Wednesday, 19 November 2025

 Renee HEATH (Eastern Victoria) (18:12): (2146) My adjournment tonight is directed to the Minister for Emergency Services. In Eastern Victoria Region, Labor is moving ahead with three large battery energy storage systems. They are proposed for Darnum, Shady Creek and Longwarry. This is a farming region. Families have worked this land for generations. Protecting soil and water quality is absolutely crucial. Many locals are worried. They have seen how this went wrong earlier this year with the Moss Landing battery fire in California – it burnt for hours, and toxic smoke spread across nearby farms. Soil tests later showed heavy metals had settled through the area. The cause is still unknown, and the long-term impact is also unknown.

These battery projects are planned in the middle of Victoria’s food-producing area. This region supplies huge shares of our dairy and fresh produce. If lithium ion batteries caught fire there, it would damage the land, and the impacts of that would be absolutely immediate and widespread. What concerns us is simple: our firefighters cannot safely extinguish even one electric vehicle battery fire – they have said so themselves – but Labor are still charging ahead with battery facilities that are a thousand times bigger than those EV car batteries, and they are to be placed in some of Australia’s most high-risk fire areas. This will create a serious gap in our firefighters’ capability. Blindly approving massive energy storage sites without equipping the supporting emergency services to handle them is, quite frankly, irresponsible and extremely unsafe. It leaves our regional communities that we all rely on exposed yet again and extremely vulnerable. The action that I seek is: will the minister commit to providing specialist equipment and training so firefighters can respond safely to these fires? And will she ensure that this is placed and these things are in operation before any BESS projects in Eastern Victoria Region proceed?