Who Profits from the Protest? Transmission, Turbines, and the Dark Money of Distrust

by Leo Gaggl • opinion

In the Wimmera Mallee town of St Arnaud in 2023, around 300 residents joined a tractor rally through the streets to protest renewable energy infrastructure. At a community meeting about the proposed VNI West transmission project, government representatives were heckled until Victoria Police advised the meeting be adjourned. More than 80 landholders signed a declaration refusing survey access to the company responsible for building the transmission line. Many of them had first learned their properties were in the proposed corridor through a QR code in a local newspaper.

The anger in regional communities is real. The concerns behind it (inadequate consultation, genuine uncertainty about land impacts, the industrialisation of farming landscapes that families have worked for generations) are not manufactured. A new ANU study documents them in careful detail, and they deserve to be taken seriously.

The question nobody is asking loudly enough is: who is paying to ensure those real concerns never translate into a negotiated outcome? And why do Australia’s political donation laws make that question nearly impossible to answer?

Knockacummer windfarm by Julie C, on Flickr
"Knockacummer windfarm" by Julie C (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Concerns Are Real

A recently published study from ANU researchers Eleanor Buckley and R.M. Colvin, “Transmission, turbines, and trust”, gives us an unusually clear picture of what is actually happening on the ground in the Wimmera Mallee. They conducted nineteen in-depth interviews with active participants in the regional renewables opposition movement.

What they found should not be dismissed. The concerns these landholders raise are legitimate: the industrialisation of country their families have farmed for generations; the noise and visual impact of turbines on properties they can’t leave; the fear that easements and contractual caveats will constrain how they work their own land; real uncertainty about who pays for decommissioning when the turbines reach end of life; and the documented failure of community consultation processes that ask for submissions and then proceed as though they were never received.

Regional Australia has a long memory for exactly this kind of intervention: the mines that opened, the royalties that flowed to capital cities, the boom towns that struggled when commodity prices shifted. Scepticism of anyone arriving with government backing and a claim to be acting in your interest is not irrational: it is earned. These concerns deserve genuine answers, not dismissal, not platitudes about the national interest, and certainly not the performative consultation the research describes.

But here’s what the research also reveals, and what doesn’t get enough airtime: the genuine concerns of these landholders have been systematically amplified and weaponised by interests that have nothing to do with their welfare.

The Climate Obstruction Playbook

Professor Christian Downie at ANU’s School of Regulation and Global Governance has spent years mapping what he calls the “climate obstruction playbook”, the toolkit deployed by fossil fuel interests to slow, delay, or derail climate action. He laid it out in detail on the 7am podcast, and the pattern is playing out in Australian regional communities right now.

The key shift Downie documents is this: outright climate denial is largely finished. It’s been replaced by something subtler and more durable: delay. You don’t need to win the argument. You just need to prevent a decision from being made. Every month of manufactured controversy is another month of fossil fuel revenue, another quarter before a coal plant closes, another year before a gas contract expires. The goal is not truth. The goal is time.

The tactics are specific:

Astroturfing. You build organisations that look like grassroots community movements but are funded by industry. “Australians for Natural Gas” is a textbook example, an industry-funded campaign presented as an independent community voice. In the United States, Edelman ran the “Energy Citizens” campaign featuring paid actors in advertisements designed to look like genuine public protest. The mechanics translate directly.

Manufactured statistics. You circulate claims that are technically sourced but stripped of context. The Buckley and Colvin research documents how a claim that “70 per cent of Victoria’s agricultural land” would be consumed by renewables spread through regional Facebook groups with wildfire speed. It originated in a Victorian Government offshore wind policy paper, cited specifically to argue against onshore-only scenarios, as an implausible worst case. The full context was stripped. When the government later removed the document from its website (acknowledging the confusion it had caused), that removal became, in regional communities, proof the government had been caught lying. The misinformation self-seals.

Co-opting real grievances. This is the most cynical move in the playbook and the hardest to counter. You take the genuine, valid, documented concerns of regional landholders and amplify them until they become part of a broader narrative that primarily serves gas and coal interests. The research documents participants who connected their opposition to renewables with COVID-19 lockdowns, government overreach, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum. These are not connections that arise organically from a concern about transmission easements. They are connections that have been built, cultivated, and distributed, through Facebook pages, through regional “tours” by think-tankers, through a media environment in which Sky News emerged as the most trusted outlet among many participants, while the ABC was viewed as a tool of the “left-wing” urban outgroup.

A national co-ordination network has quietly formed. The research documents how opposition groups from the Central-West Orana REZ in New South Wales travelled over 1,000 km to share strategies with Wimmera Mallee landholders. The “Reckless Renewables” rally in Canberra in February 2024 drew up to 500 attendees from across REZ-impacted regions, with prominent politicians, including Barnaby Joyce, who has publicly labelled renewable energy zones “disgusting”, providing political legitimacy to a movement that the obstruction playbook had spent years cultivating.

The playbook also relies on a silence closer to home. Across these regions there are farmers with science degrees, agricultural professionals, long-term graziers who understand the numbers well enough to know the claims don’t hold up: that the 70 per cent figure was nonsense, that the energy viability arguments contradict the modelling, that their communities are being played. Many say nothing. Some out of a misplaced solidarity with a community identity they don’t want to fracture. Some out of genuine fear: these vested interests carry real local weight, sponsoring agricultural shows, advertising in the papers that cover these towns, wielding political connections that make public dissent a costly choice in a small community. That fear is not unfounded. But every educated voice that stays quiet extends the life of a lie. And it is the farming communities themselves, not the fossil fuel lobby watching from a distance, who absorb the consequences of a transition handled badly because honest local voices went unheard. I’ve had those conversations with farming friends both in Europe and Australia.

The Puppet Masters Behind the Protest

Follow the money and you don’t find a farmer’s hat. You find the deep pockets of the fossil fuel lobby.

Gina Rinehart’s company Hancock Prospecting tipped $4.5 million into the Institute of Public Affairs in a single two-year period. The IPA produces “research” claiming renewable energy targets will “sacrifice” prime agricultural land, figures the experts at AEMO have assessed as grossly exaggerated, and distributes those figures into regional communities where they do their intended work.

Groups like Australian Energy Producers and the Minerals Council lobby hard for the “Future Gas Strategy,” ensuring that even as politicians talk about net zero, the policy environment remains hospitable to the very companies funding opposition to the transition.

In the 2023-24 financial year, fossil fuel interests donated nearly $4 million to the major political parties.

The Donation Laws That Make It Possible

None of this requires a conspiracy. It just requires Australia’s political donation laws, which are designed, whether by intent or convenient neglect, to keep the machinery invisible.

In this country, you can contribute $16,900 to a political party and never appear on any public register. You can split larger amounts across state and territory branches to stay under that threshold. And even when disclosure is required, the public doesn’t find out for up to 18 months, well after the electoral moment has passed.

Here is the part that should provoke genuine anger across the political spectrum: both major parties have taken this money.

This is not a story about Labor versus the Liberals. Labor has taken fossil fuel donations. The Coalition has taken fossil fuel donations. The Nationals have built a political identity around the city-versus-country divide that the obstruction playbook runs through, providing politicians willing to appear at rallies and lend credibility to manufactured campaigns. The Greens have pushed for donation reform and been blocked. The result is a bipartisan environment in which the rules that would expose the manipulation are controlled by the people who benefit most from the opacity.

Oil and gas companies spending millions on PR to shape community attitudes toward their competitors is legal. Coordinated campaigns designed to look like grassroots outrage are legal. Dark money flowing through think tanks and into regional media and community events is legal. None of it needs to be disclosed in any meaningful timeframe.

Every transmission line delayed by manufactured controversy is another year of life for a coal-fired power station. Every regional community turned against a wind farm is a win for extractive industries that have spent decades treating regional Australia as a resource to mine, not a community to sustain.

This Is Not City vs Country

The opposition to renewable energy in regional Australia is not a city-versus-country story.

The actual city-versus-country divide is real and has a long history in Australian politics. Regional communities have legitimate, durable grievances about the distribution of economic benefits, about infrastructure funding, about policy decisions made in capital cities by people who have never driven three hours to get to a hardware store. Those grievances deserve honest engagement.

But the obstruction playbook has learned to speak fluent regional grievance. It has taken the genuine memory of being exploited (the mines that opened and the royalties that flowed elsewhere, the commodity boom towns that struggled when prices dropped) and redirected that memory toward renewable energy infrastructure, which is the one thing that might actually give regional communities a permanent, sovereign stake in the energy system running on their land and their wind.

That is the particular cruelty of the playbook. It weaponises the experience of exploitation to defend the exploiters.

The Buckley and Colvin research identifies something important here: the urban-regional divide narrative is asymmetric. It holds enormous power in regional communities. But empirical research doesn’t support the intensity of that division in practice. Many urban Australians actively want regional communities to benefit from the transition. A 2025 survey by Farmers for Climate Action found over three-quarters of Australian farmers support a nationwide model for community benefit funds tied to every energy project.

That’s not the story being funded to be told.

What Real Engagement Looks Like

The research also points toward what actually works, and it looks nothing like the current approach.

Local ownership. Community energy projects (where communities host and govern the infrastructure, receive meaningful income, and have genuine decision-making power) operate with a fundamentally different social dynamic than a multinational arriving with compulsory acquisition authority. More than 100 such projects exist in Australia. They are the exception. They should be the starting point.

Consultation that actually changes things. When a landholder spends hours preparing a submission about the impact of a transmission corridor on their property, that submission should change something. The research is specific: participants attended meetings, wrote formal submissions, logged concerns through official processes, and then watched decisions proceed as if none of that had occurred. That is not consultation. It is a liability-management exercise dressed as democratic participation. The difference is legible to anyone who has ever dealt with a bureaucracy that has already made up its mind.

Transparent benefit sharing. The benefit sharing models already exist. Energy sector advocacy groups have published detailed guidelines. What’s missing is the political mandate to make them standard practice. A mandatory community benefit fund (tied to every energy project, sized to be meaningful rather than symbolic) removes one of the key levers the obstruction playbook pulls. You cannot as easily weaponise a community that has a real financial stake in the project next door.

Fixing the Plumbing

I’ve written before about the pattern I see across digital infrastructure, from smart home devices to AUKUS submarines: if you can’t see how a system works, you can’t fix it when it breaks, and you discover what you actually own when the terms change and you’re locked out.

Our political donation system is a proprietary operating system for influence. You cannot see the dependencies. You cannot audit the decisions. You find out what the terms were 18 months after the fact, when the electoral damage is done and the next consultation process has already begun.

Fixing it is not complicated. Disclosure from the first dollar. Real-time reporting. Caps that actually constrain influence rather than thresholds calibrated to preserve it. Mandatory disclosure for PR campaigns funded by fossil fuel interests when they are designed to influence public policy. These reforms have been proposed repeatedly. They have failed because the people who would vote for them are the people who currently benefit most from the system.

Regional communities hosting our energy future deserve honest engagement on honest terms. They deserve to know who is funding the think-tank representative who turned up to their community hall with a presentation about “sacrifice zones.” They deserve a consultation process where their submissions are read by people with the authority and the genuine intent to act on them. They deserve benefit-sharing arrangements that make them stakeholders rather than casualties.

And they deserve not to be used, by anyone, left or right, urban or rural, corporate or activist, as props in a campaign that serves someone else’s interests.

The yellow signs are real. The anger is real. The question the obstruction playbook is designed to prevent you from asking is: who put the sign in your hand, and what do they get from your protest?

References

←The Treadmill Nobody Chose

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