Noise Watch Australia Inc. To ACNC in Support of Waubra Foundation

Waubra is assisting our fight for a more accurate public understanding of the health effects and social isolation of intruding noise from every source… to better inform administrative and regulatory authorities of the health effects that are presently not acknowledged…

Dear Commissioner Pascoe

Re; Deregistration of Waubra Foundation

My contact with you is on behalf of network members of Noise Watch Australia. We put to you that the decision of Assistant Commissioner David Locke to declare that the Waubra Foundation is not a Health Promotion Charity is a significant misjudgement. Waubra is assisting our fight for a more accurate public understanding of the health effects and social isolation of intruding noise from every source. It is assisting our fight to better inform administrative and regulatory authorities of the health effects that are presently not acknowledged or identified. Not by them or by a Health system that is largely turning its back on many causes of health incidence. Public Health risk information is undermined by the lack of epidemiological studies in Australia. We are carrying a larger financial and personal burden of disease as a function of stress factors that escape regulatory and legal containment. Waubra is challenging these parties for their poor understanding and immorality of allowing noise that causes many health symptoms, particularly that associated with industrial turbine activity, to grow.

The basis of A/Commissioner David Locke’s judgement relating no rigorous independent scientific evidence of ill health caused by noise and vibration emissions from industrial wind turbines relies on select articles that support for his case, and ignores others. I will make reference to a range of studies that identify physiological effects of noise, particularly low frequency noise that contains significant energy levels. Waubra also reference many articles that do this on their web site and, in fact, have welcomed suggested reference we have identified. Dr Sarah Laurie, as the CEO of Waubra, goes much further and has made personal contact with many authors of studies that have concluded noise does cause harm to our health, to gather further understanding of the work they have undertaken and the reasons for doing it. This is the very thing that our carers and authorities should be doing, but instead they relate no interest. The strong connection to health academics around the world, represents the priority Waubra has for making Health a primary action plan.

To us, the decision to withdraw recognition of the positive contribution Waubra makes to assist health understanding in our community about the harm of noise, highlights the successful drive by corporate interests to undermine any chance the community has of avoiding torture. The lack of linear noise measures undertaken in the homes of residents evidences this drive further. Some have had to abandon their homes. We have had the SA EPA making only outside measures and under a noisy tree to cancel any clear perception of levels of emissions from neighbouring industrial turbines. Professor Fred Hansen and his colleagues challenged this study and provided clear evidence of its negative conclusions.

The EPA have ignored low frequency noise because that succeeded in excluding it in legislative regulation change in 2003. We have experienced arranged noise readings by SA EPA consultancy at other sites with intruding noise in the past. We have previously suggested a lack of integrity in this authority directly to the Health and Environment Ministers, and called for Ethics Council involvement in the design profiles of regulatory authorities. This request was denied, and the State Ethics Council funding was later withdrawn by the State Government.