. It becomes part of the cost of doing business. But truly extravagant demands are often refused, and long-term acrimony can then set in.

‘Professional’ opponents

Various anti-windfarm websites around the world proudly list the names of 78 ‘professionals’ who, according to the European Platform Against Wind Farms,47 which assembled the list, have ‘investigated or voiced concern for the health and well-being of wind turbine neighbors’. Fourteen of the paltry global 78 are from Australia: Steven Cooper (acoustician), Con Doolan (engineer), Colin Hansen (engineer), Les Huson (acoustician), David Iser (GP), Sarah Laurie (former rural GP), Peter Mitchell (engineer), Andja Mitric Andjic (rural GP), George Papadopoulos (pharmacist), Wayne Spring (physician), Scott Taylor (rural GP), Bob Thorne (psychoacoustician) and Carcoar husband and wife Alan Watts (rural GP), and Colleen Watts (‘scientist’). ‘Professional’ here is of course code for anyone with a tertiary qualification in any field who concludes that wind turbines cause health problems.

It’s important to put these numbers in perspective. There were 102,804 registered medical practitioners in Australian in 2015. Given Sarah Laurie is unregistered to practise medicine (see below), that leaves just five registered medical practitioners in Australia who have expressed concerns about windfarms in Australia, according to the anti-wind groups. That’s just one in 20,561 registered doctors whom windfarm opponents claim as theirs, an almost homeopathic concentration of concern.

In the following pages, we profile several prominent Australian windfarm opponents to give a sense of the some of their more interesting beliefs. We also considered David Mortimer in Chapter 3.

​Sarah Laurie

The high priestess of windfarm opposition in Australia is undoubtedly Sarah Laurie. She has been the public face of the Waubra Foundation, although in recent years she has been much less prominent. Google alerts for her name since about mid 2015 have rarely flagged any news coverage.

Laurie lives a short distance from the site of a windfarm once proposed for Crystal Brook in South Australia in 2010. The project did not proceed at the time, but has recently been picked up by another developer and is again progressing. Laurie’s concerns about windfarms seem to date from around that period. She has been a prolific writer, although mainly confines her efforts to submissions to windfarm enquiries, lengthy letters to politicians, bureaucrats and journalists, the web pages of the Waubra Foundation and other international anti-windfarm websites. She seldom, if ever, writes for scientific journals. On 8 May 2017 PubMed returned no results from the advanced search author=Laurie S, and all fields=wind.

Laurie is a medical graduate who obtained her bachelor degrees in medicine from Flinders Medical School in Adelaide in 1995. She practised medicine for seven years before ceasing practice in April 2002. She let her registration lapse some two and half years later. Since graduating she has to date therefore spent more than twice as long not practising (15 years) as she did practising (seven years). She was awarded a fellowship with the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners in 1999, and a fellowship with the Australian College of Remote and Rural Medicine in March 2000, although she relinquished her membership of the latter in 2004. Laurie has explained that her decision to stop medical practice was because of personal health and family reasons.

When the Waubra Foundation formed in 2010, its website described Laurie as its ‘medical director’. This later changed to ‘chief executive officer’.48 She is unaffiliated with any accredited research institution. Therefore, if the Waubra Foundation under her direction was conducting ‘field research’ involving human subjects, this would not have been approved by any institutional ethics committee. She would have been unable to publish any papers arising from that research in any reputable medical journal where formal ethics clearance is mandatory whenever human subjects are involved.

In 2013 Laurie gave evidence about her views on wind turbine health impacts to the Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal. The tribunal noted that she ‘has not conducted formal structured research. She states that she conducts an ongoing survey, where, to date, she has spoken with approximately 130 people in Australia who live in the vicinity of industrial wind turbine projects.’ This semantic distinction between her ‘field research’ and ‘formal structured research’ would make a fascinating case study in human research ethics.

The December 2013 judgment of the Ontario tribunal includes some 12 pages discussing whether Laurie’s qualifications and experience entitled her to be considered an expert witness in the tribunal’s deliberations, and the evidence she gave. On the matter of her use of the title ‘Doctor’ in association with her Waubra Foundation activities, the judgment states:

Two years later, the transcript of Laurie’s evidence to the 2015 Senate committee on wind turbines describes her as ‘Ms Laurie’, but those who signed off the final majority report still allowed her to be described in the report as ‘Dr’ on seven occasions. Stop These Things and other anti-windfarm websites have no doubt that she should still be called ‘Dr’.

Laurie has sometimes had a hard time in courts and tribunals when she has sought to be or been called as an expert witness in wind turbine cases.

The South Australian Environment, Resources and Development Court, in its judgment of Paltridge & Ors vs District, was satisfied that public health would not be put at risk by a proposed windfarm development. Commenting on Laurie’s evidence to the court and comparing it to that provided by Professor Gary Wittert from the University of Adelaide, the bench wrote:

The court also noted:

The judgment concluded: ‘We accept his [Wittert’s] conclusions and, where his evidence differs from that of Dr Laurie, prefer the evidence of Professor Wittert.’

Wittert examined Laurie’s ‘research’ data, which she claimed showed an association between the morning blood pressure of three individuals living near the Waubra windfarm and the power output of the turbines. Wittert concluded (as anyone with even basic ability to interpret graphic associations can see immediately by looking at the data): ‘These data are inconsistent with any assertion that the output from wind turbines has an adverse effect on blood pressure.’51

The same 2013 Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal judgment states:

A South Australian court made a similar observation in 2014:

The judgment noted that:

The 2013 Ontario judgment determined that while Laurie could give evidence, deficiencies in her training and expertise and current status as an unregistered doctor meant that:

It noted that while her status as a medical graduate who was now unregistered did not permit her to make medical diagnoses of persons she interviewed, this is in fact what she was doing when providing her opinion about those whose health she described:

Laurie was allowed to testify in a 2014 hearing for the Bull Creek Wind Project in Alberta, Canada. However, the commission gave its opinion on her skills and training and testimony, stating: 

Laurie sometimes goes out of her way to explain that she and the Waubra Foundation are not opposed to windfarms, but rather that they are an organisation focused on publicising and ameliorating the health effects of noise and infrasound regardless of its source. The Ontario Environmental Review Tribunal summed up this distinction:

This is hard to reconcile with the overwhelming focus of Laurie’s attention on windfarms. Any Google search for her statements and writings provides a deluge of evidence that her primary target is windfarms, with only occasional passing mentions of noise problems from other industries.

Laurie has spoken often at public meetings organised by the Waubra Foundation and local opposition groups. In early October 2010, residents of Leonards Hill in central Victoria were encouraged to attend a presentation in nearby Evansford, given by Laurie. In the same week, the Australian Environment Foundation, a climate change denialist group, arranged a protest meeting at the opening ceremony for the beginning of works on a two-turbine, 2000-shareholder community-owned windfarm at Leonards Hill, near Daylesford. Banners with ‘Windfarms make me sick’ were prepared and some 50 people (almost all of them out-of-towners) attended the protest, which was reported in the local press.

 In November 2010, Laurie was reported in the local newspaper, the Advocate, as saying, ‘If I were living right there I would be very concerned. I would be beside myself.’ She highlighted acute hypertensive crisis as a potential effect and said it warranted ‘immediate attention’. Scary stuff. In early December 2010, the ‘president’ of the Daylesford Landscape Guardians (since deceased) told the Australian, ‘I’ve been on medication for the last five years just fighting this.’56 The windfarm had not even opened but the president was already worried sick.

On 22 June 2011, one of the two wind turbines at Leonards Hill began operating at 25 percent capacity. The president was interviewed by ABC News less than 48 hours later and said, ‘I’ve heard the turbines the last three nights and I’m finding that it feels inside the house like it’s being pressurised. And so I’ve not been sleeping until later on.’ In mid-August 2011, the Ballarat Courier reported that Leonards Hill received its first health complaint from a 57-year-old woman with sleep problems. She described the sound of the two turbines, half a kilometre away, as at times ‘like a jet engine’. The next day, the Landscape Guardians president went public as the second health complainant about the windfarm. 

Laurie has made some quite extraordinary statements in her public pronouncements. She claims she has ‘heard from [unnamed] ex-employees that if they have disclosed their health problems [caused by wind turbines] their employment has been terminated – in their words, they have been dropped like “hot cakes”.’57 We are unaware of any former employees in Australia ever taking legal action over a dismissal, going public in the media to describe their experiences, or making a submission to a parliamentary inquiry.

In 2012, Laurie wrote to the NSW planning minister, Brad Hazzard, and others advising them that alleged rapid fluctuations in barometric pressure around windfarms could sometimes ‘perceptibly rock stationary cars even further than a kilometre away from the nearest wind turbine.’58 This is a claim that would have made a fascinating story for a Mythbusters investigation.

Laurie may be a country and western fan, channelling the Patsy Kline and Kitty Wells duet ‘Talk back trembling lips’ (in which they sing ‘shaky legs, don’t just stand there’) when she told the South Australian court in 2011 that wind turbines can make people’s lips vibrate ‘from a distance of ten kilometres away’.59 That’s about the distance from downtown Sydney to the northern suburb of Chatswood. Indeed, these vibrations are ‘sufficient to knock them off their feet or bring some men to their knees when out working in their paddock’, she added elsewhere.60

These fascinating claims could of course easily be subjected to tests under blinded experimental conditions. Windfarm operators would willingly co-operate in the experiment by powering turbines on and off unbeknown to the experimental subjects, whose lip trembling, ability to stand in paddocks, and claims to hear the turbines from massive distances could all be tested. We would encourage budding experimental psychology students to consider approaching the Waubra Foundation and inviting them to co-operate in such a study. They could collaborate in setting out the experimental protocols and testing procedures, and could name in advance any confounders they might be likely to raise in the event of the study showing that none of these effects could be demonstrated.

Finally, a South Australian court at which Laurie appeared as a witness apparently couldn’t resist this priceless comment in its judgment:

Chile is a mere 11,365 kilometres from Australia’s east coast.

​Noel Dean

Noel Dean and his wife have owned a property in the Waubra area since 1970. They had lived there since early November 1974, but left their home on 25 May 2009 because they were experiencing extremely bad headaches and felt unwell. Dean wrote in a Senate submission that:

Construction of the Waubra windfarm began in December 2007 and was completed in June 2009. The first turbines began generating green power in February 2009 and the entire site was fully operational by July 2009.

Dean told the ABC Four Corners program, in an episode broadcast in July 2011:

He repeated this to the 2011 Senate inquiry in March that year, stating that his family had to move very soon (perhaps only one night) after the Waubra wind turbines started up: ‘My family was fairly affected because we had to move straight away; we could not stay another night because my head felt as if it was going to burst.’64

Dean has appeared at public meetings organised by opponents in other areas, where he gives emotional accounts of his health and his belief that the Waubra windfarm is responsible for his situation. In his 2011 Senate submission he described his belief that the ‘frequencies produced by the turbines are the same as those that operate the brain, the interference of frequencies of the brain by those that are produced by the turbines is why the lower parts of our bodies went cold.’65

However, in his Senate submission he also stated: ‘I have been in brain training care and rehabilitation for about ten years because of an unfortunate, unrelated incident.’66 Dean would thus appear to have been in rehabilitation for a pre-existing health problem for some eight years prior to his exposure to the Waubra windfarm and still required ‘brain training and rehabilitation’ during the period in which he attributed various adverse health conditions to his exposure to the turbines near his property. Dean also advised the Senate that he was a polio survivor who had to ‘rub liniment into my legs during the night, thankfully now only once during the night’.67 Yet he appeared to attribute this nocturnal problem, and others, to the wind turbines.

In the 2011 anti-windfarm film Pandora’s pinwheels, Dean stated: ‘If I’m not careful it will take me out. I suffer from … they say sleep apnoea’.68 Dean does not say in the film how long he has suffered from sleep apnoea, and whether this preceded his exposure to the wind turbines (an exposure that, according to his account, may have lasted for as little as one night).

Dean once told an anti-windfarm meeting at Baringhup in Victoria on 19 March 2013 that wind turbines started charging his mobile phone without it being plugged in. ‘I’ve had my … mobile phone go into charge mode in the middle of the paddock, away from everywhere.’69 This extraordinary claim would certainly be of great interest to manufacturers of mobile phones, who to date have apparently not been advised that this remarkable charging ability is something all phone users should be aware of.

​Ann and Gus Gardner

Ann (often referred to as Annie) and Andrew ‘Gus’ Gardner are two of Australia’s most determined windfarm opponents. They live near the AGL-operated Macarthur windfarm in Victoria, which is the largest in Australia. It commenced construction in October 2010 and the first turbines were connected to the electricity grid in September 2012. The Gardners live on a farm there, where they keep sheep with fine wool. They appeared on an ABCTV 7.30 Report report on 12 October 2011.70 Ann Gardner explained about wind turbines that ‘The ultra-fine sheep are highly strung. They are highly vulnerable if they are stressed,’ while her husband worried that the windfarm would harm their income: ‘My hard-earned capital [would be] threatened by this monster’. 

Two other fine-wool growers interviewed on the program, Noel and Lyn Hartwich, who have a property near the Callicum Hills windfarm, said:

Both Ann and Andrew Gardner are on record as saying they are still affected even when the turbines are off. In Chapter 3, we described how those claiming to suffer from acute effects of wind turbine exposure say that they get immediate relief when the wind stops turning the turbines or when they move away from their residences. But on 7 February 2015, Ann and Andrew Gardner wrote a letter to the local newspaper, in which they claimed:

How is it that while many complainants argue that their symptoms stop when the turbines are not turning, the Gardners claim that their symptoms continue?

Andrew Gardner sent the email below to 189 recipients, including politicians and journalists, on 26 April 2015 (he did not bother to ‘bcc’ their addresses). The politician who forwarded it to me commented about the irritating frequency with which he received these unsolicited multi-addressed emails from the Gardners. Gardner’s email read:

Note that elsewhere the Gardners have said that even non-operating turbines disturb them, yet here they say the turbines are turned off so that they can sleep. So which is it?

​Les Huson

Victorian acoustician Les Huson is one of 14 Australian ‘professionals’ named on a list of people promoted by anti-windfarm groups who have ‘investigated or voiced concern for the health and well-being of wind turbine neighbours’.72

In 2015 Huson presented a poster at a conference on windfarm noise in Glasgow that impressed Ann Gardner, prompting her to advise the 2015 Senate committee that ‘It is now accepted that infrasound DOES come from wind turbines that are not operating.’73 Gardner provided no evidence for such ‘acceptance’. Huson’s paper described his measurements of infrasound inside dwellings when the turbines were not running compared to when they were operational.74 He concluded that:

There was a rather important problem with Huson’s conclusion. His declaration that the infrasound he recorded was from the high wind interacting with the stationary blades and towers takes no account of whether it might have in fact been infrasound in the wind itself, or perhaps from sources like refrigerators or fans within the houses in which he did the recording. He undertook no pre-construction recordings of infrasound in the same locations to see what the infrasound readings were in when the same ‘high winds’ were blowing. This obvious problem may explain why his paper seems never to have been published in any research journal.

Huson notes in his paper that he was ‘not affiliated with any pro- or anti-wind organisation.’ Perhaps. But he has a track record as being a ‘go-to’ acoustician whose work is lauded by anti-windfarm groups.

George Papadopoulos

Some anti-windfarm advocates appear to have almost superhuman auditory capacity. General Electric has compared the diminishing dB of a wind turbine over distance with the volume of other common noise sources. For example, at a distance of 400 metres, the audible noise from a turbine is comparable to to that emitted by a household refrigerator.75

George Papadopoulos, a pharmacist, may be peerless in his auditory acuity. He lives near the town of Yass in New South Wales and is an avid writer about windfarms online, to inquiries, and to anyone who might listen. He has often emailed me oddly worded letters, often commencing with the baroque ‘My dearest Professor’. He is apparently possessed of extraordinary aural abilities, almost as if he has bionic ears. Here are some examples.

In May 2011, he wrote on a homeopathy website about visiting a windfarm with two others:

But by March 2012, Papadopoulos was writing that he could now hear turbines 35 kilometres away – a seven-fold increase in less than a year!

His amazing abilities then increased further and by October 2012, he reported:

As the crow flies, 100 kilometres is about the distance from the central business district of Sydney to the town of Lithgow on the other side of the Blue Mountains. Papadopoulos has been confronted with his ‘100 kilometre’ statement several times and has never taken a backward step from it.

​George and the world of woo

For a time after he began agitating against windfarms, Papadopoulos linked up with an entity called Geovital Academy as an ‘assessor’.79 Thanks to the Wayback Machine, we can still read his deleted particulars, which have since been removed from the Geovital site:

Geovital’s website is quite something. It sells blankets, shields, paints and pillows to protect gullible people from the evils of electromagnetic radiation invading their houses. From at least 8 May 2012 until 31 May 2013, the Wayback Machine shows, the website included a statement from ‘Noble [sic] Prize winner Ivan Engler Dr.med.univ., PhD’:

No one named Ivan Engler ever won a Nobel Prize in any category. He may have won a Noble prize, whatever that might be.

It gets worse. In 2013, the Cancer Council Victoria had its attention drawn to a section of Geovital’s website inviting people to participate in ‘a blind study about the occurrence of cancer in geopathically disturbed areas’. The study was open to ‘cancer-suffering households’ in Melbourne. The study involved an examination of radiation in the houses of those with cancer. Following the assessment, the illnesses of the participants would be revealed to a ‘geobiologist’ to be compared with the measurements taken during the assessment. Participants were required to pay $45 toward travel expenses and a fee of $95 per room assessed.

The Cancer Council wrote to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on 20 August 2013, complaining in detail about the study. It argued:

The application of ‘shielding paint’ promoted on Geovital’s website was said to have been followed by ‘76 percent of 250 chronically ill people recovered to good health within 3 months of having Geovital shielding solutions put into place’.

The ACCC contacted Geovital and all mentions of the study were quickly removed from its website. Papadopoulos has ended his association with Geovital, but his judgment in being associated with them in the first place is notable. In spite of this, Papadopoulos is listed on anti-windfarm websites as a ‘professional’ who has raised concerns about windfarms.81

​Bruce Rapley

Bruce Rapley is a New Zealander who made a submission to the 2015 Australian Senate inquiry. Senator Madigan and his committee were apparently impressed with his expertise and invited him to give oral evidence to the committee.

Like Noel Dean, Rapley appeared in the 2011 amateur movie Pandora’s wheels.82 At different times in the film he describes himself as ‘a biologist’, ‘a scientist’ and ‘a philosopher of science’. At the time the film was made, Rapley had no PhD (his degree was awarded in 2015 by Massey University in New Zealand). In the film he refers to ‘our research [on windfarms] over the last three years’, that is, from 2009 onward, and talks about ‘our records’. So where is this research and these records? A PubMed search conducted on 9 May 2017 found five papers published by Rapley between 1995 and 2007 on bioelectromagnetics, but nothing on windfarms, acoustics or the philosophy of science. Massey University advised me in 2016 that his 2015 PhD thesis, on sound in the military environment, was publicly unavailable as it was under restriction for unstated reasons, a ruling that is apparently ongoing. His research is thus not available to anyone for review.

Rapley’s spoken evidence to the 2015 Senate committee was something to behold. A supremely self-confident person, his testimony is highly recommended for enthusiasts of bluster.

His opening oral statement worked up to a final farrago of outrage:

Rapley spent much of his allocated time blasting research on the nocebo phenomenon as it has been applied to research on wind turbines. He started with:

Asked to expand on this by Senator Back, Rapley waded in:

Rapley continued displaying his limited understanding of how nocebo effects can occur:

As we discussed in Chapter 5, this objection is easily countered by pointing to the way that complainants are often exposed to new negative information after a period of never having heard or considered that wind turbines may be harmful.

He finished by arguing that since ‘we have animals affected by this’ and that ‘animals are not really susceptible to media hype’, the nocebo hypothesis had to be bunkum. Appendix 1 documents many claims about animals that we highlighted in Chapter 2. None of them has ever moved beyond evidence-free assertion.

Some might care to weigh the value of Rapley’s opinions about nocebo research and windfarms against those of Sir Simon Wessely, recent president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who has published on the subject.84

 In 1995, the New Zealand Skeptics Society reported that:

​Politicians

Several federal politicians in the Liberal and National parties and on the crossbench have been stalwart critics of windfarms.

These have included former prime minister Tony Abbott,86 former treasurer Joe Hockey,87 the current minister for resources Senator Matt Canavan (Queensland), Senator Chris Back (Western Australia),88 the late Alby Schultz (MP for Hume in New South Wales) and his successor Angus Taylor,89 ex-senators John Madigan (Democratic Labour Party), Bob Day,90 Steve Fielding (Family First) and Nick Xenophon (independent), and current senators Jacquie Lambie (independent)91 and David Leyonhjelm (Liberal Democratic Party). 

Madigan, Back and Taylor, along with Senator Ron Boswell (National Party, Queensland, since retired) and MP Craig Kelly (Liberal Party, New South Wales) spoke at the 2016 Stop These Things rally, so were clearly comfortable assisting the group in its mission.92 As of 8 May 2017, a collection of 12 videos of the rally published on YouTube in July 2013 had been viewed on average just 211 times each.93

A few of these politicians are worthy of special attention.

John Madigan arguably made little impact on the Australian political landscape during his six-year tenure in the Senate, despite expending superhuman effort to oppose windfarm development. Madigan introduced, along with co-sponsor Nick Xenophon, the Excessive Noise from Wind Farms Bill 2012, which was ultimately rejected by parliament. He chaired the Senate Select Committee on Wind Turbines, whose recommendation to set up a Wind Farm Commissioner was ultimately an own goal (see earlier in this chapter). Throughout 2012 and 2013 his staff were in the audience at community windfarm consultations in South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria and eagerly asked attempted ‘gotcha’ questions.

When asked who invited him to address the Stop These Things rally, Madigan claimed that he did not know. He frequently started interviews and speeches with an assurance that he was ‘not against turbines’, yet on his website he boasted of his ‘fight’ against wind energy.

Xenophon, seen by many as a moderate voice, worked closely with Madigan on a wide range of anti-wind activities, including a series of community meetings around south-eastern Australia in 2012, one of which ‘activated’ David Mortimer (see Chapter 3). Xenophon was slated to appear at the Stop These Things rally in 2013 – a coup that STT breathlessly boasted about prior to the rally. When the progressive GetUp! and Friends of the Earth organisations arranged a pro-renewables rally in Canberra on the same day, Xenophon attempted the politically impossible: he agreed to front both rallies. A freelance filmmaker had planned to document his appearance at the rallies and his mad dash between the two (set to the Benny Hill theme ‘Yakety Sax’?). Perhaps word reached his office – Xenophon pulled out of both at the 11th hour.94

Several Coalition MPs have informed contacts of mine that behind the scenes no one was working harder or smarter to stop the development of wind energy in Australia than Angus Taylor, federal member for Hume. Having become engaged in the windfarm debate around 2003, Taylor spoke at many community meetings around his electorate, assuring the locals that a solution to their concerns was in train. He authored and widely distributed a report to his party room called ‘A proposal to reduce the cost of electricity to Australian electricity users’. The report suggested that if Australia immediately abandoned the renewable energy target and moved instead to gas generation, Australian energy consumers would save $3.2 billion by 2020. He was ignored, as wind energy has become cheaper than gas-generated electricity by a wide margin. Taylor (nicknamed by Stop These Things as ‘The Enforcer’) addressed the 2013 rally, an odd move for an Oxford-educated junior MP known to have an eye on the top job.

In June 2015, after describing windfarms as ‘visually awful’ while a review into renewable energy he’d commissioned was ongoing, Prime Minister Tony Abbott went on to say, ‘Up close, they’re ugly, they’re noisy and they may have all sorts of other impacts.’95 When questioned whether he’d actually visited a windfarm, he declared that he once rode a bicycle past the single small wind turbine on Rottnest Island, off Perth. If only Tony Abbott had submitted a formal complaint about this turbine, it would not only have been the first against the Rottnest turbine: it would have been the first complaint against any windfarm in Western Australia.

​The media

I have done many interviews with Australian news media on windfarms and health issues since 2010. These have rarely if ever been hostile, with program researchers, journalists and on-air staff often remarking to me off-the-record that the ‘other side’ of this issue are often decidedly oddball.

There are only three outlets that have regularly given anti-windfarm activists a warm embrace: the Australian newspaper (particularly its ‘environment’ writer Graham Lloyd; 2GB radio announcer Alan Jones, whose program is broadcast live into many other linked stations in the Macquarie network; and the bizarre internet radio program Fair Dinkum Radio, hosted by the conspiracist Leon Pittard, who gives a platform to every conceivable type of truther and nut-job. Pittard has given several lengthy, fawning interviews to windfarm opponents.

For a while, the Ballarat Courier, thanks to reporter Brendan Gullifer, who went on to become Madigan’s chief of staff, was a wellspring of anti-windfarm reporting, and arguably was the first Australian paper to give prominence to the theory that windfarms made people sick. When Gullifer left, anti-windfarm reporting at the paper dried up entirely.

Sydney-based radio announcer Alan Jones has unquestionably provided more exposure to windfarm opponents than anyone else in Australia, and possibly in the world. Jones, who thinks global warming is ‘witchcraft’,96 regularly gives extensive airtime to these opponents. In October 2016, in one of his typical bombastic preambles that lasted longer than the interview itself, he referred to ‘renewable energy rubbish’, claimed that there was ‘harrowing evidence’ that windfarms were ‘buggering up people’s health’, and rattled off portentous references to the Japanese and Iranian studies that we critiqued in Chapter 4.

This chapter has considered the range and apparent motivations of the small number of interest groups and individuals who have been prominent in opposing windfarms in Australia. We have profiled some of the more ‘interesting’ people among them and statements they have made. In the next chapter, we will look at the themes and strategies that some of these opponents have used in their efforts to attack and discredit those whom they see as standing in the way of their efforts.