Wednesday, 19 February 2025

 Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (12:57): (1390) My question is for the Assistant Treasurer and concerns the Essential Services Commission’s grant of an electricity transmission licence to Transmission Company Victoria, TCV. Minister, this is a complete fiction. It is a travesty of a decision, ignoring not only the consultation responses from the community but the letter and the spirit of the rules. TCV has no intention whatsoever of transmitting electricity – it cannot and it will not. In fact as a wholly owned AEMO subsidiary, that would be completely inappropriate. This decision bends the rules, simply to allow TCV to exploit the law to force access to the 250 farms potentially affected by the VNI West project. Instead of changing the law, this government’s agencies are ignoring it. Yet again ministers are riding roughshod over existing rules to force through this unwanted ill-designed project. I ask the minister to request ESC reconsider this decision immediately.