Article by Mia Schlicht, courtesy of the Herald Sun.
29.08.2025
Today, far too many rural and regional communities in Australia are struggling under policies that threaten our vital agriculture and resource sectors. This is particularly so in Victoria.
This is why the Bush Summit being held in Ballarat on Friday is so important.
For those of us who live in the city it is easy to forget the impact policies demanded by the inner city can have on rural and regional communities.
The Bush Summit series is a vital reminder of the importance of the bush, not just in our history but also for our future. It is these communities that generate the wealth that funds the schools, roads and hospitals that all Australians rely upon.
Yet if you look at Spring Street or Canberra today, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
In the same week the Bush Summit arrives in Ballarat, state parliament has been debating legislation to strip farmers of their right to stop massive, high-voltage power lines and energy infrastructure from destroying their livelihoods.
This legislation is central to delivering the net zero agenda, and it is Victoria’s farming families who are being sacrificed to satisfy the ambitions of those in the inner city who will never see a transmission tower built in their own backyard.
This is not a net zero transition, as Premier Jacinta Allan and her allies in the Greens like to call it.
It is a demolition. It robs farmers and landholders of their most basic property rights and turns over the management of their land to politicians and bureaucrats.
It will even empower the state government to use force to enter privately owned properties.
And the costs are not confined to the bush. We have been told for years that wind and solar will deliver cheap and reliable energy, but the truth is very different. Renewables are unreliable, they destroy prime agricultural land and they are anything but “green”.
The policy of net zero has been the key driver of the 19 per cent increase in power bills faced by Victorian households since 2024, no matter if they are located in the city or the bush. Australia-wide, in 2024 alone, the 50 largest wind farms and 50 largest solar farms received approximately $1.7bn in subsidies from electricity consumers through hidden charges on their bills, with $1.2bn of this going to foreign-owned companies.
Victoria once enjoyed some of the lowest electricity prices in the industrialised world, but it now has some of the highest, thanks to net zero.
As the Herald Sun recently reported, the cost of connecting Victoria’s six renewable energy zones to the grid had almost doubled from an initial estimate of $4.3bn to $7.9bn. The state’s Energy Minister has not been able to guarantee that costs will not rise further.
All this is the inevitable result of decades of poor decisions based on ideology rather than evidence, and at the end of the day it’s our rural and regional communities that must bear the burden of complying with the demands of the inner city.
While we are slowly waking up to the economic, social and environmental devastation caused by net zero policies, it is the human tragedy unfolding in regional communities that should preoccupy policymakers.
The Institute of Public Affairs has surveyed the attitudes of Australians towards regional and rural Australia for several years. Consistently, a clear majority of Australians recognise that the whole nation benefits from the revenue generated in these areas, and that agriculture and mining are critical to our future prosperity.
Despite this, our leaders continue to burden the regions with red tape and policies that make it harder for communities to succeed and grow.
What we need is leadership that will back the bush, restore property rights and allow our most productive industries to thrive.
We instinctively see rural and regional communities as a force for good; it is time we made that known to our leaders.
At the end of the day our food does not come from a supermarket, it comes from a farm, and the energy that keeps the lights on comes from the mines and power stations serviced and staffed by regional Victorians.
Ever since the Gold Rush our state’s prosperity has been built in the regions.
Unless governments stop treating our regional and rural communities as an afterthought, the very people who sustain our state will be left behind. Mia Schlicht is a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs
