Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026

Parliament of Victoria | Legislative Council | Second Reading
4 March 2026

David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan Region):

I rise to speak on the Energy and Other Legislation Amendment (Resilience Reforms and Other Matters) Bill 2026. The bill amends the Electricity Safety Act 1998 to require Victorian electricity distribution businesses to prepare network resilience plans and to provide for the approval and enforcement of these plans by Energy Safe Victoria.

We will be experiencing more frequent and more severe weather events due to climate change, and energy distribution companies will need to take proactive steps to prepare for these events. That might include fortifying infrastructure to withstand high winds, relocating assets from flood-prone areas or providing generators to communities left without power in the wake of an extreme weather event. The resilience plans will be enforceable and there will be penalties for businesses that fail to take reasonable steps to implement their resilience plans.

During the inquiry into climate resilience in Victoria, we heard evidence of communities being left without power for extended periods following floods and bushfires. It is great to see the minister responding to the findings and recommendations of that inquiry.

The bill makes other changes, including amendments to life support provisions under the Electricity Industry Act 2000 and the Gas Industry Act 2001, amendments to the National Electricity (Victoria) Act 2005 to support the transition of the energy sector from fossil fuels to renewables, and amendments to the Statewide Treaty Act 2025 to ensure the Self-Determination Fund can receive and administer the relevant benefits to traditional owners, as well as other minor amendments which I will not go into now.

There have been amendments moved by the government and the opposition. Let us look at the opposition amendments first, the first of which is to impose a requirement on electricity retailers to itemise the proportion of funds that will go into the Traditional Owners Fund. The legislation relating to the three groups receiving benefits under the scheme was passed in the previous VicGrid bills.

Those groups all received the same amount: landholders, affected communities and traditional owners. It is an accepted practice to include the compensation and benefit payments in the project costs, which are then reflected in the network component of the retail bill. The opposition say that this amendment is about transparency – that consumers are entitled to know what they are being charged for.

But if this is about transparency, why aren’t they seeking for all funds to be itemised on the bill instead of just the Traditional Owner Fund component? Why is the opposition only interested in the amount being paid to traditional owners?

Their other amendments seek to amend the national electricity act 2005 to remove various clauses relating to environmental assessments and to applications to the grid impact authority for approval of generation, storage or hybrid energy projects located outside of a declared renewable energy zone.

The bill amends the National Electricity (Victoria) Act 2005 to allow the Minister for Energy and Resources to make an order relating to the regulatory arrangements related to the declared transmission system where an environment effects statement has been ordered, so it allows those two processes to run concurrently. However, the conditions of the EES must be satisfied.

In relation to the clauses concerning applications to the grid impact authority, I was a little curious as to why the opposition would oppose the streamlining of processes to enable more applicants to connect to the transmission network, notwithstanding their rather well ventilated antipathy towards renewables.

These clauses require applicants to prove that they have undertaken due consultation and engagement with affected landholders, communities and traditional owners and that their project delivers meaningful social value and economic benefits. Those very requirements for appropriate consultation I think were admirably highlighted in the inquiry that the Environment and Planning Committee just completed into consultation.

I think the feeling of the committee was pretty much unanimous as to the ability to improve this. We have heard those opposite complain about the lack of consultation with landholders and communities. Surely they are supportive of requirements for a grid impact authority holder to consult and engage with these groups.

I suspect their resistance perhaps has more to do with the requirement to also engage with traditional owners in this process. This suite of amendments has nothing to do with transparency. I am afraid I feel that there is an element of this which is primarily dog whistling. We will not be supporting them.

Turning to the government’s house amendments which deal with the government’s compulsory acquisition powers, currently the compulsory easement acquisition process for transmission projects can only commence once the environment effects statement process, which includes the heritage impact statement, is completed.

This amendment will allow the EES process to run concurrently with the compulsory easement acquisition process, as currently happens with rail networks, with roads and with water infrastructure, so it is not exactly groundbreaking. It will create more certainty for landowners and bring forward completion dates.

The acquisition transaction will not take place until after the environment effects statement has been completed, and if it is found that the easement is unsuitable for the transmission line route, if it is not much use to the company anyway, the land can be sold back to the landholder. Either way the landholder is no worse off.

That said, this is an area we are looking forward to exploring further with the government tomorrow when we are in committee, although I am told it is fairly unlikely at this stage that an easement would be found unsuitable, as the process of calibrating the transmission line route is more advanced and the route has been altered literally thousands of times.

As I understand it, on the current western link proposal the EES is almost completed now and will be released later this year.

The amendment will align Victoria’s compulsory acquisition powers with those that currently exist in New South Wales and have done for some time. These have been uncontroversial and very successful in finalising those voluntary agreements with landholders.

In New South Wales 98 per cent of voluntary agreements are reached once the compulsory acquisition process has been triggered, and this is what Victorian landowners have been calling for. Emma Kealy, the Nationals member for Lowan, beseeched the Premier to get on with compulsory acquisitions in September last year.

I do want to put a caveat here, which is that I have not had a chance to contextualise this with Ms Kealy, but if I quote directly from the transcript, it says:

‘Have compulsory acquisitions of land and make it quick and make it fair so our people can move on … I call on Premier Allan: please, if you care about regional people, go out and do compulsory acquisition, as you would for a Melbourne project, and let our people deal with this, because the uncertainty is dividing families.’

That seems a very reasonable proposition from Ms Kealy. She is from out that way. As I said, there may be some contextual issue that I am missing, but it seems to me that that is a pretty solid support for exactly this concept of bringing forward the compulsory acquisitions.

Despite this, the coalition are not supporting these amendments. They say that the process undermines the EES process, which it does not, because it runs concurrently. It simply allows the government to trigger one process ahead of the other, which, as I have noted, has been working fine in New South Wales.

The outcome is ultimately the same. It is not about how many easements have been acquired. If the EES does not pass, the process will be the same whether the land has been acquired or not. It is bigger than any one site.

I am not denying that there have been issues with the rollout of the government’s renewable energy scheme, particularly when it comes to community consultation in the regions. We heard this loud and clear and shamefully in the Environment and Planning Committee inquiry into consultation processes. But this is something that needs to happen.

We must move away from coal-powered energy. Whilst it is all fine for Mr Limbrick to hark back to the days when we had lots of coal and say, ‘We need to build a new coal station,’ no-one is going to fund it, unless Mr Limbrick is going to be arguing that that should be funded by the state government, which would seem to be rather contrary.

In reading some of the opposition contributions to this debate in the Assembly, I cannot help but feel that all the outrage of generational farming families at having to carve off productive country that feeds the state, the nation and the world to accommodate transmission easements is a bit disingenuous.

It does not take much to recognise that the greatest threat to productive agricultural land and farming communities in Victoria is climate change. There will not be many more generations of farmers working that land as they do currently if we continue to delay Victoria’s transition to renewable energy. We will be supporting the bill and the government’s house amendments, and I commend the bill to the house.

[Council divided on Bill]

[Bill passed 22 votes to 17]