Waubra Foundation Calls On Greens To Support RECS Fraud Investigation

We welcome Senator Di Natale’s referral of the Foundation to the Australian Taxation Office and the newly established Charities Commission. We have just been through that process with the ATO earlier this year, and were given a clean bill of health.

It is clear that there are many people, including the Greens, who do not wish the Waubra Foundation to continue to raise the serious issues of adverse health effects of noise pollution, specifically from infrasound, low frequency noise and vibration in addition to audible noise in the higher frequencies.

This is yet another attempt to “shoot the messenger”.

Health impacts from environmental noise, and the need for research have been known to the Australian Government authorities for years, yet almost no research has been conducted, and noise pollution is not currently regulated to adequately protect the health of the community, especially in rural areas.

The Foundation has helped provide information and support to individuals and communities impacted by coal mining noise, CSG field compressor noise, and gas fired power station noise in addition to wind turbine noise.

We are disturbed by the widespread practice of noise polluters in all these industries harming people with unregulated noise pollution, then buying them out and silencing them with gag agreeements. This has perpetuated the widespread ignorance amongst the health profession concerning the impacts of this lower frequency noise pollution on health, when the dose is high enough and the exposure duration long enough.

We would like to ask the Greens the following questions. Given that both Senator Di Natale and Senator Milne have used parliamentary privilege to attack the personal reputations of some of the directors of the Waubra Foundation, we are particularly interested in their responses.

1. Why did you choose to vote, as a bloc, on 14th March, 2013, not to support Senator Madigan’s motion for the investigation of the RECS (Renewable Energy Certificate) fraud at Waubra? The amount involved at Waubra alone is approximately $80 million, all funded by the Electrical consumer. In contrast, the total donations to the Waubra Foundation over the three years of our operation is just under $200,000.

The Waubra Foundation believes that this fraud at Waubra is the tip of the iceberg and that when other wind developments are properly audited by independent acousticians with no financial ties to the wind industry that some of these wind developments will also be shown to be non compliant with existing state noise pollution regulations. It is not currently possible to do that, because wind developers refuse to hand over the wind mast and power output data which would enable an independent audit to be conducted. We have been advised by the Clean Energy Regulator that they rely on the “honesty” of the wind developers with respect to their compliance, and there is no audit performed which is independent of the wind developers.

2. Why do you continue to ignore the mounting evidence of serious harm to the health of vulnerable rural citizens, some of them Greens voters, who have been harmed by environmental noise pollution from sources such as CSG field compressors, gas fired power stations, and coal mining as well as wind turbines?

3. Do you sanction the use of gag agreements when the noise polluters buy out desperately sick people?  We know this is occurring at all these noise polluting developments.

4. Do you agree that rural residents living near wind turbines are “collateral damage” in the “war on climate change”? Some rural residents have been told this directly by bureaucrats in departments of planning and renewable energy, and we would be interested to hear your views.

5. If rural residents are not considered by you to be acceptable “collateral damage” why is a blind eye being turned by the Greens to breaches of noise pollution regulations, and consequently fraud to the tune of millions if not billions of dollars?

6. How much money have the Greens received over the last five years, both individually and as a party, from the wind industry, and wind turbine manufacturers or from any of its agents or employees?

The Waubra Foundation looks forward to publishing your responses.