City-based teal independents have crossed the great dividing range to support Pilliga and Liverpool Plains farmers and traditional owners fighting a Santos coal seam gas project and the accompanying Hunter gas pipeline.
North Sydney MP Kylea Tink, who grew up in Coonabarabran on the edge of the Pilliga, returned to NSW’s north-western slopes on Wednesday with fellow independent Sophie Scamps to hear the concerns on local landholders.
They were invited by the former federal independent Tony Windsor, who has a farm in Werris Creek on the Liverpool Plains.
The battle over the project has come to a head after Santos restarted seismic testing in the area in late January. Santos has also started contacting landholders to gain access for the Hunter gas pipeline, which the NSW government declared critical state-significant infrastructure for “economic reasons” in December last year.
Although Santos holds two petroleum exploration licences south of the 95,000 hectare Narrabri coal seam gas project, it has yet to confirm its plans. Santos did not respond to questions from Guardian Australia.
It comes as the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, last week approved another project by Santos to open 116 new coal seam gas wells in Queensland’s Surat Basin.
Tink and Scamps flew over the Liverpool Plains and then met with farmers and traditional owners in a community forum to discuss the gas projects.
Tink said that if both Labor and Coalition won’t listen to communities on issues such as coal seam gas, change would have to come from the crossbench.
“[The Santos project] is a really good example of this,” Tink said.
“We sit in the largest crossbench in the house with 16 [MPs], four of them are Greens. It is about changing the people who are carrying the message stick so they are not using it to beat you over the head.”
Scamps told the audience about her experience organising a successful community campaign during the 2022 election, and recommended farmers concerned about the gas project endorse a community-selected independent.
“If you want someone to genuinely represent this community from within this community, you need a community independent,” Scamps said. “Because who is representing the farmers?”
Helen Strang, a Tambar Springs farmer and president of the Tambar Springs branch of the Country Women’s Association, attended and said locals had written letters about the issue and visited their state politicians to no avail.
“I think a lot of us are feeling very much taken for granted,” she said. “It’s taken 12 years of our lives, spending time away from our beautiful families and growing beautiful produce.”
Traditional Kamilaroi descendent Mitchum Neave, who is chairman of Red Chief Local Aboriginal Land Council, said governments were overruling First Nations people on the Narrabri gas project.
“How can governments justify the overruling of traditional people?” he said. “Not just us. We have all these farmers as well who don’t want [the project]. Government departments, environmental departments and government planning departments need to be held accountable.
“We are leaving our great-grandchildren a mess for a handful of dollars today.”
Kate Gunn, a farmer who hosted the information day, said she was hoping more people would realise that developing coal seam gas on the Liverpool Plains was an “exceptionally bad idea”.
Gunn is one of a younger generation of farmers. Soon after she returned to the land, the first big coalmining project was announced for the region. Since then, both BHP’s Caroona coal project and Shenhua’s Watermark coalmine have been dropped. Now she is dealing with the Santos project.
“There’s a lot of us that are very committed and the number is growing,” she said. “I went to town yesterday and was asked for my phone number and people said ‘make sure you ring me next time you have a protest or a blockade. I want to come and hold a sign’.”
Darling Downs farmer Liza Balmain travelled 800km from Cecil Plains in Queensland with Suzie Holt, a former independent candidate for Groom, to meet with the farmers and share their experiences with coal seam gas developments.
Balmain said their community held their first rallies in Cecil Plains in 2010 after they discovered Arrow Energy were exploring for gas in their area on the Condamine floodplain 75km west of Toowoomba.
“We are in a similar but different situation. We are facing an onslaught of coal seam gas,” she said.
“Like the Liverpool Plains, it is some of the best farming land in Australia, and [ours] is classed as priority agricultural area (PAA) land.”
Balmain and Holt are advocating for a trigger in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act – similar to the water trigger – which would protect prime agricultural land.
The water trigger is an amendment introduced by the Labor government in 2013 that requires coal and coal seam gas projects that affect water resources to be assessed under national environmental laws.
