Handing our Parks back to the beef industry    1 (20%)

Putting power lines underground    2 (40%)

Increasing speed camera renenue    2 (40%)

The fossil fuel industry is sure getting their money’s worth with Ted Baillieu and his Liberal/National Party Government.

In Ted Baillieu’s Victoria, building a wind farm is now almost impossible and the feed-in tariff for solar panels has been cut by over 50%.

However, building a coal mine 800m from a primary school is OK, and if a mining company wants to dig for coal or drill for gas in your backyard, polluting our land, water and air, there’s nothing you can do about it

Last week the Baillieu Government attacked renewable energy on two fronts.
First, they introduced new planning laws that allow anyone within 2km of a proposed wind farm to veto the proposal.
The Clean Energy Council estimates that this will cost Victoria $3.6 billion and thousands of jobs, as wind energy companies move to other states and other countries.
Victoria’s population density means that it will be virtually impossible to build any more large-scale wind farms beyond the ones which already have planning approval.

However, destroying the wind energy industry wasn’t enough for Ted, two days later he announced that the feed-in tariff for solar panels (photovoltaics) was being cut from 60 cents per kilowatt hour (60c/kWh) guaranteed for 15 years, to 25c/kWh, guaranteed for 5 years.
Estimates are that this will blow-out the payback period for putting solar panels on your roof (the time it takes before the amount you save on electricity covers the amount you spent on the panels) from around 7 years to around 14 years.
Again, thousands of jobs and large sums of investment money will be destroyed.

Not only are Baillieu’s 19th Century energy policies costing jobs, increasing our reliance on coal and damaging our economy, they will also result in higher electricity prices.



So the question to ask is why?

Why is Ted Baillieu willingly driving up the cost of electricity, cutting jobs and investment?
Why is he destroying an industry that has around 90% support amongst the Australian public?
Why is he abandoning climate action when he himself voted for a 20% by 2020 emissions reduction in the Victorian Parliament in 2010?
The answer to these questions is in who is benefiting from these policies.

As is often the case with energy policy in Australia, the beneficiaries of Baillieu’s policies are the powerful and well-connected fossil fuel industry, in particular the gas and coal-fired electricity generators.
As mentioned above, once a certain amount of renewable energy is built into our electricity grid the average wholesale price of electricity begins to fall – eating into the profits of the coal and gas companies. If renewable energy is held back, then these companies can continue to bring in exorbitant profits and consumers get stuck with ever increasing electricity prices and greenhouse gas pollution.

THE Coalition government pushed ahead with its controversial alpine grazing trial despite receiving a key department's warning that no scientific, social or economic evidence existed to support it.

Documents released under freedom-of-information laws show Parks Victoria - managers of cattle grazing in the Alpine National Park before it was banned in 2005 - delivered categorical advice to the Department of Sustainability and Environment last December.



Despite this advice, cattle were quietly reintroduced in early January.

By March, Canberra ordered cattle from the park as the trial had not been approved under national environment laws. In July, The Age reported the state government had launched another plan to bypass federal laws, but by last month the federal government was considering new oversight powers of national parks to head off such a move.

The emails show Parks Victoria had raised concerns about selected grazing sites due to

recent flooding

and the presence of

threatened species

and other ''issues'', including the existence of

delicate alpine bogs and waterways.

Some sites could not contain cattle within their boundaries, the advice said.

The government deleted the site names from the released documents so it is impossible to tell if this advice was heeded by the department when finalising grazing areas

.

Parks Victoria also suggested that if the department wanted to test alpine grazing's effects on fire risk,

According to a department framework document, the government expected in the trial's first year to find fauna and flora species not previously reported or known. The Victorian National Parks Association said this was an admission that their site selection was based on old information and a thorough check for threatened species was not done.

said the association's park protection spokesman, Philip Ingamells.

BEFORE European settlement up to 80 per cent of the wet eucalyptus forest of Victoria's central highlands was old-growth mountain ash, with trees taller than 90 metres towering above the landscape.

According to research published in US journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,

The paper says decades of logging and frequent bushfire have reduced the area of old-growth to about 2000 hectares - 1.2 per cent of the forest area north-east of Healesville.


Lead researcher David Lindenmayer, from Australian National University's Fenner School of Environment and Society, said if the current combination of clearfelling and fire continued the mountain ash could be lost and replaced by wattle, or ''acacia scrub''.



''If it collapses into acacia scrub, it is impossible to get out again. It really is a catastrophe in the true sense of the word.''