Stop Labors Towers Newsletter – September 26, 2026

 

IN THIS ISSUE

  • THIS FIGHT IS NOT OVER
  • The Labor party I voted for is gone
  • Labor’s WRL cost review looks like cover for a decision already made
  • Leader of the government found guilty of contempt of parliament
  • The Victorian government’s cruel farce: forcing landholder handshakes while moving the goalposts
  • The Australian – Barnaby Joyce demands $900bn renewables royal commission as condition to guarantee government supply
  • WRL EES submission attached written by the late Ken Mcdonald 

THIS FIGHT IS NOT OVER

The ink is dry on their WRL Environment Effects Statement, a hollow, deeply flawed approval that falls across our properties like a death sentence. Make no mistake: if you believe this fight is over simply because a bureaucrat signed a paper, you are underestimating this communities resolve.

Under the current Labor administration, the Western Renewables Link will drag its iron carcass across our horizons unless we stop it. Now is the moment to shatter their certainty.

This project cannot proceed. The distant voices in the city feed us a steady, calculated diet of ideological platitudes – promises of “keeping the lights on” and a blind, desperate march toward net zero. But they do not pay the true price of their own misguided and self-serving ambitions. The financial ruin will be wrung from the pockets of every consumer, while the irreversible devastation of the environment is left entirely for us to inherit. This Labor administration has mutated into something unrecognizable: a self-serving, authoritarian monolith that operates with a deaf and arrogant detachment from the rural lives it is tearing apart. Their failures across the board are staggering, but it is here, in the shadow of the WRL, that their negligence becomes fatal.

These towering high-voltage lines will not just scar the landscape; they will take lives. When the summer winds howl and the landscape turns to tinder, the bushfire risk they are violently forcing upon us will not be a matter of abstract policy, but of raw survival. This project will displace families from the quiet sanctuaries they have poured their sweat into. It will tear through the heart of our agriculture, ripping up the very dirt that sustains us, all to satisfy an arrogant political agenda.

The Labor party of old, the one that might have once listened to the people who work the land, is dead and buried. In its place sit disconnected overseers, intoxicated by their own authority, trading our safety, our homes, and our futures for their own political optics.

The stand we must take now is absolute. This government must be thrust from power.

Every single person reading these words has one job, and it requires a fierce, unyielding commitment. You must take this message and spread it far and wide. Over the next two months, you must become relentless lobby your friends, your families, your coworkers, and your neighbours. Make them understand what is at stake. Andwhen you walk into that polling booth, you must place Labor last on the ballot. It is no longer just a vote; it is the only weapon we have left to defend our land from the fire and the iron.

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THE LABOR PARTY I VOTED FOR IS GONE

Ben Carroll is not a new beginning. He is a senior product of the government now asking Victoria to forgive it.

I grew up believing Labor stood for working people.

Labor did not begin in corporate boardrooms, ministerial offices or expensive consultants’ reports. It emerged from workshops, building sites, factories, farms and union halls.

In 1856, Melbourne stonemasons put down their tools and marched for the eight-hour day. They demanded a fair division between work, rest and family life. Their victory helped establish Victoria as a birthplace of the organised struggle for workers’ rights.

That was the tradition I believed Labor represented: ordinary people standing together against concentrated power.

For much of my life, that belief earned Labor my vote.

But the Victorian Labor Party governing today has become the very thing it was created to oppose. The party established to protect ordinary people from entrenched power has itself become an entrenched centre of power – secretive, factional, wasteful and increasingly contemptuous of anyone standing in its way.

I do not say that lightly.

The Labor Party I voted for is gone. In its place stands the Labor machine.

The rot is not confined to one leader

“Rot” is a harsh word, but it is the right word.

Political rot does not mean every Labor member is dishonest. It means misconduct, secrecy, waste and contempt for accountability have spread deeply enough that they are no longer isolated incidents. They become part of the culture. Senior figures defend the system, benefit from it, remain silent within it or suddenly discover its failures only when an election approaches.

This is not simply the record of Daniel Andrews or Jacinta Allan. It reaches across Labor’s current senior ranks, its factions, its ministerial offices and the upper levels of government.

The Victorian Ombudsman found the so-called “Red Shirts” scheme was an artifice and wrong, with 21 Labor MPs breaching Parliament’s Members’ Guide.

Then came Operation Watts. The joint IBAC–Ombudsman investigation uncovered extensive misconduct involving members of a Victorian Labor faction and the misuse of public resources for factional purposes. Former Ombudsman Deborah Glass later described the behaviour uncovered as a form of “grey corruption” – the bending or breaking of rules to favour political allies and networks.

These were not accusations manufactured by Labor’s opponents. They were findings of

Victoria’s independent integrity agencies.

The Ombudsman also found that “creeping politicisation” had become a reality inside

Victoria’s public sector. Independent voices were being marginalised, major decisions were increasingly concentrated outside specialist departments, and some public servants were reportedly afraid their careers would be destroyed if they spoke openly.

The WRL has been developed under extraordinary secrecy, relying heavily on consultants and excluding key public-sector expertise.

That is not healthy democratic government.

It is what happens when a political party remains in power so long that it begins to confuse the interests of the party with the interests of the state.

Waste without accountability

Look at how this culture treats public money.

The Victorian Auditor-General found the decision to host and then cancel the 2026 Commonwealth Games cost taxpayers more than $589 million with “no discernible benefit.”

The Games business case was inadequate. Its original budget was unrealistic. Regional councils responsible for many venues were not properly consulted. The government later released a cancellation estimate that the Auditor-General found was overstated and insufficiently transparent.

More than half a billion dollars disappeared into an event that never happened.

Nobody resigned. Nobody accepted meaningful responsibility. Ordinary Victorians simply inherited the bill.

Victoria’s own budget now forecasts net debt reaching $175.6 billion in 2026–27 and $199.3 billion by 2029–30. The Auditor-General projects annual interest costs reaching $9.2 billion by 2028–29, reducing the money available for hospitals, schools, roads, police and other essential services.

Every dollar spent servicing this mountain of debt is a dollar that cannot repair a country road, shorten a hospital waiting list or support a struggling Victorian family.

This is not responsible Labor government. It is intergenerational vandalism dressed up as progress.

Ben Carroll was not an innocent bystander

Now Ben Carroll asks Victorians to believe he represents a “new direction”.

He says he became Premier to fight for working people. But Ben Carroll is not an outsider arriving to clean up somebody else’s government.

He entered Parliament in 2012, joined the ministry in 2017, served as Minister for Roads and Road Safety, held the Public Transport portfolio and became Deputy Premier in 2023.

He was inside the government. He sat within its senior leadership. He was part of the administration responsible for the debt, secrecy, infrastructure failures and deteriorating public confidence he now promises to repair.

The secret public-transport levy exposes the hollowness of his attempted reinvention.

The Auditor-General found that the government approved an additional annual one per cent charge on public-transport fares, on top of inflation-based increases, to help fund the Suburban Rail Loop and other transport projects. It was introduced without being transparently disclosed to commuters.

The charge was first approved in 2021 – when Ben Carroll was Minister for Public Transport. It was confirmed again by the government after he became Deputy Premier. Carroll says he was not involved in creating it, and I do not allege otherwise. But he has refused to say when he first became aware of it.

He promised to abolish the charge only after the Auditor-General exposed it.

That is not a new government voluntarily cleaning house. That is an old government scrambling to repair the damage after it was caught.

Carroll also served as Minister for Roads and Road Safety. Yet, weeks after becoming Premier, he publicly conceded that “the condition of our roads is not good enough.”

He now wants credit for fixing a system he spent years helping to administer.

Even his decision to establish a royal commission into alleged corruption in Victoria’s construction sector raises an unavoidable question: where was this determination while he was a minister and Deputy Premier in the government under which these problems were allowed to grow?

Ben Carroll may be a different face, but he is not a different government.

He is not the cure for Labor’s decay. He has been part of the senior leadership presiding over it.

The working person has become collateral damage

The same arrogance is now being inflicted on regional Victoria through the Western Renewables Link.

Farming families, landholders, firefighters, small businesses and our communities are expected to carry the consequences of a 190-kilometre overhead 500kV transmission line, with easements between 70 and 100 metres wide.

This is what Labor now calls standing up for working people: forcing ordinary families to defend their homes, farms, livelihoods and safety against a project backed by the full machinery of the state.

Labor celebrates the dignity of workers in its speeches, but disregards working people when they stand in the path of one of its grand projects.

It speaks of consultation while refusing to reconsider.

It speaks of fairness while transferring risk onto regional communities.

It speaks of protecting the environment while proposing to industrialise farms, landscapes and habitats across Western Victoria.

It speaks of social licence while reaching for compulsory acquisition when communities refuse to surrender.

That is not the labour movement I believed in.

Voting Labor out is not betraying Labor values

To every lifelong Labor voter who feels the same disappointment: you do not owe this government your loyalty.

A political party is not a football team. It does not deserve unconditional support simply because our parents voted for it, our families belonged to it or it once represented our values.

Labor must continually earn the votes of working people. This government has not.

At the next Victorian election, we must do the difficult but necessary thing.

TURN YOUR BACK ON THIS LABOR GOVERNMENT

Do not be deceived by a last-minute leadership change.

Do not allow Ben Carroll to distance himself from a government he helped lead.

Do not reward secrecy, factional misconduct, financial recklessness and contempt for regional communities with another four years of power.

Vote for candidates who will open the books, restore independent scrutiny, protect taxpayers, respect regional Victoria and subject projects such as the Western Renewables Link to genuine reassessment.

Voting Labor out is not a betrayal of the values the party once represented.

It may be the only way left to defend them.

Labor must lose power – not necessarily forever, but long enough to rediscover humility, accountability and respect for the people it was created to serve.

Sometimes a party must be defeated before it can be saved from itself.

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LABOR’S WRL COST REVIEW LOOKS LIKE COVER FOR A DECISION ALREADY MADE

We are the people who would be forced to live with the Western Renewables Link. Its towers would stand over our homes and farms. Its route would cut through the places we work, raise our families and know by heart. We would carry the risks long after the ministers who approved it had moved on.

For years, we have been told to trust the process. On 14 September, Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny concluded that WRL’s environmental effects were acceptable overall, while acknowledging that some impacts were likely to be significant. We are the people expected to live with those impacts. Her conclusion did not make them smaller.

The next day, Premier Ben Carroll announced an independent assessment of WRL’s costs. He spoke of transparency and promised that no compulsory land acquisitions would occur while the assessment was under way. For a moment, it sounded as though the government might finally stop and listen.

Then Energy Minister Jaclyn Symes told Parliament what the announcement meant: “There is no review of the project. There is no pause and review.” WRL would continue while its costs were assessed. Later, she declared: “Under a Labor government, WRL will proceed.”

So we are being asked to bear the impacts of a project whose Planning Minister has accepted them, whose Energy Minister has promised to proceed, and whose Premier offers a cost assessment while the project keeps moving. A price check with the answer already decided is not a genuine review.

Symes’s certainty is especially hard to accept from where we stand. How can she guarantee WRL will proceed before the government publishes the updated cost it says we all deserve to know? On 22 September, she was asked whether the government accepted a description of WRL as an approximately $4 billion project. She referred instead to the cost assessment. We deserve a direct explanation of the figures, what each includes, and what ministers knew when they committed to this line.

Carroll cannot stand aside from this contradiction. If his assessment can change the government’s decision, he should tell us what finding would make that happen. If nothing could change it, he should stop presenting the assessment as reassurance. To us, promising scrutiny while pressing ahead looks like cover for a decision already made.

We call on Kilkenny, Symes and Carroll to release the full cost history, the advice on WRL’s need and alternatives, and the records of project-specific dealings with unions and construction interests. Further commitments should stop while those records are independently examined.

We have spent years explaining what this project would do to our land, our safety and our lives. We will not be told that we have been heard while the government declares the outcome in advance. Stop WRL. Open the books. Let an independent investigation establish who drove this decision, whose interests it served, and what we have been kept from seeing.

Extract from:  Legislative Council 22 Sep 26

Western Renewables Link

Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (14:29): My question is to the Minister for Energy and Resources. AusNet is controlled by Brookfield Asset Management. On 6 March 2026 a Brookfield fund filed its annual report with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It described the Western Renewables Link as a A$4 billion project and stated:

“AusNet finalized the commercial framework with the Victorian Government and executed a binding construction contract for WRL …”

Minister, does the government accept Brookfield’s description of the Western Renewables Link as an approximately $4 billion project – yes or no?

Jaclyn SYMES (Northern Victoria – Minister for Energy and Resources, Minister for Environment, Minister for Climate Action, Minister for the State Electricity Commission) (14:29): I thank Mrs McArthur for her question. Mrs McArthur, as per my answer to Mr Davis’s question1, in relation to the government’s position we are undertaking a cost assessment to provide transparency to Victorians. We want to ensure that we have up-to-date independent information about the cost of this project. At this point in time, procurement has commenced, and as I have indicated in my answer, this is a cost assessment that will demonstrate the true cost of this project. But what we already know is that we cannot afford not to build transmission.

Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (14:30): Well, Minister, you failed to answer the question. On 18 May, more than two months after the $4 billion Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure, PAEC asked your predecessor to provide updated advice on total estimated investment costs for WRL. She replied, ‘Absolutely,’ acknowledging those costs end up on bills. Yet on 27 May your government responded in writing with only a $1.53 billion construction estimate and a $1.6 billion construction contract. If Brookfield’s $4 billion figure is wrong, will you unequivocally state today that the government’s total investment cost for WRL remains at $1.53 billion?

Jaclyn SYMES (Northern Victoria – Minister for Energy and Resources, Minister for Environment, Minister for Climate Action, Minister for the State Electricity Commission) (14:31): I thank Mrs McArthur for her question, and what I take from your question is a full endorsement of an independent cost review, which we have commenced.

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The Legislative Council today found the Leader of the Government, Jaclyn Symes, guilty of contempt of the Council after the Carroll Labor Government failed to hand over documents it had been ordered to produce.

The censure motion, moved by the Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Council, Bev McArthur, also suspends ministerial statements for the rest of the sitting day and refers Ms Symes to the Privileges Committee to consider further sanctions.

The censure follows a motion passed by the Council yesterday, 24 votes to 15 with the support of the entire crossbench present in the chamber, requiring Ms Symes to deliver the outstanding documents to the Clerk by 9:30am today. The Government failed to meet that deadline.

As at Tuesday, 46 orders for the production of documents were overdue with no substantive response other than claims of insufficient time. Well over half of these orders came from the Liberals and Nationals.

The Government has claimed executive privilege in response to 84 orders and made no privilege claim in just six. It has claimed insufficient time in response to 70 orders. Of the 1,535 documents the Government itself has identified as relevant, 630 have been withheld in full.

Mrs McArthur said: “Labor was given every opportunity to comply with this order.

“The Parliament extended deadlines, provided new document procedures to manage large requests, and yesterday gave them one final deadline which they ignored.

“The Premier often says under his government, ‘integrity is not optional’. Clearly that is not true.

“If ministers won’t submit to scrutiny, they shouldn’t expect an uninterrupted platform in this chamber to promote the government’s failed agenda.

“If you sow secrecy, you reap suspicion. Labor has sown secrecy on an industrial scale, and today it reaped the harvest.”

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THE VICTORIAN GOVERNMENT’S CRUEL FARCE: FORCING LANDHOLDER HANDSHAKES WHILE MOVING THE GOALPOSTS

The Victorian state government is orchestrating a masterclass in administrative cruelty and bureaucratic double-speak regarding the disastrous high-voltage transmission rollout across western Victoria. While politicians in Melbourne issue reassuring soundbites about “reviewing” the widely condemned infrastructure project, the private energy giants building it are simultaneously holding a gun to the heads of local farmers.

Recent correspondence to federal oversight authorities exposes a deeply disturbing contradiction that the state government is either too incompetent to manage or too cynical to correct.

Right now, developers are aggressively pushing regional property owners to sign binding, permanent easement agreements, enforcing a hard, rapidly approaching deadline. Meanwhile, the Premier has publicly claimed the entire project is under active review.

This staggering hypocrisy places immense, unfair pressure on farming families. How can any agreement be considered “voluntary” when the state refuses to confirm if the route, scope, or even the existence of the project will change?

The state government is essentially demanding that generations of agricultural legacy and land value be permanently surrendered based on a ghost of a plan. They are allowing developers to lock in land grabs before the public is allowed to see the results of this supposed review.

This is not a mere oversight; it is a profound failure of governance and basic procedural fairness. The logical, ethical sequence is undeniable: a review must be completed, and its findings published, before any landholder is forced to make a permanent decision about their property.

Local advocates have urgently appealed to the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner to step in where the state has failed. The demands are clear and justified: immediately suspend all developer deadlines, halt all finalizations of these forced “voluntary” agreements until the review is public, and force the Victorian government to explain this chaotic, predatory process.

The state government cannot have it both ways. They cannot hide behind the illusion of a review while allowing developers to lock farmers into permanent contracts in the dark. It is a cowardly dereliction of duty, and the rural communities in the crosshairs deserve far better than this orchestrated uncertainty.

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BARNABY JOYCE DEMANDS $900BN RENEWABLES ROYAL COMMISSION AS CONDITION TO GUARANTEE GOVERNMENT SUPPLY

-THE AUSTRALIAN

Monday 21 September – The Australian Newspaper – Robert Gottliebsen

BARNABY JOYCE DEMANDS $900BN RENEWABLES ROYAL COMMISSION AS CONDITION TO GUARANTEE GOVERNMENT SUPPLY

One Nations’s Barnaby Joyce declared at the weekend that a condition of One Nation guaranteeing supply in any Australian parliament would be the establishment of a

Royal Commission into the estimated $900bn Australian renewables disaster.

Any Royal Commission will uncover how, what started as a low cost way of harnessing Australia’s wind and solar generation potential, became a project that would burden Australia with a totally uneconomic power network.

Queensland has been smart enough to stay clear of it. But now Victorians are starting to wake up to the disaster and, if they effectively exit, not only will their power infrastructure costs be slashed, but it would leave NSW power users paying the bill for the renewables disaster.

Accordingly, if there is a Royal Commission it may not be a pleasant experience for directors of companies involved.

The Joyce declaration follows a series of commentaries by myself and others uncovering massive government mistakes and concealment.

Among my revelations have been:

The next election where the One Nation Royal Commission policy will be put before voters is in Victoria on November 28.

Already the Brookfield cost announcement issue is creating a dramas for Victorian Premier Ben Carroll, Opposition Leader Jess Wilson and the Nationals Party Victorian leader Danny O’Brien.

The two Victorian transmission projects that link Melbourne to the Snowy 2.0 Hydro battery and the NSW solar and wind farm projects are the 240 km VNI West project (which will require some 600 high voltage transmission towers) and the 190km $4b WRL requiring around 450 towers.

It would be highly unusual if Brookfield did not inform the Victorian government at the same time as informing the New York Stock Exchange that the project would cost $4bn (before return guarantees). But in a move reminiscent of his predecessors –

Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allen – Premier Ben Carroll ordered an independent cost assessment of the WRL and delayed the project.

But Carroll’s government does not need to undertake an independent cost assessment after the election. Brookfield has already done the job and almost certainly it is in the government’s possession. Carroll does not have to wait until after the election to make a decision. Voters can assume he is simply delaying and WRL will proceed if he remains Premier.

Liberal Opposition Leader Jess Wilson has also declared she wants to review the project by determining the costs. She can now reveal her intentions because she now knows the cost and she has already declared that the other half the link to NSW – VNI West – should be halted.

It makes no sese to build WRL for $4bn without the VNI link to NSW. On the surface its an easy decision for Wilson but it is politically dangerous given the so called “Teal seats”. Wilson’s “review” can and must take place before the election.

One Nation has already undertaken its review and declared it will stop both the WRL and VNI transmission lines. The Nationals stand to lose most of their seats in Western Victora to One Nation if there is no a clear Coalition decision given the staggering cost has now been revealed.

At the federal level, Anthony Albanese plans to make a strong appeal for Australia to join the UN Security Council. The main theme of his speech will be Australia’s role in curbing the harm social media is doing to younger people – an excellent plan. But in a briefing to Canberra journalists, he also revealed plans to mention the crumbling renewables scheme. That would be a bad plan.

Not surprisingly, the government refuses to make public the total cost and this will be a key target of One Nation calls for a Royal Commission.

In collaboration with Aidan Morrison, I put the cost of the entire renewables project at least $900bn. But it is exploding because the CFMEU is planning to extend its control over Snowy 2.0 to the rest of the project.

If the Victorian WRL and VNI transmission lines, which go through prime agricultural land, are blocked, then power regenerated by the Snowy 2.0 hydro battery will not get to Victoria and that puts the whole scheme in jeopardy.

Not only was drilling at the Snowy 2.0 hydro regenerator badly planned, but the transmission lines were placed at all the wrong places.

Around 2024-25 when it became apparent that many gas powered generators were needed to avoid blackouts the gas fired stations were not ordered. and now will take a decade to obtain and install.

The Liberal’s Wilson’s says that instead of building massive interstate interconnectors, the Coalition plans metropolitan “urban solar parks” — leveraging commercial and industrial rooftops. It’s a much better policy than the current renewables plan because transmission costs are slashed and farms are saved.

Like the current renewables projects, the Liberals will use gas as a back up for periods when the sun is not shining. And duplicating the current renewables plan gas generation equipment will take around a decade to install so coal will be required until the 2040s.

In Victoria, therefore both the government and Coalition plans require large amounts of coal generation. But because a likely Coalition plan abandons transmission network it will save our farm lands and slash network charges to consumers.

One Nation will aim for nuclear development. Australians rejected this at the last election, but at that time voters were offered a low cost renewable scheme to replace coal. The cost of that scheme has exploded. Nuclear, including Australian designed small nuclear plants and our pioneering work in using nuclear waste, must therefore again be reconsidered by carbon emissions concerned electorates One Nation will ensure it is a major issue.

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WRL EES SUBMISSION ATTACHED WRITTEN BY THE LATE KEN MCDONALD 

Western Renewables Link

Submission to Environment Effects Statement from Ken McDonald, Chairman of the Coimadai Avenue of Honour Restoration Society Inc.

Ausnet would have to respect any significant Cultural Heritage Survey findings. If this location was a sacred CHMP site the transmission line would have had to avoid the area 

I believe RSL Memorial sites should be given the same level of respect by any development & the WRL should not be allowed to impact the Lake Merrimu RSL area. 

Roger & Margaret Wood let me know today that Ken passed away a few months ago. I did hear him speak at the hearing asking Ausnets expert witness some questions. Ken spoke with passion about the impact of the WRL and he did not receive an answer to his question ” Will any of the Avenues trees be removed ” . 

Ken’s  submission conveyed there was no respect from Ausnet to plan the transmission line to impact the memorial site where they hold services, expect them to shift and also cross over the avenue of honour which has already had to be replanted because of road works in the past . Each tree has a plaque naming the fallen soldier in alphabetical order.

Understandably it will be upsetting to the RSL members and affected families if Ausnet remove any of the trees & force them to relocate the memorial service site . 

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HOLD THE LINE. FINISH THE FIGHT.

VOTE LABOR OUT.

HOLD THE LINE.

The Western Victorian Community Alliance