PROTECTING THE VISUAL BEAUTY OF THE SPA COUNTRY
Welcome to the homepage of the Spa Country Landscape Guardians, a community group formed with the one main focus of protecting and maintaining the environmental beauty of the Spa Country, Victoria. We encourage you to use this site as a basis for forming your own opinion about the true benefits for wind power, and encourage you to leave a comment on the site or send us an email.
We ask the question "Why do we so readily accept that everything 'green' is automatically good?" It is ok, and can we really be proud of, just blindly accepting any 'green' proposal? Many costs, not just monetary, are imposed on society because of these proposals and we seek to make these costs known.
We, at Spa Country Landscape Guardians, openly oppose the development of a proposed industrial wind farm at Stoney Rises, Smeaton. Wind Power's proposed Tuki development is exposes nothing more than a shonky developer seeking to profit from state/federal government handouts at the sake of small rural community. Why should we stand aside and allow these developers to come into our community and build an industrial wind farm right next to residential housing in an area renown for poor wind speeds? The proposed site is protected by a Significant Landscape Overlay and is host to some of Victoria's most beautiful volcanic rocks, yet this developer wants to be able to come in and simply profiteer from destroying one of Australia's most significant landscapes and basking in our taxpayer monies?
Our fight has not gone unheard - see below our front page on the Australian newspaper!
"The Australian" website, 25th September 2007
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Does Australia really want to follow in the steps of Germany and other European countries and later realise what a costly waste of taxpayer monies wind power is before then proceeding to pull the wind turbines down? We seek answers to the following unanswered questions:
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Where is the evidence to verify that wind power is actually a feasible and cost-effective alternative energy source?
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Why has no cost-benefit analysis of wind energy been done in verifying it as a suitable and efficient energy source for Australia?
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If the federal government is determined on promoting the use of green-energy, why then does this industry remain unregulated?
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Why have Wind Power Pty. Ltd. chosen a site that is covered by historic volcanic rock and protected by Significant Landscape Overlays?
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Why have Wind Power Pty. Ltd. chosen a site that is next to residential housing and thus will impose subsonic noise, exposure to 24-hour 7-days-a-week strobe lighting, interrupted views, increased traffic flow to the nearby residents?
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Why have Wind Power Pty. Ltd. repeatedly refused to release any data about the wind speed at the Tuki site?
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Why have Wind Power Pty. Ltd. failed to provide adequate community consultation?
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Why are Wind Power Pty. Ltd. only proposing to lease the land from the landowners and not buy it outright? Is this merely a way to dodge public liability insurance and ensure the quick on-sale to a private equity consortium so that they can later clean their hands of the project once they have received the government subsidies?
We demand, as within our rights as residents of the Spa Country, that these questions be answered before we just simply hand over our beautiful landscape to these outside developers. We encourage you to help us with this fight.