Polwarth electorate power poles
Mr RIORDAN (Polwarth) (19:10): (6480) The adjournment debate I have tonight is for the Minister for Energy, and the action I seek is to receive an update on the promised rollout of power pole replacements that the government trumpeted back in December last year. In December last year we were promised across our region 7000 new power poles would be wheeled out and replace an ageing stock that is very, very problematic and a great cause of bushfire. Many of my constituents will recall the St Patrick’s Day fires; they will remember Black Saturday—all caused by failing power poles. The problem is the government said, ‘Every year for the next five years we’re going to replace 7000 poles in your district’, and no-one knows how many poles have been replaced because based on that we should have about 4200 done by now, and my great suspicion is that we are not even close to that at this stage. But more importantly, the Colac to Camperdown main power line, the 66-kV and the 22-kV power line, again last week caught on fire. That is two years in a row—a major power pole fault and fire. Both fires have occurred in the middle of winter when the risk to property, the risk to life and the risk to agriculture are greatly minimised. We all remember what happened on St Patrick’s Day—a pole fire, a catastrophic event, burnt out and destroyed lives and communities, and they are still trying to get over that from 2017. Of course no-one needs to remember the devastation caused in 2009 by the Black Saturday fires, once again caused by this same power line. This power line has demonstrated the danger it causes when the infrastructure is not kept up to speed. Last year in the middle of winter the pole just snapped and fell over and caused a fire. This year it was a brand new pole, a pole put in only when a road was widened at Weerite. It was a relatively brand new pole—within two years old—and it caused a major structural fire only two weeks ago. This government has claimed to have spent nearly $1 billion—$1 billion—on electrical safety installations on our main power connections, and yet it is still failing to keep people in my community safe. It is failing to give the confidence that the community needs that they can actually live surrounded by such a critical infrastructure that is just proving to fail and cause fire. So we need desperately for the minister to provide to the community an update on where the pole replacements are, where their commitment to the 7000 per year for the next five years is at, and have they met their target to have their own claim of 4200 by August this year? I await urgently the minister’s response.