“Come for the fight, stay for the night.” So reads the invitation to a $50 a-head fundraising event being held this Saturday at Marnoo Cricket Ground by Farmers Fightback – a “proper country get together” that will be headlined by One Nation duo Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce – “kids welcome!”
Farmers Fightback was founded by Wimmera farmer Ben Duxson, originally in opposition to the VNI West transmission line – the contested grid upgrade the state LNP has vowed to scrap if it wins the November election.
But the group is now being billed and promoted as a national movement, “standing against industrial renewables being forced onto Australia’s best farmland.”
The picture being painted – in vivid colours by certain politicians and the Murdoch media – is one of fed-up farmers united in a David and Goliath battle against “state-owned transmission utilities, and a cast of foreign multinationals.”
But the story that isn’t being told is that some of the biggest victims of increasingly strident “grass roots” opposition to renewable energy development are other farmers – those who support and wish to benefit from renewables.
