The Western Renewables Link Environmental Effects Statement (EES) is live. And while it spans more than 10,000 pages, the government says your submission can be “just a few dot points.” That’s not consultation it’s a deliberate tactic to quiet your voice.

Make no mistake: being silent is exactly what they want.

Over the past two weeks, our review of the EES has uncovered serious deficiencies from under played fire risks to poor planning, environmental disregard, and deeply flawed assumptions about community support. But none of that means anything if we don’t speak up.

Even a short submission makes a difference. If you’re unsure where to begin, just start by putting your personal concerns on paper. Use the 17 chapters of the EES to guide you whetherit’s fire risk, land use, biodiversity, agriculture, mental health, or simplythe lack of genuine consultation.

You don’t need to be an expert. You just need to be heard.

We are here to support you with resources, summaries, and templates but the most powerful submission is your own.

Here’s a link to our EES Response Starter Guide

Don’t step aside. Stand up. Submit.

WRL EES – review so far

Attached for your reference are three initial high-level reportscontaining a sample of our early assessment of the EES.

Purpose: These reports highlight significant flaws in the EES and are provided to empower you to prepare and submit your own response.

Ongoing Updates: We will release further high-level reports on other critical issues in the coming weeks. Our analysis is following a chapter-by-chapter basis and should assist in navigating and responding to the EES in detail.

Customisation: Please tailor these and the other reports to your own circumstances, or simply use them as inspiration. Our analysis takes a broad approach, your specific impacts may differ and provide powerful inputs.

What our early analysis is telling us

Our analysis continues, but the evidence we have found so far is leadingus to call on the Minister for Planning to reject the EES assessment and not approve the project. Across multiple areas we are finding that the impact analysis is inadequate and not fit for purpose. When all is added together, we don’t believe that the EES provides a reliable basis upon which the Minister can make an informed decision about the project’s impacts.

Extracts from the reports are highlighted below. We encourage you to review these reports, adapt them as needed, and use them to build your own informed submissions.

Chapter 13 – High Level Assessement of Bushfire

Extract: The WRL EES’s assessment of bushfire risk is fundamentally flawed. It underestimates ignition potential, misrepresents emergency service limitations, and fails to uphold the legal and ethical primacy of human life. Without a rigorous, site-specific, and transparent reassessment – grounded in best practice and local realities – the project should not be allowed to proceed in high-risk areas. The current EES is insufficient, misleading, and places lives and property at unacceptable risk.

Chapter 15 – High Level Assessment of Agriculture

Extract: The WRL EES fundamentally underestimates and misrepresents the severe, multifaceted impacts of high-voltage transmission infrastructure on agricultural operations. The EES’s optimistic framing of residual impacts as “minor” or “negligible” is contradicted by independent research, industry guidelines, and the lived experience of farming communities.This analysis identifies major shortcomings in the EES’s approach, demonstrate these flaws undermine agricultural viability…

Chapter 23 – High Level Assessment of Land Impacts

Extract: The EES assessment of contaminated land impacts for the WRL is inadequate by best-practice standards and independent evidence. It underestimates the risks of encountering, mobilizing, and managing contamination, lacks robust site-specific controls and monitoring, and fails to provide the transparency and accountability required to protect human health, landholders, and the environment…

See the full EES here

Don’t wait. Start your submission today and stand up for Western Victoria.

Start here: Download the EES Submission Guide

Western Victorian Community Alliance & Moorabool Shire EES Drop-In Sessions

The Western Victorian Community Alliance, in partnership with Moorabool Shire, will be hosting three community drop-in sessions to support landholders in preparing their submissions on the Western Renewables Link Environmental Effects Statement (WRL-EES).

These sessions will not be attended by AusNet and are intended to offer genuine, practical guidance to help you complete your submission.

Please begin working on your submission beforehand using the guidelines above. Arriving with a draft will allow for deeper support and tailored advice.

Session Details:

• Bacchus Marsh – Lerderderg Library, 215 Main St
  Thursday 24 July, 4:00pm–8:00pm

• Myrniong – Myrniong Hall, 6 Short St
  Thursday 31 July, 4:00pm–7:30pm

• Ballan – Council Office, 15 Stead St
  Saturday 2 August, 10:00am–1:30pm

We will physically block access if we have to.

This Government has made its intentions clear.

They are trying to force through the Western Renewables Link by any means necessary, rewriting the law, bypassing consultation, and now activating a 10,000-page Environmental Effects Statement (EES) process that no ordinary landholder can fairly navigate.

They are not seeking permission.

They are demanding submission.

And they’ve backed that demand with pending legislation that empowers AusNet to enter private farmland by force, with police at their side.

This is not about consultation. It’s coercion.

This is not about climate. It’s control.

Let’s be honest: you gain nothing by cooperating.

You gain no goodwill, no fairness, no justice.

You only help them claim that consent exists where it clearly doesn’t.

The WRL has no social licence.

It is being propped up by misinformation, political deals, and a planning process stacked against the very people it harms.

The EES now live is designed to overwhelm – 40 days to respond to 10,000 pages.

No rural community has the resources to match that. And they know it.

But the WRL only works if we let it.

It only works if landholders stay silent.

It only works if communities are worn down.

It only works if we step aside.

But we will not.

We will lodge submissions.

We will lock gates.

We will expose their lies.

And if they try to enter by force, we will stand our ground, united.

Because this isn’t just about a powerline.

This is about whether a Government can crush its people in the name of progress, and whether its people will let them.

We say no.

Not on our land. Not under this law. Not through silence.

Communities across Western Victoria are rising.

They are choosing courage over compliance, action over fear.

The WRL will fall.

But only if we keep standing together

loud, proud, and unbroken.

We’ve been giving a lot of thought to what they call “net zero.”

It’s a phrase that rolls off the tongues of ministers and executives like a promise, as if it means the same thing in Western Victoria as it does in Treasury offices or city lecture halls. Net zero. Paris targets. The transition. Words polished to shine, but never once laid in the soil they claim to rescue.

Out here, we know what it really means.

It means the Western Renewables Link, an industrial invasion disguised as climate salvation. It means transmission towers gouging their way across hills, valleys, and fire-prone plains. It means bulldozers through thriving environmental areas. Chainsaws in native corridors.

They call it infrastructure. We call it environmental genocide.

Because what is it, really, when you threaten to annihilate the biodiversity of a landscape under the banner of “green energy”? What is it when you torch the ecosystems of already-fragile regions, fracture wildlife corridors, and sever soil systems that have sustained life for thousands of years?

It is ecocide, plain and simple.

The WRL doesn’t just threaten landholders, it threatens the land itself. It threatens the wedge-tailed eagle’s nesting grounds. It puts fire-prone country under greater risk by slicing firebreaks through bushland. It exposes dry forests to erosion, salinity, and disease. Once these places are torn apart, they don’t return. And no tower ever brought back a tree.

All of this under a plan that has an Unfit Environmental Effects Statement. No independent review. No real consent. And yet the WRL is declared “committed” by VicGrid and its architects, whose models count profit margins, but never species loss, soil health, or intergenerational stewardship.

Out here, we are custodians. We know these lands, because we walk them, work them, and protect them. We know where the grass thickens before a storm. We know which fence line the echidnas cross. And we know this project is not a path to decarbonisation, it’s a highway to environmental devastation.

Let them not say, years from now, that no one warned them. That no one stood to defend the native ground they paved in the name of progress. Because we are standing now.

We do not whisper. We declare.

We reject the WRL, not because we reject change – but because we refuse to sacrifice our ecosystems to a plan built on deception, coercion, and short-term gain.

The line has been drawn.

And we will not let them cross it.