Along one wall, shelves are stacked with produce from Myanmar—biscuits, rice, noodles, spices and sauces. There are few customers but they stay a long time, sitting on the orange plastic chairs and talking at the long row of tables in the middle of the shop, or charging their phones at the tables by the other wall. People order coffee with condensed milk, or a plate of rice with curries from the bain-marie. Young men step outside for a cigarette and then return. One man has the remote control for the TV and chooses a string of Taylor Swift video clips from YouTube.

Shawfikul Islam comes in, wearing double denim and a backwards baseball cap. He arranged to meet here, but he’s late because he has been at the police station, helping interpret for two men who were in a dispute. The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic group in Myanmar—although the country’s government refuses to use the word ‘Rohingya’, and considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Shawfikul explains that there are 500 Rohingya in Melbourne—mostly living in Springvale—and about 3000 in Australia. Mainly, they are young men like him. “For Rohingya boys growing up, the dream is to escape,” he explains. “We’re the most unwanted community in the world.”

Shawfikul begins to introduce people in the community, starting with Kabir, the owner of the café.

Read more, and see Tia Kass’s illustrations, at SBS online

This is an illustrated feature for SBS, with short profiles of eight people from the Rohingya community in Melbourne. 

So they did something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago: bypass the network altogether. “We did it cheaper than connecting to the grid,” Burfitt, a retired electrical engineer, explains.

“We got the first juice about a month ago and we’ve been using the power to fit out the shed. We’re proud we could do something visionary.”

The solar panel and battery system at the Men’s Shed is connected with a bigger initiative: Totally Renewable Yackandandah. A group of residents want the north-eastern Victorian town to produce more electricity than it uses, by 2022.

They began working on their scheme twelve months ago, and already the number of solar households in the town has jumped. Now, one in every three houses has solar power, more than double the national average.

Matthew Charles-Jones, from Totally Renewable Yackandandah, says they’re surveying local residents and working on their grand plan, with the help of a council grant. In the meantime, new solar panels, like those on the brand new Men’s Shed will make it easier to reach the target.

Yackandandah is one of three Australian towns plotting to become 100 per cent renewable, along with Newstead, in central Victoria and Uralla in northern NSW. Newstead was recently awarded a $200,000 grant from the state government to develop its plan.

Nicky Ison, director of Community Power Agency, says the technology is the easy part. For larger-scale renewable energy schemes, however, funding remains a challenge. That means starting small and growing.

“These towns first need to do widespread energy efficiency campaigns, and look at household, business and community solar,” she says.

In Yackandandah, the community centre has set the example. Its old brick-veneer house has been transformed, with the help of a state government grant. Local tradies installed a large solar photovoltaic system, insulation, double-glazing, shading and efficient air conditioners for heating and cooling. Electricity bills have plunged by three-quarters.

“We’ve had some really cold days this week,” says Ali Pockley, the centre’s manager. “But you come in here and it’s just toasty. It was hopelessly inefficient up until the retrofit, no doubt about that.”

Ison says that while the idea of “energy self-sufficient towns” is unfamiliar in Australia, it is well established overseas. Last year, she organised a visit by Arno Zengle, the mayor of a village in Bavaria called Wildpoldsried, which produces more than four times the electricity it consumes.

Matthew Charles-Jones heard Zengle speak and was inspired by his message, because Yackandandah is about the same size as Wildpoldsried.

Although going fully renewable is an ambitious goal, the town has form: a decade ago, residents bought out the local petrol station, which was closing down. Now it’s a thriving community-owned business, encompassing hardware and farm supplies, with an annual $3 million turnover. It hands out $20,000 in local grants each year.

It also boasts a large solar photovoltaic array, funded in part by the local folk festival.

Charles-Jones says Totally Renewable Yackandandah is propelled by concern over climate change, but also – as with the petrol station – by a desire to strengthen the local economy.

“We’re not inventing anything new,” he says. “We’re just being smart about the way we’re doing energy.”

Read an edited version of this article at The Age online

Em Herring has grown garlic once before: in an old tyre on her grandpa’s beef cattle farm in Gloucester, NSW, when she was only 8 years old.

“He said to me, ‘Emily, if there’s one crop you grow when you’re older, it should be garlic’,” she recalls. “It’s funny that I’ve come full-circle.”

Herring is now 25, a tertiary-trained musician living in Northcote, and she’s turning back to the land.

She’s one of a dozen people – overwhelmingly young women – who are taking part in the inaugural Pop Up Garlic Farmers program, run by a group called Farmer Incubator.

From left, Paul Miragliotta, Emily Connors and Em Herring, with Age photographer Simon Schluter. Credit: Farmer Incubator

The fledgling farmers have each sown 500 cloves, at four different donor farms around Melbourne – in Coburg, Keilor, Ballan and the Mornington Peninsula. They’ll take the crop all the way from seed to market, harvesting in December, and learning about sales and marketing along the way.

“It’s a way to engage people in the city with farming,” explains Paul Miragliotta, from Farmer Incubator. “There are lots of positive things you can do in agriculture, like regenerating the land and growing local food systems. But getting into it is quite daunting if you’re not from a farm, or don’t have much money.”

The 32-year-old is in a similar situation himself, having recently taken his first lease on a small farm in Keilor.

He says garlic is the ideal crop for the experiment: it grows slowly over winter, which eases the pressure for watering; and it stores well, so the farmers won’t have to sell on a deadline.

“We’re also trying, in a small way, to bridge the gap between imported, supermarket garlic and boutique, farmers’ market garlic,” Miragliotta says.

Before Pop Up Garlic Farmers began, he interviewed six experienced growers for their tips. Number one is to avoid a “weedy nightmare”, he says. “Weeds are like street fighters and garlic can’t compete with them.”

Emily Connors hasn’t grown garlic before. She grew up in Sandringham, without a veggie patch. She always shopped at supermarkets and had no understanding of her food, how it was grown, or by whom. “I went to an all-girls Catholic school and I don’t remember a seeing a farmer at the careers nights!” she laughs.

She now works at CERES in Brunswick East, often labouring at its Harding Street market garden in Coburg, where she recently sowed her first garlic crop. The site has been a market garden since the late 1800s, when Chinese migrants began farming on the banks of the Merri Creek.

“I feel like I’m part of that rich tradition,” Connors says. She hopes the coming months will help steer her towards a market garden of her own.

“We have a food system dominated by companies which are profit-driven, rather than focussing on nurturing people and land,” she says. “This a perfect way of countering that system, and connecting our community with our food.”

Read this article at The Age online

PLAZA Palms was once part of the Cairns Colonial Club Resort. Its 71 units, with steep pitched roofs, are clustered on a large 10,000 square metre property, complete with a resort-style pool, only a few kilometres from the Cairns CBD. By 2010, it had fallen into disrepair and disrepute; it became a backpackers’ hostel, then accommodation of last resort.

“I’ve got numerous stories about people who came to this property and never escaped it – never escaped the system,” says Janet Guthrie, its new proprietor.

When Plaza Palms came on the market, Guthrie and her friend Stuart Wright saw opportunity. Both had worked for more than two decades in Aboriginal health and welfare, for government and for non-profits. They’d had enough. They wanted to risk something different.

“What I see is a very tired and lethargic homelessness sector here in this region. In Cairns, the rate of homelessness has increased,” Guthrie says. “I’m like: ‘Sorry, government, your plan is not working’.”

So, in 2011, Plaza Palms became Three Sistas, a for-profit business dedicated to providing affordable crisis and temporary accommodation. Over 270 people, including 44 kids, now live on site. Almost all of them are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders. Many, Guthrie says, are people “regurgitated through the system”, or mob from Cape York, who’ve come down for hospital appointments “and get trapped here for a number of reasons”.

There’s a café, a convenience store, a coin-operated laundry and a heavy emphasis on individual responsibility. A bus service takes kids to school – but it’s a service for which the parents must pay. Tenants are on six-month leases; as part of the deal no alcohol or drugs are allowed on site and visitors mustn’t stay past 10 pm. Three Sistas employs seven people, each of whom had been long-term unemployed.

This year, construction will begin on 20 new units to serve as patient travel accommodation – for that, Three Sistas has partnered with Indigenous health organisations in the Far North.

“We don’t receive any government funding,” Guthrie explains. “We don’t want any, simply because we see what happens to organisations that do. We never want to become complacent. We know we have to work hard everyday to produce income to keep our model alive.”

Three Sistas is a social enterprise.

It’s one of a growing movement. At a time when corporate capitalism roars as the engine of catastrophic inequality and environmental degradation, social enterprise has moved beyond buzzword to great hope. Here’s an answer for our throbbing mess: business for good.

“Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish,” said Bill Drayton, social entrepreneur, academic and founder of the Ashoka Foundation. “They will not rest until they have revolutionised the fishing industry.”

Drayton, an American, did more than anyone to popularise the concept throughout the 1980s and ’90s, and his is one of the most cited quotes about social enterprise. But his choice of analogy prompts reflection, for aren’t the oceans already overfished? And in whose interests would a revolution be – the industry or the people? Can it be both?

*

Jo Barraket had been an environmental activist until, in the early 1990s, cooperatives caught her interest – self-funded, they seemed better able to pursue their own ends than the grant-driven organisations she’d worked with. Later, Barraket switched to academia and wrote her PhD on the social and political dimensions of the cooperative movement. She describes coops as “the original form of social enterprise: they’re member-owned businesses that exist to meet some unmet need”.

So began Barraket’s “research fascination” with all kinds of social enterprise. She emphasises, however, that she’s not a wide-eyed advocate. “Just like any other citizen, I think some forms of social enterprise are fantastic, and some are frankly not my cup of tea. I do think that needs to be acknowledged.”

She waited ten years for the sector to collect some information about itself; until, impatient with waiting, she did it herself. The research, conducted in 2010 with Social Traders, suggested there were about 20,000 social enterprises in Australia, working in every industry of the economy.

Professor Barraket, now director of Swinburne University’s Centre for Social Impact, is updating that study. While it’s too early to interpret the data, she will venture that “social enterprise is alive and well”.

But – ahem – what exactly is a social enterprise?

 It’s a matter of debate. British social enterprise expert David Floyd cites folklore that Londoners are never more than six feet away from a rat. Likewise, he says, at a social enterprise conference you’re never more than six minutes away from “the social enterprise definition debate”.

Prompted by her Australian research, Professor Barraket adopted a big tent approach: social enterprises are organisations that exist to serve a public benefit, trade to do so, and plough a substantial part of their profit or surplus into fulfilling their mission. That might include charity op shops, community-owned wind farms, or cafes waited by refugees; fair trade chocolatiers, healthcare cooperatives, or recycling businesses staffed by people with disabilities.

She notes that her interpretation is broad enough to include Sanitarium, the large food company wholly owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

“Just being a social enterprise does not indicate that it’s more socially progressive than the thing next door,” Barraket says. “One person’s social purpose might be seen by another as quite regressive, depending on what their values are.”

The Big Issue – which is one of Australia’s best known social enterprises – employs a stricter definition: social enterprises should be not-for-profit and create work for marginalised people.

“There can only be one first principle – either shareholder return, or social benefit,” explains The Big Issue’s CEO Stephen Persson. “We all know businesses that will jettison environmental, social, or employment outcomes to ensure they deliver the profits that are expected.

“Our first obligation is not to make more and more profit, but to deliver a social return – and not go broke in the process,” Persson says.

The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, based at Oxford University, takes another line. It holds a torch for the entrepreneurs, not the enterprise. Its director, Dr Pamela Hartigan, is adamant that the two are different. A social entrepreneur pursues transformational change. A social enterprise may or may not; it could just chase money to support a charity’s existing programs.

Recently, Floyd, the British social enterprise blogger, has written that the definition debate has migrated upstream, to the academics and investors. Practitioners are too busy trying to keep their businesses afloat. But by anyone’s definition, more people are trying – and talking about – social enterprise.

Professor Barraket links its popularity to the rise of ethical consumption and the desire, especially among younger people, for workplaces where you don’t have to check your values at the office door. Social enterprises have also been “manufactured” by governments, she says, as they shift to market models of governing: outsourcing and devolving services to private providers. Traditional charities, too, are seeking new ways to secure their funding.

“We’re experiencing a contraction of resources relative to social demands in most societies in a complex world,” Barraket says. “That environment lends itself towards new thinking about social interventions and about business models.”

In this territory the role of social enterprise becomes fraught, liable to accusations of complicity in creating the disadvantage it seeks to address. In the UK, Conservative prime minister David Cameron has championed social enterprise as part of his vision for “Big Society”; it’s a key plank in his plan to slash budgets. Local governments’ discretionary spending will fall by two-thirds by 2020, leaving civil society to pick up the slack.

Persson foresees a similar situation in Australia: our aging population means fewer tax dollars will support growing social need. “The government should and will, I hope, always provide these services in part, but the economics will be really challenging. Unless we come up with different methodologies to deliver services sustainably, we’re leaving those people on the margins in a desperate situation,” he says.

As well as supporting street vendors to sell magazines, The Big Issue runs women’s subscription and school talks programs. One of its latest initiatives is The Big Idea, a competition in which university students spend a semester developing a business plan for a social enterprise. This year’s winners, from Central Queensland University, were Angus Hughes, Jessica Kahl and Mattison Rose, engineering students who devised The Shelter Project, flat-pack emergency housing made from pallets.

It’s one of several such incubators, including programs run by the School for Social Entrepreneurs, Impact Academy and Social Traders – where every month, about two-dozen people attend introductory workshops. “The first message we communicate,” explains Mark Daniels, its head of market development, “is that if you’re not prepared to run a small business, which involves worrying about wages and taking a risk, then social enterprise probably isn’t for you.

“People fall in love with the social side, but our key advice would be you’ve got to be really good at business to run one of these.”

His organisation founded the Social Enterprise Awards in 2013, and that year, the prize for “Youth-led Social Enterprise of the Year” went to Thankyou Water, a bottled-water business that devotes its profits to water aid projects. It has expanded into muesli, soaps and hand creams.

For Daniels, Thankyou is the perfect example of scalable commerce. “Now they’re in Coles and Woolworths they’re reinvesting millions every year, because they built a really strong business proposition,” he says.

Bottled-water is popular, but it’s a dubious product, banned in one Australian town, as well as a few schools and campuses. Its production and distribution wastes water and energy; its consequences are more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and more plastic in the oceans. Consumer advocate Choice estimates that it is almost 2000 times more expensive than tap water.

The business has reverberations, but measuring them makes for a difficult and contested calculus. While it is a brave observer who casts judgement, there is certainly cause for contemplation, not only celebration.

Throughout 2013, the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council coordinated a seminar series called Reconstructing Social Enterprise, presented by experts with “a critical yet sympathetic perspective”.

In the first seminar, Pascal Dey and Chris Steyaert, from the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, called on academics to ditch their “rose-tinted view” and instead, to provoke and intervene: to engage in “myth-busting” about the connection of “social enterprise to system-wide social change or to the sweeping eradication of the intricate problems of our era”; to interrogate failures; to question how social enterprise is used by people in power; to analyse how it contributes to the common good – are market solutions the best way to solve the ills of a market society?

Alan Greig has spent decades investigating and championing all kinds of ways to do business for good. Among other roles, he’s a director of Social Business Australia. With long experience, he’s both enthusiast and cynic.

Social enterprise can be part of the mainstream economy, he says. “It’s not your everyday business of empowering and enriching the individuals who set it up. It’s about empowering and enriching communities.”

As an advocate for cooperatives, and employee- and community-ownership, however, Greig is sceptical of the notion of an entrepreneur as a lone social hero – as in Bill Drayton’s quote about fishing and revolutions. “It attracts a certain kind of determined individual wanting to change the world by ‘doing good’,” he says. “But I’d like to see more emphasis on group enterprises where the focus is more economic – on tackling inequality by using business ownership to share wealth more broadly, for instance.”

Greig is also a member of a working group charged with investigating legal models for social enterprises here and overseas.

In the United States, registered “benefit corporations” have a special legal status recognising that there’s more to their business than the bottom line. There’s a similar model in the UK, called “community interest companies”. Both enshrine the businesses’ social and environmental purposes and guard against mission-creep. In the UK, they can sell shares, but the company can’t be wound up or merged for the personal gain of the shareholders.

“There are massive reforms happening in all the Anglo countries,” Greig says. “Australia is just very backward with these things.”

*

In October, Three Sistas became a certified ‘B Corp’, a voluntary, international standard for good business practice. There’s no special legal status attached and not all B Corps would be considered social enterprises, but for a fee, you can be assessed for social and environmental performance. Three Sistas’ score placed it the highest in Australia and among the best in the world.

And yet, it has not been received benignly: Guthrie says they’ve been criticised by other service providers, accused of profiteering from poor people. She sought B Corp status to help demonstrate their accountability to their community.

Their enterprise is still young, but Guthrie is ready to offer a verdict: “It works”. From their experiences, she and Wright spied a business opportunity to answer a social question: a way to make a living and a difference.

She believes there’s no contradiction, in their case. In fact, the nature of social enterprise will help it succeed: while government contracts and handouts breed complacency elsewhere, she says, Three Sistas’ tenants are free will vote with their feet. She has to do a good job.

“We’ve got skin in the game. Everything I own is tied up in this business. If this fails for me, there goes my children’s future,” Guthrie says. “It’s a case that it won’t fail, because I can’t allow it to.”

An edited version of this article was published in The Big Issue, No. 476.

WHEN Shuwen Ling received the letter from the City of Melbourne, she thought it was spam. Or maybe it was a fine? “It was on good quality paper,” she explains. “But when I read it carefully, I thought: ‘This is pretty cool’.”

Ling is nearly 20 years old and it’s three years since she left her hometown, a few hours from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She studies finance and civil engineering at the University of Melbourne and lives in an apartment near the Vic Market.

She was one of 6,500 people who received the letter, 600 who responded, and finally, 43 who were randomly selected to reflect the city’s demographics. Their task? To make recommendations on the council’s budget for its first ever 10-year financial plan – spending that is worth, in sum, up to $5 billion.

It’s an experiment in “participatory budgeting”, a subset of the political theory known as “deliberative democracy”.

Citizens’ juries, such as this one, are being used increasingly often around the world. They’re another kind of representative democracy, one that steers policy making away from the entrenched positions of political parties, lobbyists and squeaky wheels, and towards the considered voices of ordinary, well-informed citizens.

In Melbourne, the “People’s Panel” was coordinated by the newDemocracy Foundation, a not-for-profit research organisation that says it’s aiming to move our democracy out of “the continuous campaign cycle”.

The panellists were posed this question: “How can we remain one of the most liveable cities in the world while addressing our future financial challenges?”

I spoke with five of them, including Ling, from the panel’s inception to its aftermath. The process began in August, and in the following weeks, they spent six Saturdays hearing evidence from councillors, staff and experts of their own choosing. They read reports, did sums, asked questions, and wrangled over the answers. It was a bigger commitment than they’d expected, but most poured themselves into the challenge. Would the council act on their recommendations? 

Councillor Stephen Mayne is the chair of the city’s finance and governance committee. He says there’s a “genuine malaise” in our democracy, one we suffer in our municipalities just as much as in the state and federal arenas. “People are jaundiced about politics. There is quite a bit of disengagement and a lot of negativity. This is a model that potentially rebuilds trust and engagement.

“As long as I’m on council I’ll be pushing to implement a credible amount of the recommendations,” Mayne said, before the panel had finished its deliberations. “I think that if you give 50 people a lot of information, just like with juries, they’ll usually get it pretty right.”

*

When Maria Petricevic entered the first session, she felt a little intimated. Dr Petricevic is a Collins Street dentist – her practice overlooks the town hall. “I was scanning the room and thinking: ‘Are other people better informed than I am?’”

She is enthusiastic about Melbourne – throughout university, for seven years commuting on the V/Line train from Geelong, she dreamed of one-day moving north. “I just love this city,” she says.

By the second session, she felt more confident about her ability to contribute, but slightly overwhelmed by all the information. “It’s been an eye-opening experience,” Petricevic said in the lunch break. “I just have so much more insight into how much goes into operating a city”.

It was a bright Saturday in September and the panellists were gathered in a grand room on the lower level of the Melbourne Town Hall. Through the windows, you could see the legs of pedestrians and the bodies of trams passing by on Swanston Street.

The City of Melbourne’s chief finance officer, Phu Nguyen, gave the group a rundown on the current budget, and its longer-term projections. “We’ve reached a level of what I call ‘Peak Parking Revenue’,” he said. “People are complying more than they used to.”

He laid out the broad challenges for the city over the coming decade, all with implications for the bottom line: rapid population growth, climate change, technological transformation and economic uncertainty.

The renewal of the Queen Victoria Market site could cost up to $250 million, and serious upgrades to infrastructure and facilities will be required. On current estimates, he said, the council will fall short of cash.

The panellists split into small groups for a “speed dating” session with councillors and senior staff. With the weight of town hall above them, and established voices in their ears, it was hard to imagine the panel’s advice straying too far from the status quo.

But one of the panellists, Hani Akaoui, an architect with a thin moustache, a considered manner and an office at the top end of Bourke Street, noted that his fellow citizens weren’t shy about asking critical questions. “We want to be informed,” he said.

Cr Mayne used the speed dating to pitch his agenda, including rate rises, more efficient staffing practices, and selling Citywide, the council’s wholly-owned waste service company. “I can see the potential political power of the recommendations, so I was very keen to push them to focus on the big material issues,” he said later. Some were swayed, others irked; all noted his forceful approach. (The panel recommended against selling Citywide.)

For the third session, the panellists were able to request any experts they wanted – among those chosen were demographer Bernard Salt and climate scientist Graeme Pearman.

In the break, Bruce Shaw, a barrister who lives in Southbank, expressed his scepticism about the ubiquitous cheerleading for the city: “If I hear one more person say Melbourne is the world’s most liveable city, I’m going to scream.” (Later, he did – quietly.)

While they aren’t hemmed in by party politics, the panellists do bring their own concerns. Shaw thinks our public transport is poor, especially the sluggish trams, and must be made more reliable. Ling was interested in high-rise developments – her dad is a property developer in Malaysia. In Melbourne, she thinks, there are too many new towers, too tall and too small inside.

Renee Hill recently moved to Kensington with her partner. She works in marketing in the finance industry, and her primary worry is about how the city is promoting sustainability and preparing for climate change. “If we don’t start planning now, we won’t be in a position to deal with it,” she says. “That’s really top of mind for me.”

This represented one of the main struggles for the panel. The council’s powers are constrained. Decision-making on critical issues such as public transport, planning for big buildings and systemic responses to climate change all rest elsewhere.

“We always have to remember that the purpose of the exercise is to improve the budget of the city,” Akaoui says. “It’s not theoretical, and it’s not master planning; it’s literally financial.”

An annual budget of $400 million takes some reckoning. Can the hoi polloi analyse it? And can they do it on Saturdays?

Professor John Dryzek, from University of Canberra, is one of the world’s experts on deliberative democracy. He says there’s been an “explosion” of citizens’ forums in the last decade, and experience has proven lay people worthy of the task.

“All you need to do is give people time,” Dryzek says. “Give them access to information, enable them to ask questions of the experts and people really can get their head around incredibly complex issues.”

The Danish Board of Technology has been running these juries for 20 years, seeking citizen’s views on controversial issues such as genetically modified food and electronic surveillance. Recently, South Australian premier Jay Weatherill has convened deliberative panels on questions of how to reduce alcohol-related violence and how motorists and cyclists can share roads.

Participatory budgeting, too, has a rich recent tradition. It began in 1989 in Porto Alegre, in Brazil, where thousands of citizens participate in directing an average of about US$70 million from the city’s budget.

Earlier this year, the Darebin City Council in Melbourne’s north convened a citizen’s jury to direct $2 million in spending on community infrastructure. The residents returned with eight recommendations, including a new neighbourhood house, exercise equipment and sports courts.

Dryzek says citizen’s juries are a way of refreshing our political realm and injecting qualities otherwise in short supply, such as listening and reflection. “Australian parliament in particular is unremittingly adversarial,” he says. “People are interested in scoring points rather than really seriously reflecting upon the issues.”

Each jury requires careful planning and hard decisions about demographics. The task of making the panel demographically representative is not straightforward. Age and gender splits are obligatory, but what about wealth, ethnicity or sexuality?

In Melbourne, there are over 116,000 residents and nearly 18,000 businesses, but two-thirds of rates revenue comes from the latter. The facilitators, newDemocracy Foundation, recommended that the People’s Panel should comprise an even split of residents and non-residents (both business owners and workers). As a consequence, 60 per cent of the panellists were male – a proportion said to reflect the over-representation of men in CBD businesses.

Professor Dryzek describes the high proportion of non-resident panellists as “very unusual”. Iain Walker, the foundation’s CEO, says representation among the 40-odd panellists is descriptive rather than statistically exact. “The test for the community is: ‘Do I see people like me involved?’”

*

On the fifth Saturday, the citizens deliberated. But they didn’t finish, so they had to return for an unscheduled sixth day. To pass a recommendation, the panel required 80 per cent agreement. Each person was given an electronic voting paddle and five options from “Love it” to “Loathe it”. The results flashed on the projector screen immediately.

This process – the jury’s deliberation – is the system’s promise, its claim to legitimacy. For outsiders, however, its merits were impossible to judge. The panellists had resolved that in order for everyone to feel comfortable venturing their opinions, they would close some sessions to observers. And so, whenever they were debating or voting, they excluded their fellow citizens.

Shaw maintains that when the room was closed, no one dominated. “The word ‘democracy’ describes it well,” he says. “Whether or not the council will regret it is another thing.”

Ling observed that some people who came with strong opinions softened them, or compromised significantly. The facilitators instructed voters to apply the following test before spiking a proposal: “Can you live with it?”

For the most part, agreement came easily. “There’s been a lot more consensus than I expected,” Hill reflected.

On the final day, as the clock ticked, the pressure rose. “The people who were pushing wacky ideas saw that the game was up,” Shaw says. “We finished up with a good report, with a realistic number of ideas presented fairly.”

Their 11 recommendations, released in mid-November, include proposing rate rises each year of up to 2.5 per cent above inflation, more spending on mitigating and adapting to climate change, extra bike paths, selling “non-core” properties, reducing new capital works and pressing the state government for a higher tax on developers.

*

There’s a pitfall common to many of the citizen’s juries, however: their recommendations are often ignored. In this case, the council promised the People’s Panel a formal response at its meeting on November 25. At the council meeting, Mayne was effusive as he presented the official reply: “I think they’re excellent recommendations,” he said.

The councillors postponed their response, however, and instead, referred the proposals to staff for analysis and modelling. When the council’s draft 10-year financial plan is released in April, the panel’s report will be included in its entirety, along with an explanation about whether or not each recommendation has been adopted.

Hani Akaoui was in the gallery – he’d returned early, especially, from a business trip to Sydney. He was pleased with the outcome. On the question of rates, he believes increases are reasonable. “The overall mood of the panel was that the council is doing a good job. We’re happy with the city and we want to keep it at the forefront.”

Among the panellists, the process engendered loyalty and pride – and, also, not a little chagrin that they weren’t given more time. But they had an opportunity to participate, deeply and meaningfully, in civic debate.

“You really should know that people have been so passionate and committed to participating,” Maria Petricevic says, citing evidence: one man sent his views by text message from hospital, where his wife was in labour; another woman was undergoing chemotherapy, but continued to attend.

Petricevic feels like she has made a contribution to the city she loves. She’s also gained trust in the council for its commitment to community engagement. “Other levels of government could take a leaf out of that book,” she says.

Ling will – “probably, hopefully” – still be here in a decade, but if not, perhaps her younger brother will instead. She, too, feels she’s made a contribution to the community, and it has kindled her interest in the affairs of her adopted city.

Now this panel is over, Akaoui believes others should begin. “I think this shouldn’t be done once in a blue moon,” he says. “It should be done every year.”

Read a version of this article at The Age online

CHEWTON Primary School – student population 40 – perches on a hill above the houses of the small Central Victorian town, which borders on Castlemaine.

Before the year is out, its red tin roof will be home to solar panels facing east and west, positioned to best offset its demand. The school is crowdfunding for a renewable energy system, by way of a new scheme called The People’s Solar.

“Our savings won’t go back into the big bucket,” says principal Julie Holden. “They won’t be used for staffing and books.” She’s promising to fund environmental initiatives by students around the town instead, as well as more energy efficiency improvements for the buildings.

Modest though its goal sounds, Chewton Primary is one front in a revolution.

In a speech in mid-October, Michelle Groves, CEO of the Australian Energy Regulator, described the coming change in the electricity industry that way: “a revolution”.

“Revolutions can seem threatening at first, but they also present opportunities,” she said.

In her speech, delivered to the Energy Users Association of Australia conference, she was discussing the rise of “prosumers” – consumers of electricity who are now also producers. Over a million households have installed solar panels in the last few years, she said, and that’s a good thing: along with smart appliances and batteries, this wave of solar generation is increasing both customer choice and the resilience of the electricity network.

But she warned that if existing networks resist these new, competing technologies, “there is a risk that a significant number of consumers will ‘walk away’ from the network”.

That is, they’ll leave the grid altogether, in favour of their own generation and storage, leaving its fixed costs to be defrayed among fewer users. “This would have major consequences for many consumers and for the efficient operation of energy markets,” Groves said.

Solar photovoltaic panels are booming for good reason. They’re a consumer item of malleable meaning, alluring for stubborn individualists and climate change activists alike.

But for a growing number of people, renewable energy promises something even more: an opportunity to rejuvenate communities and create local jobs. All around the country, volunteers are planning energy systems that will be owned by their community, covering a scale from single rooftops to entire towns.

“The buzz phrase is that solar power is democratising the energy market,” says Tosh Szatow, the founder of the People’s Solar, as well as a consultancy called Energy for the People. “But the democracy we’ve got isn’t serving our interests. This is something more – it’s energy owned by people, serving interests defined by those communities themselves.”

Around Castlemaine and districts, in particular, the solar citizens are rallying.

It’s a cloudless Sunday morning at Chewton Primary. Szatow explains the People’s Solar to his audience: “If the community gives the solar panels once, those panels will give back to the community for 25 years. So we turn $8000 of donations into $25,000, or more, of reinvestment in the town.”

Szatow is wearing a blue t-shirt bearing the slogan: “Stick it where the sun shines”. The event is called “Going off the grid” and it’s doubling as a fundraiser for the primary school’s panels. The People’s Solar has already overseen the installation of community-funded panels at Taradale Primary and Castlemaine Childcare Co-operative.

The region is becoming a hotspot for grid-connected solar households. In August, over 300 residents signed up for new rooftop systems by way of a not-for-profit, bulk-buying scheme called Mount Alexander Solar Homes.

Beforehand, Castlemaine already boasted nearly double the statewide proportion of solar houses, says the scheme’s coordinator, Neil Barrett. Because the new systems are much larger than most pre-existing ones, in total they’ll lift the shire’s solar generation capacity by up to a quarter. “It’s been a ripper,” he says. “It’s employed a lot of people for four or five months. We’re taking expressions of interest for a possible second stage.”

Volunteers with another organisation, the Mount Alexander Sustainability Group, are investigating renewable generation on an even larger scale. They’re scoping a range of options, including a solar farm, small-scale hydro and biofuels generation, which would account for a quarter of the shire’s total electricity consumption. They are planning to establish their project as a co-operative, majority-owned by locals.

The group has adopted the same model used by Hepburn Wind, a community wind farm that has been generating power since 2011. Its two turbines feed enough electricity into the grid to more than match the needs of nearby towns Daylesford and Hepburn.

Taryn Lane is the community officer for Hepburn Wind. She also works for its spinoff, Embark, which was founded to help similar projects start up. Right now, she says, the best option for community groups is solar, because there are several viable models, from bulk buys and donations, to investing in powering the local pub. There are at least ten community groups across the state working on it, from the Surf Coast to East Gippsland, and fifty around the country.

The outlook for wind, however, is grim. The federal government’s decisions to scrap the carbon tax, and review and reduce the Renewable Energy Target have slashed the co-operative’s earnings.

The Victorian government hasn’t helped. Its sudden blanket ban on wind power in the Macedon Ranges (among other locations), imposed in 2011, scuppered locals’ plans for three turbines in a nearby pine plantation. Previously, the community group had received a government grant for a wind monitoring mast.

“It’s a bit of a mess isn’t it?” says Lane. “It shouldn’t be this hard.”

She argues that the state government should exempt community-owned projects from the wind “no-go zones”. It should also introduce a state-based renewable energy target and establish a feed-in-tariff for community-owned solar – policy measures that have already been adopted in South Australia and the ACT.

But as the state election approaches, there’s no sign of change. In mid-October, the Napthine government released its energy policy. Renewable energy wasn’t listed among its seven priorities. The state Labor party has promised to review the wind no-go zones and other planning restrictions, and also, to expand renewable energy, but hasn’t announced how it’ll do so.

North of the Murray, the signs are more encouraging. The New South Wales government, also Liberal, has emerged as an unlikely champion of community-owned energy.

Last Thursday, Rob Stokes, the NSW environment minister, will launch the “Repower One” project, a 99 kW solar array on the roof of the Shoalhaven Bowling and Recreation Club.

He also announced a new round of grants worth $700,000 for community energy projects. Last year, the NSW government awarded $411,000 to nine different community-owned wind and solar farms.

The solar panels on the bowls club are an initiative of volunteer group Repower Shoalhaven. On the strength of countless volunteer hours, they managed to locate a profitable oasis in the regulatory morass, explains Chris Cooper, the group’s founder.

They raised $120,000 in ten days. More than half the investors are locals and Cooper says it’ll deliver them a good commercial return. The bowls club, too, stands to come out several hundred thousand dollars ahead over the life of the system.

Repower Shoalhaven is planning on doing it again and again – cuts to the RET notwithstanding. Already, they’re in discussions about rooftops on local universities, high schools, ambulance buildings and water authorities. “We hope to get another one up by Christmas,” Cooper says. “Every three months we aim to get another project out to our members and investors.”

Elsewhere in NSW, the government is sponsoring a project to establish Australia’s first “Zero Net Energy Town”. The winning town, somewhere in the northern inland region, will be announced in mid-November. It’ll be funded to develop a blueprint and business case to switch to 100 per cent, locally generated renewable energy.

The scheme’s coordinator, Adam Blakester, from Starfish Initiatives, a charity that works on regional sustainability, says the public shouldn’t underestimate the scale of projects, and the ambitions of those involved.

“Most people think community and they think cute and little,” he says. “People haven’t yet understood that this is about serious projects with serious engineering, money, law, governance and marketing. And it’s got to be one of the most professionally overqualified sectors I’ve ever worked in – it’s a long way from the lamington drive part of the community sector.”

All that knowhow goes only so far, however, because the challenge isn’t only technical; it’s also regulatory. Now, over half our electricity bills are consumed by distribution, he says, and the regulated charges are the same no matter how far the electricity travels. Local energy systems, especially in the regions, have the potential to cut those costs – if they’re allowed to.

“Until now, regulation has been about ensuring the generators and network operators don’t go bankrupt and we always have electricity,” Blakester says. “When you want to fiddle with it, you find out it’s very complex – and you bump into some of the most powerful vested interests in the world.”

Earlier this year, Blakester helped found a peak body, the Coalition for Community Energy, to help lobby for regulatory change. In June, it held a conference in Canberra. One of the speakers was Arno Zengle, the mayor of a village in Bavaria called Wildspoldsried. Last year, the village produced more than four-and-a-half times the electricity it consumed.

“In Germany there are more than 300 towns that have achieved zero net energy status,” Blakester says. “It’s like another planet compared to the centralised energy oligarchy we live in.

“Can we do it in Australia? It’s too soon to be confident the answer is yes. Technically it’s doable, but whether it’s culturally and systemically possible, well, that’s up to us.”

*

THE chasm in thinking about our energy future can be traversed in just 12 kilometres in Central Victoria, between the towns of Maldon and Newstead.

Late last month, the state government announced that Maldon, a village of 1500 residents only a short drive from Castlemaine, is going to get gas – by the end of 2017, approximately.

It’s part of the “Energy for the Regions” program, first announced in 2011. The state government’s latest tender, worth $85 million, will fund gas connection for 11 towns across Victoria by way of “virtual pipelines”. Compressed gas will be trucked to a station on the outskirts of each town. From there it’ll be distributed throughout the streets via a brand new pipe network.

The successful contractor, TasGas, a subsidiary of Brookfield Infrastructure Group, says the rollout will cover 12,500 homes and businesses.

In the middle of next year, the company will go on a “roadshow” of the towns, says CEO Roger Ingram, to explain its offer and pitch residents to connect. TasGas is still finalising its numbers, but Ingram estimates that the virtual pipeline will deliver gas 40 per cent cheaper than LPG.

Tony Wood, the energy program director at the Grattan Institute, thinks it will be a hard sell. The institute’s latest report, Gas at the crossroads, speculates that households will, if anything, begin switching away from gas. In the last 5 years, retail gas prices have risen by more than one-third, and they’re expected to rise significantly more. The wholesale price is tipped to double in the next two years.

“If gas prices go up as much as they might, a lot of customers aren’t going to connect after all. Or if they do connect, they’re going to be really pissed off. How would you feel if you connected and gas prices went up by 50 or 100 per cent in a very short space of time?” Wood says.

He describes the government’s spending on Energy for the Regions as “mindboggling”.

The $85 million amounts to a subsidy of $6800 for each house and business that could connect. But in reality, it’s much more. At the take-up rate estimated by TasGas – between 15 and 30 percent over the next decade – the government is shelling out somewhere between $22,667 and $45,333 a pop.

“I’m sure governments must have made worse investments, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head,” Wood says.

The residents of Newstead, 12 kilometres south of Maldon, want something different. For four years, the volunteers comprising “Renewable Newstead” have been working on a plan to become completely powered by renewable energy.

The group began by offering energy audits, which were taken up by 8 out of every ten residents. Then they began looking into creating a local micro-grid, fed by banks of solar panels.

“Our main interest is community building,” explains Geoff Park, from Renewable Newstead. “We’ve got the complete spectrum of views about climate change and sustainability. The number one priority for us is that whatever we do needs to add to the social capital of our community.”

Park anticipates that the scheme would offer electricity to locals at a slight discount from current prices, while also generating cash for to spend elsewhere in the community. And unlike gas, they don’t need the government to pay. A small grant would help scope a plan, but otherwise, it would be a commercial proposition.

Two years ago, when Park contacted the Liberal state government about the idea, he didn’t even get a reply. The group has had similar trouble dealing with the network distributor, Powercor.

Tosh Stzatow is advising Renewable Newstead on its plan to go 100 per cent renewable. He notes that if the money being poured into “Energy for the Regions” – $6800 per house – was spent on solar instead, it would cut an average household’s electricity bills close to zero for over 20 years.

“We really are at a crossroads,” Szatow says. “Every dollar we spend in centralised gas and electricity infrastructure takes us down a road to rising energy prices, non-renewable fuels and extractive business models.

“The other road is locally-owned and managed renewables, with stable or declining energy prices. That’s the one we want to walk down.”

Read this article at The Age online

JOE Caygill and Dave Kerin are the most unlikely of collaborators: one is a conservative-voting small businessman; the other, a Marx-quoting trade unionist.

Caygill has been in the manufacturing industry for 30 years. He’s the owner and CEO of Everlast, a hot water tank manufacturer based in Dandenong. But before long, he won’t be the boss anymore – just a worker-owner like everybody else.

He’s teamed up with Kerin and a group of volunteers, many of whom are environmental activists, to convert his business into “Eureka’s Future”, a not-for-profit workers’ co-operative factory.

“I used to negotiate hard against a lot of union initiatives in the earlier days, but as you get older you get wiser,” Caygill says. “And I realised that it doesn’t matter whether you’re way left, way right or somewhere in between, people can come together for a just cause.”

Their cause is the Earthworker Co-operative. The Dandenong factory, and a new facility at Morwell in the Latrobe Valley, will be part of a network of co-operatives aiming provide local jobs and stimulate a “just transition” from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Caygill did not expect it to turn out this way, but he is adamant that his workers should own his business. Indeed, he believes it’s the only option. Imported tanks are sold in Australia for what it costs Everlast merely to make them. Unless something changes, the business won’t last much longer.

“With not-for-profit co-operatives, all of a sudden we can be competitive,” he says. “As long as we can comfortably cover our costs, we don’t need to make a profit.”

In a worker co-operative, all employees have a stake in the business and an equal vote in the way it runs. Typically, pay is much more even. Caygill anticipates that as a manager at Eureka’s Future he’ll earn no more than double the lowest paid worker. The co-operative’s other advantage is an innovative sales plan: it is using workplace agreements to offer solar hot water systems to workers in lieu of wage rises.

“To my mind, the country needs to be underpinned by a strong manufacturing base,” he says. “I think it’s critical. At the moment it’s underpinned by resources, but the resource boom isn’t going to last forever. And it isn’t only manufacturing we need to address, but also climate change, because our country is going to be one of the most vulnerable.”

Kerin is a life-long union and social justice activist. Currently a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, he’s been an organiser for several different unions. For the last 16 years, he has been toiling on the Earthworker plan as a volunteer, seeking the right time and place to begin. “It’s been a real learning experience for all of us. Now I know what they mean by the word ‘co-operation’. It’s hard work,” he says.

As a teenager in the late 1960s, Kerin joined the Builders’ Labourers Federation. He participated in the “green bans” of the early 1970s, when the builders labourers refused to work on projects they considered environmentally or socially damaging.

For him, the idea of the co-operatives grew from the roots of the green ban movement: he believes the responsibility to provide meaningful work is inseparable from the need to tackle climate change. Now, he says reaching beyond the ideological divide has become non-negotiable too, because governments are backing away from climate action.

“To me, apart from the climate emergency, the big story in all of this is that small Australian companies have been hit by neoliberalism just as hard as working people. The old Marxian expression for what has happened to small business is they’ve been ‘proletarianised’. They’ve been pushed into the working class. Everything they make, they’re pumping back into their business.

“The good ones, like Joe, feel great responsibility for the people they’ve employed over the years and they don’t know what to do about it. That’s the seedbed for a new approach for the common good.”

While Kerin spent his formative years organising with the Builders Labourers Federation, Caygill rose through the management ranks at the industrial multinational BTR Nylex. In the late 1980s, he started his own plastics manufacturing business.

“I’ve always believed that if somebody gets off their arse and achieves things, what they reap is their reward,” Caygill says. “Dave and I are really on opposite political sides: he’s fairly left wing and I’m fairly right wing. We’ve probably fought each other over picket lines.”

But what unites them has now become more important, he says: a belief in manufacturing, social justice and doing something about climate change.

Workers’ co-operatives are few in Australia. Historically, Australian workers chose to unionise to bargain wages up, rather than organise to own production themselves. Other kinds of collectivism prospered, however, especially agricultural co-operatives, such as Dairy Farmers, as well as small-town co-operative stores and credit unions.

“Not many people in Australia are very familiar with the idea of a worker-owner co-operative,” says Professor Katherine Gibson, an economic geographer from the University of Western Sydney. “Traditionally there has always been an antagonism between the union movement and the idea of worker co-ops.”

In recent months, however, this has changed: new worker co-operatives include a civil engineering services co-operative in Melbourne (which is affiliated with Earthworker), a café in Adelaide, a date farm near Alice Springs, and an aged care business in Sydney [see box].

Gibson’s most recent co-authored book is called ‘Take Back the Economy’. She sees the co-operatives as part of a broader social context in which old political categories and alliances are vanishing. Independents and minor parties are rising, and farmers and environmentalists campaign together against mining.

“The divisions of the past are breaking down given the challenges we’re facing today,” Gibson says. Earthworker shouldn’t be understood as a union or green scheme, but rather, “an initiative of a community saying we need a different way of organising our economy”.

“In co-ops and other experiments like social enterprises, we’re seeing that people crave a more ethical relationship with the economy, rather than the belief that we’re all looking out for ourselves,” she says. “As a society we need to care for each other, and there’s a thirst for asking how we might do that within an enterprise model.”

Melina Morrison, CEO of the newly formed Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals, says it is “to be expected” that people will turn to the worker co-operative model in response to the decline in manufacturing.

“Co-operatives thrive in times of economic downturn because they are a self-help solution. In a worker co-operative, labour hires capital, not the other way around. The reason for the enterprise is job creation: the profit is the job,” she says.

But people’s ambitions, however worthy, don’t always match reality: starting a business is hard going, and even harder if you’re doing something unusual, for which advice and finance are thin on the ground.

In mid-2012, when Heinz shut its tomato sauce factory at Girgarre, in the Goulburn Valley, the workers and the local community rallied. They formed the Goulburn Valley Food Co-operative and, initially, offers of funding rolled in. But Heinz refused to sell the factory to its old employees. Before long, the money dried up.

Les Cameron, the co-operative’s public officer, regrets not being able to capitalise on their time in the national spotlight. “If Heinz had been willing to sell to us, that would have given us breathing space. But even so, we would have been trying to compete with global capital in a shrinking market.”

Later that year, the group was considering an alternative plan – taking a lease on a smaller facility in Kyabram – when the Banksia Securities financial group collapsed. A lot of people in the region lost money, including ex-Heinz workers who had invested their redundancy payouts with Banksia.

So the food co-operative changed tactics again. “We felt putting money into a risky, undercapitalised venture would be like rubbing salt in the wound,” Cameron explains. It now uses its funds – raised from one-off contributions by more than 1000 members – to finance local growers and food businesses to increase production and sell into a wider network of stores and restaurants. These include makers of pasta and sauce, pear cider, strawberry jam and liqueur, with more on the way.

The Girgarre site remains all but idle. A small section of the plant is being used by a business that converts out-of-date food into animal feed, Cameron says. “There’s probably a metaphor in there for what happened. And all that infrastructure, a lot of which was paid for out of the public purse, is effectively rotting.”

Only a few ex-Heinz workers are still involved in the co-operative. It is volunteer-run, not worker-owned. No one is getting paid. Its gains, compared with its initial dreams, have been modest. But they are gains all the same. “In some ways we feel stronger than we ever have been – it feels like we’re doing something at the human scale that could be repeated,” Cameron says.

“It’s our attempt to replace the current distribution system, which is dominated by the supermarket oligopoly. Like a lot of big ideas, it isn’t going to deliver in five minutes.”

Both the Goulburn Valley Food Co-operative and the Earthworker Co-operative were inspired by the Mondragon co-operatives from the Basque country, in Spain.

Beginning with two-dozen workers making paraffin stoves in 1956, the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation now comprises a web of 289 businesses including a university and a bank, 110 of which are owned by their workers. The group employs over 80,000 people, and it has proved comparably resilient throughout the deep recession in Spain.

“It’s been a successful model of regional development and it has inspired a lot of people more recently, especially in areas where companies have moved on and left whole workforces abandoned,” Professor Gibson says.

For instance, the Evergreen Co-operatives in Cleveland, Ohio, which formed a cluster of laundry, urban farming and solar panel installation co-operatives beginning in 2009. So far, their growth has been far slower than anticipated, and few jobs have been created.

The journey for Earthworker has been protracted. But it has now negotiated clauses in a range of Enterprise Bargaining Agreements, including a university, a council, and a community sector agency, which allow employees to salary sacrifice for its hot water systems.

“We use the agreement as the means to distribute the goods – that’s never been done before,” Kerin explains. “It’s a world-first. We build the demand side and manufacture into it.”

As with the Mondragon model, Earthworker will be a central co-operative that provides finance, training and support for subsidiaries, such as Eureka’s Future and the engineering services co-operative.

Recently, the group raised nearly $80,000 in a fortnight-long crowdfunding campaign for Eureka’s Future. “That just shows that people aren’t waiting for governments because, crikey, we can’t wait any longer!” he says.

His ultimate vision is to offer childcare and housing, via co-operatives, as a part of their job. They’d be part of a growing “social sector” in the economy: “We would be manufacturing the things the country needs in terms of jobs and climate: the new green electricity, water and mass-transit grid. Three decades of that work will see this country prosper.”

As a businessman, Caygill is rather more circumspect. “We’ve got this transition period now where it can all fall down, or it can get stronger and bigger,” he says.

Until three years ago, Everlast was in operation 24 hours a day, 6 days a week. It employed 45 people. But that ended overnight when the then federal Labor government cut rebates for solar hot water units. “It’s been a real struggle ever since,” Caygill says. Now he employs only ten, but believes Eureka’s Future can re-create the old jobs within 12 months.

He says that while his views on politics haven’t changed, he’s been troubled by the decline of manufacturing, the growing influence of large, footloose corporations, and the casualisation of the workforce.

“One of the only ways people can make money [in manufacturing] now is to exploit the workers and drag down the costs. That’s the reality of it,” he says.

“I think everybody deserves to make a decent living. That should be a God-given right in this country, and it isn’t. We need to try to change that. And when you address both manufacturing and climate change, the beauty of it is that there can’t be any opposition. It’s unique because it brings everybody together.”

Caring for the carers

WHEN Robyn Kaczmarek began working on a casual contract for a community care agency, visiting elderly people in their homes, she didn’t like the way she was treated. “It’s a poor quality, low-paying job. It’s really, really hard work and you’re usually alone,” she says. “The people at the bottom don’t have any say and that was really disheartening.”

She also observed that it was bad for the clients too – high staff turnover and poor communication undermined the continuity and quality of care.

Home support workers are “already economically marginalised”, says Melina Morrison, from the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals. They’re often women from non-English speaking backgrounds, or older women returning to work part-time.

“Aged care workers are a forgotten bunch,” Kaczmarek says. “Nobody is looking after them.”

Rather than put up with it, she founded a worker-owned business. Co-operative Home Care is based on successful models in the USA and UK. After two years planning, it began operating last October. The workers are based in Sydney’s inner-west and south-west, employing 20 people and growing quickly, with plans to expand into a network of linked home-care and day-care centres.

For now, management, administrative staff and carers all receive the same rate of pay. Each worker gets one vote and the books are open so everyone knows how the money comes and goes.

Kaczmarek says the upside is clear for co-op workers: comparatively higher wages, more training, and the opportunity to take on different roles in the business. “The other benefit is that they’re supported,” she says. “They’re not alone in the job, which otherwise doesn’t happen in this industry.”

Read this article at The Age online.

Read ‘The Co-operation’, a related article about the Goulburn Valley Food Cooperative.

IT’S a Monday evening at the 3CR studios in Collingwood, and Save Albert Park’s radio show has just begun.

When the rousing theme song – “Do you hear the people sing?” from Les Misérables – ends, host Barbara Clinton introduces the guests. Owing to circumstances, there’s been a sudden change in programming: she had to bump a public parks expert from New York.

“Tonight we’re devoting our programme to the state government re-signing the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Albert Park for a further 5 years,” Clinton says.

“Firstly, I’d like to ask Peter Goad, was this a surprise to us at Save Albert Park? What was your immediate reaction?”

“Well, Barbara, we’ve been protesting against this event now for 20 years,” Goad, the group’s president, replies. “I’m not really surprised to hear they’ve re-signed, but of course it’s still a blow. We are perennial optimists. We think that eventually something has got to go right.”

The group has hosted a half-hour weekly radio spot since the mid-1990s. Today is a particularly dark day: Premier Denis Napthine graced the pages of the Herald-Sun waving a chequered flag. The event will continue in the park until 2020, at least. The Premier described the race as a “key pillar of Victoria’s major sporting events strategy” and congratulated Grand Prix Corporation chairman Ron Walker for “getting the best deal for Victoria”. As usual, the government would not reveal how much it paid for the contract.

On the radio show, Peter Logan – a former Port Phillip councillor and the group’s media spokesperson – ridicules the idea that the race offers value for money. “To use Joe Hockey’s phrase, the Grand Prix is a leaner, not a lifter,” he says. “It’s getting a multi-million dollar subsidy every year.”

Save Albert Park is a story of extraordinary community activism and persistence against overwhelming opposition.

The group held its first official meeting in February 1994, in the Albert Park library. Peter Logan was among the 50-odd people there, outraged both at the impending loss of their park to commerce, and that the deal had been done in secret, without any consultation. They hoped to stop it before it began. “We were a bit shell-shocked. We weren’t sure how to go about it,” he says.

Before long, they figured it out. A newspaper article the following year referred to the group as “one of the strongest campaign organisations ever built up in Australia”. Its organisational chart contained 18 specialist subgroups, including a legal group boasting about 40 lawyers, two QCs and a former County Court judge.

Goad now says that at its peak, the group’s membership was about 3000, but plunged when the Labor Party embraced the race. Now, they have about 300-400 households, or 1000 people. Two-thirds are from further afield than the neighbouring suburbs, he’s quick to affirm. Since 1996, every Port Phillip council has opposed the race, but it has never just been a case of the NIMBYs.

Although its numbers are diminished, Save Albert Park endures. As well as its radio show, the group runs weekly working bees at the park and produces a monthly newsletter. Volunteers staff the South Melbourne office each weekday morning.

The state member for Albert Park, Labor’s Martin Foley, meets with them 3 or 4 times a year. Despite his party’s support for the race, Foley admires the activists.

“This community is all the better for Save Albert Park,” he says. “They’re locals giving up so much of their time and energy for a very noble pursuit: protecting open space for parks.

“Because their activism comes from the very best of intentions and is not party-political, the community can trust them. That means a great deal – it’s one of the reasons they’ve been able to sustain their efforts for so long.”

Peter and Rosemary Goad meet me at their office the morning after the radio show. It’s a modest nook in South Melbourne Town Hall, adjacent to the quarters occupied by fellow travellers, the Friends of the ABC.

High on a bookcase, entirely forgotten, sits a delightfully provocative sculpture: a golden fist in middle-finger salute. “I can’t remember where it came from – we’ve had it so long,” explains Rosemary.

The couple, who live in Middle Park, were recruited to the cause by Logan in early 1994. They met him at a Save Albert Park stall at the South Melbourne market.

Goad pulls a wealth of documents from his shoulder bag. Both sides of politics have endeavoured to keep their dealings with the Australian Grand Prix Corporation secret. Save Albert Park has done its best to draw out the evidence.

He produces a well-thumbed copy of the 2007 report by the Victorian Auditor-General, which questioned the “brand value” benefits for the city and found the Grand Prix amounted to a net cost to the state of $6.7 million. An updated analysis using the same methodology – this time commissioned by Save Albert Park – estimated a net cost of over $60 million in 2012, accounting for traffic congestion, noise and loss of access to the park.

The corporation’s annual report for 2013 showed the government gave it a $58 million subsidy. It also reveals that it spends nearly $30 million to install and remove the race’s infrastructure every year. “Ridiculous!” Rosemary exclaims. “It’s just busywork.”

The group’s objective remains the same as ever: to remove the race from the park. Instead, it could be held at Avalon, Goad says, where a purpose-built track could be a year-round boost for the Geelong economy, rather than months of traffic snarls and inaccessible parkland for Melbourne.

He closes his eyes in concentration when he makes an important point, which is often. He has been president for over a decade. He formulates his arguments – clear, rational, well-founded – again and again but nothing gives. Still the cars go round.

What’s it like defending reason in the face of two-decades of unreason?

“We are acting for a large number of people who are sympathetic but can’t do anything – they haven’t got the time. It’s just like the people who are protesting against the East-West link, which has no business case and nothing to justify it. They’re doing the [protest] work for me – I’ve got enough to do already,” he says.

“To a degree, we’re the conscience of Victoria. Somebody’s got to do it, because the whole thing is so basically dishonest. You’ve got to be philosophical and not get too emotionally involved. It’s depressing, but what does keep you going is the fact that you’re battling against something you know is wrong.

“And Ron Walker keeps us entertained.”

On the wall is a magnificent green tapestry commemorating the early years of the struggle. It marks key moments in the fight: the 10,000-strong rally in May 1994; “Chainsaw Tuesday”, in December that year, when over 100 trees were cut down around the lake and beyond; and “Flag day” the following year, when the group’s giant 40m by 20m flag was unveiled.

As Goad says, they were “heady days”. Nearly 700 people were arrested for various acts of civil disobedience, from sitting in proscribed zones to locking themselves onto trees marked for felling.

One year, several dozen protestors blocked access to the Grand Prix’s depot during track building. “The Grand Prix Corporation is denying us access to the park, so we are trying to deny them access to their stored equipment,” spokesperson Diana Burleigh said at the time. During the race that year, 60 protesters blocked the VIP entrance gate. Two were dressed as ducks. Four were arrested.

Among the civilly disobedient were many prominent citizens. Carrillo Gantner AO, actor, director and theatre founder, and subsequently, city councillor and Victorian of the Year, was one of them.

“I’m not against the Grand Prix. I am against it being located in Albert Park,” says Gantner, currently the chairperson of the Sidney Myer Fund.

He decided to take a stand when Premier Jeff Kennett introduced the Grand Prix Act, which exempted the event from various other pieces of legislation and removed the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. People whose houses were damaged by track compaction works could no longer sue for compensation.

“That seemed to be a bridge too far, because people have been fighting and dying since the Magna Carta – and probably well before – for the right of appeal to an independent judiciary against a wilful executive,” Gantner says. “So along with a few friends we resolved that it was time to be visible in our protest.”

It was a “fairly unusual group” he says, including as it did, the daughter of a Liberal Premier, Julia Hamer; the son of a state governor, James McCaughey, and a prominent artist, Mirka Mora. They sat where they weren’t supposed to – in the place designated for the pit building – and refused to budge.

“The police were very polite and asked us sweetly to move to the other side of the tape on the ground. To move our arses three feet to the left, basically,” Gantner says. “And we said ‘No thank you, we came down to be arrested’.”

They were never charged. For all the arrests, not a single conviction was recorded.

Gantner was a dues-paying member of Save Albert Park for “some years”, and remains sympathetic. The campaign has endured, he believes, in part because the governments have been “so dishonest and opaque” about costs and crowd numbers.

The initial, prolonged militancy had its place in the broader tumult that finally undermined Jeff Kennett’s premiership. But when even a change of government yielded no progress, their mobilising moment had passed.

“That was our heroic age. We’re now in the stoic phase,” Goad says. “It was so intense it burnt a whole lot of people out. The only way to continue to fight the Grand Prix was to concentrate on the facts and the economics, rather than the demos.”

The group’s other tactical shift has been to volunteer in the park itself. The Goads take me on a tour of their works. Peter navigates their Subaru through the park with a proprietary air, shifting bollards where necessary for ease of vehicular access.

Out of the Grand Prix’s reach, they’ve planted hundreds of trees and installed nearly two-dozen Cyprus pine bench seats. They revegetate and guard over a small patch of bushland, adjacent to the Junction Oval, which contains the Corroboree Tree, a lone River Red gum estimated to be up to 500 years old. The tree bears wounds on its trunk where it was clipped by passing trucks. Save Albert Park successfully campaigned for VicRoads to install a barrier.

It’s one of many small wins around the park. When Lakeside Drive opened as a four-lane, 60 kilometre-per-hour thoroughfare, Save Albert Park documented every accident. The speed limit was reduced and the road narrowed.

“All the things we’ve done!” Rosemary chuckles.

Most famously, the group held a vigil at the park just off Albert Road. It lasted from 1994 until 2005.

In early 2000, Peter Goad was interviewed for an Age article, uncharitably titled “Why on earth do they bother?” By then, the vigil had notched up 1672 days. The journalist concluded her article by asking: when, if ever, will you give up?

Goad answered that he would campaign for “as long as it takes”, and certainly wouldn’t quit within 20 years.

Another long time volunteer, Reg Boyd, answered that he’d give up “when they put me in a box”.

Boyd is seriously ill with cancer, but remains the group’s treasurer. “Reg is indomitable,” Goad says. “His quote was correct.”

This latest extension has deflated Rosemary, however. Her spirits are “dampened, totally dampened”, she concedes. She’s not sure if their fight will continue beyond the terms of this contract: “Age will not allow.”

But Peter literally scoffs at the idea of giving up. “They’re such bastards, you can’t let them get away with it,” he says. “You have to fight it, even if you fail.”

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STEVE Beasley stands on the long factory line, with the crane controls at his waist. Hanging before him is the crucible, which looks like a huge steel teapot, with a long, downward spout for siphoning the molten metal.

He manoeuvres the crucible forward so its spout extends into the smelting cell, where – with the help of extraordinary amounts of electricity – alumina is turned into aluminium, at 950˚C.

He’s been doing this for years, but something is different this time. The smelting cell – known as a “pot” – has already been switched off. There are 368 pots at Alcoa’s Point Henry smelter; this month, the operators have gradually shut them down.

At lunchtime, Beasley sits with his shift partner Wayne Palmer in the canteen. On one wall is a pinboard decorated with photos from the site’s 51 years. On the other, is a jobs board.

“There’s life after Alcoa,” Beasley says, over a plate of chips and gravy.

“It’s time to get it over with,” Palmer says.

Tomorrow, it’s over – nearly six months after the plant’s closure was announced in February. Today, the workers flick the switch on the last functioning pots, and siphon whatever metal they can get. The aluminium rolling mill, adjacent to the smelter, will close by the end of the year. Altogether, 800 people will lose well-paid jobs.

It is the latest of the mass-manufacturing job losses to hit the town, but Point Henry’s demise resonates beyond its economic impact. The Alcoa plant, with its iconic water tower, has been a constant presence in Geelong, visible to the east across a narrow stretch of Corio Bay. From father afield, too, it was a symbol of Australia’s post-war industrial optimism.

Warren Sharp has worked for Alcoa for 24 years. For the last three “eventful” years, he’s been the smelter manager at Point Henry. He is in charge until 7 pm tonight, after which the years-long decommissioning process will begin.

The closure announcement in February was no surprise, Sharp says, but it was still a shock – in the same way as the death of someone with a terminal illness can be. The years since the global financial crisis have been trying: the combination of a low aluminium price, a high Australian dollar, and old technology has proven lethal.

Alcoa’s newest smelter, in Saudi Arabia, is four times larger than Point Henry and much more automated. The company’s Portland smelter, opened in 1986, will continue to operate.

“We’ve pushed our technology as hard as we can,” says Darrel Linke, the manager of the electrode division. Linke started at Point Henry in January 1979 as a graduate electronic engineer. “We’ve always had good people here. We find a way of doing things.”

They know how to run the plant. But shutting it down safely, while continuing production, has been another challenge altogether. “It’s been a good distraction for us, that’s the truth of it,” Sharp admits.

For the last couple of months, each week has marked another melancholy milestone: the last shipment of alumina unloaded from the pier, the last anode made, the fires extinguished in the furnace, and ever more smelting pots shut down.

Both Sharp and Linke have observed the bittersweet truth that as the end nears, their admiration for their colleagues continues to rise. The challenge of working together has grown, as has their sense of mutual satisfaction from a job well done.

“The teamwork is tremendous,” Linke says. “I reflect on that. It’s going to be the hardest thing for me to say goodbye.” He has no job to go to next.

This week, as each crew has finished their final shift, they’ve gathered in the canteen to mark the moment and receive a commemorative booklet tracing through the site’s half-century history.

Alcoa of Australia was founded by mining engineer and businessman Lindesay Clark. He convinced the American parent company to invest; and, crucially, persuaded the Australian government to protect the industry with import restrictions. The new venture would mine and refine bauxite in Western Australia, and smelt, roll and fabricate aluminium in Victoria.

The smelter at Point Henry poured its first hot metal in April 1963. In ‘White Gold’, a company history published in 1997, Geoffrey Blainey wrote that the Americans cancelled a gala opening ceremony, which was to be conducted by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, for fear of industrial espionage by Japanese experts who’d been invited. They instructed that no official guests – not even Menzies – were to set foot inside the buildings.

The modernist photographer Wolfgang Sievers photographed the Point Henry site in its first year of operations. He returned several times in the next two decades, and as always, sought to portray the dignity of work and his faith in a notion of progress that united men and machines.

Linke recalls that when he started, 35 years ago, he was proud to join an industry that extended beyond primary production, and brought jobs and money into the country. “To me it felt good to do that, as opposed to being a miner. Having that whole supply chain, right to the end,” he says.

“It feels a little bit like we’re regressing. It’s sad – paring back the vision that the founders of Alcoa of Australia had.”

His pride in the company is not unusual. It is common to the managers, workers, receptionists and even unionists. Ben Davis, the Victorian secretary of the Australian Workers Union, says the smelter has a good relationship with its employees and the whole region. “Alcoa has been so much a part of the social and economic fabric of Geelong since it opened,” he says.

(The shop floor has been tense at times, however. In 1973, the workers staged the ultimate provocation: a strike on VFL grand final day.)

The average length of employment as an “Alcoan” at Point Henry is 18 years. But now, those jobs are gone. In retrospect, Wolfgang Sievers’ photos evoke a belief in progress that has long since eroded. As photographic historian Helen Ennis has written, his images “express no doubts about the future”.

“Their vision thus seems worlds away from contemporary concerns about the negative impacts of technology, pollution, environmental degradation and climate change,” she writes.

Her observation is especially apt in the case of aluminium, often described as “congealed electricity”. At Point Henry, Alcoa consumed over 7 per cent of the state’s electricity load, or about three times that of Geelong’s households.

In his review on climate policy, Ross Garnaut noted that Australia was among the world’s least efficient aluminium producers, and his modelling suggested that smelting would gradually move offshore.

The company’s brown coal power station at Anglesea is up for sale. It was built especially for the smelter and provided 40 per cent of its electricity.

Now, the power station has become the source of controversy for its 80 workers and for Surf Coast Air Action, a local campaign calling for its closure. The group is concerned about the plant’s sulphur dioxide and other emissions and its bushfire vulnerability. On August 10, it is staging a rally and march to the mine.

Without the carbon price, Anglesea power station has become a viable economic proposition, says Professor Mike Sandiford, director of the Melbourne Energy Institute at University of Melbourne. But if it continues to supply the grid, despite plummeting demand, it will be a significant contributor to what he describes as “a dire emissions outlook”. Our electricity supply is set to become more carbon intensive for the first time in half a decade.

*

Every Friday, Rebecca Casson writes an upbeat column in the Geelong Advertiser. Casson is the CEO of the Committee for Geelong, whose members comprise large and small businesses in the town.

“Geelong’s economy is changing, but is manufacturing really dead?” she wrote recently. “According to recent feedback, definitely not! Evolving and innovative? Yes. Exciting? It sure is.”

Casson points to smaller manufacturers, such as Boundary Bend Olives, the Little Creatures Brewery, or high-tech wheel maker Carbon Revolution, and to other growing industries, such as insurance. The National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Transport Accident Commission are both headquartered in the city.

“It is the job of the committee to be positive, but not to put spin on it,” Casson says. “We are realistic, we do know that the city is going through this huge change and we would be foolish to say everything is fine. Everything is not fine.”

“These new jobs might not come immediately, and they might not be in familiar industries. But if people are willing to retrain there are a lot of opportunities.”

On Monday morning, the city’s “job shop” will open its doors for the first time. Located at the Gordon TAFE, in a heritage building near Geelong railway station, the walk-in centre will offer careers counselling and advice on work available in the area.

It is part of Skilling the Bay, an $11 million state-government program managed by Greg Leahy, from the Gordon. He’s tasked with lifting education levels and workforce participation across the region. Geelong’s high school completion rate is well below the state average. Youth unemployment is particularly high.

Young men can no longer follow their fathers to Ford or Alcoa, Leahy says. “Instead they’ll be coming out of school or university and getting a job with a small to medium-sized enterprise in West Geelong or Ocean Grove. The path to those jobs is nowhere near as clear.”

The path for retrenched workers is equally muddy. Leahy acknowledges there “isn’t a perfect fit” between their skills and the region’s growing industries – healthcare, community work and construction.

But the Gordon has been working with Alcoa employees for months. The company has paid for resume writing workshops and short courses, and offered extra funding for training in whatever field employees choose.

“The workers are at different points in the journey: some are resigned to their fate, some are thinking laterally, some are in denial,” Leahy says. “We’re trying to create a family-friendly environment. We don’t want people confronting these issues on their own.”

In the lounge room of their neat, brick home in Geelong’s eastern suburbs, Damian and Bethany Young are explaining their revised plans.

When Damian began at Point Henry in 2000, he thought he had a job for life. But earlier this morning, the couple signed a lease on a shop in East Geelong. They are converting Bethany’s part-time, online kids and homewares store, Ryder Loves Miller – named after their two young sons – into a bricks-and-mortar business.

The city’s main street is pockmarked with empty shops, but the couple believe they’ve identified a niche. “We’re positive,” Bethany says. “We don’t think Geelong is dead at all, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing this.”

For Damian, 39, it’s a wild career change. “I’ve gone from one extreme from another,” he says. “I never imagined myself in retail. I find it a bit daunting, but Bethany reassures me.”

“He is a little institutionalised,” she laughs.

It’s a word that comes up often in conversations with, or about, “Alcoans”. They’ll have to get used to “the real world”, Bethany says: lower wages, fewer sickies and less flexibility for time off with family.

Young, 39, took his redundancy a few weeks early so he could start work on the shop. Even so, he still speaks about Alcoa in the present tense. “I work in the potrooms,” he explains. “It’s hard work. If it wasn’t hot, they wouldn’t pay us the rate they do.”

His workmates are mates – they’ve attended each other’s weddings and kids’ birthdays – but he expects catch-ups will become rare as life moves on. As the former union delegate for his shift, he is worried about their welfare – especially those who’d committed to big mortgages. A few have jobs, but many have been forced to search farther and farther afield.

On his last day, in mid-July, Young was told he could leave early – but he wasn’t ready to go. “I got changed and it didn’t really hit until I was having that last shower. I was like: I don’t want to get out yet. But Bethany was coming to pick me up. “So I left. I shut the locker and walked out the gate.”

For better or worse, he stepped into a new Geelong.

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GWENDA Allgood is a no-nonsense local councillor, five times a mayor, from Ararat. In mid-November she travelled east to Seymour to speak about wind farms at forum on energy held in the bowls club hall.

“We did not have one objection,” she told the audience, explaining the benefits of the Challicum Hills wind farm, built in 2003. “I can only speak as I find: there is no noise [from the turbines]. I don’t know why, but there isn’t. And they’re our best ratepayer – they pay well, they really do.”

There were about 50 people in the hall; almost all were renewable energy supporters. The event was hosted by a local environment group, with speakers on the topics of home retrofitting, community solar power and the campaign against coal seam gas.

But there was one key reason for the afternoon’s proceedings: the Cherry Tree wind farm, 16 turbines planned for a nearby ridgeline above the Trawool Valley.

The wind farm, proposed by Infigen Energy, was before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. The project had become controversial in late 2012, following a meeting held by the anti–wind farm activist group, the Landscape Guardians.

After receiving 117 objections, the local council delayed and finally denied the permit, against the advice of its planning officers. The company appealed; the matter had already been before the tribunal for ten months.

When Allgood finished speaking at the meeting, a man named Gary Morris put his hand up. Sounding slightly nervous, he read from his notes about a survey criticising another wind farm. “I’m just concerned about the noise aspect,” he said.

“Instead of getting on the internet,” Allgood replied, “you need to go out and visit them. I invite you to Ararat, and I will personally show you around.”

Afterwards, Morris explained that his home was within 3 kilometres of the proposed turbines, but Infigen had never met with him. “My concerns aren’t just about noise. It’s about health, and it’s about this company,” he said.

*

Like the rest of the world, Australia urgently needs to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to avoid runaway climate change. A recent report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance says new wind turbines are already cheaper than new coal- or gas-fired power stations, even without carbon pricing. And yet, the forecast for wind power is remarkably mixed.

In 2009, the South Australian government set a target for renewables to cover one-third of its energy production by 2020. It has nearly met the mark already. Wind power alone now accounts for 27 per cent.

But in Victoria, the industry has stalled. In August 2011 the state government stiffened its planning rules, giving people who live within two kilometres of wind farms the right to veto, and prohibiting turbines in several regions.

A new report from Victoria’s Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, Professor Kate Auty, says wind power comprises less than 3 per cent of the state’s electricity generation.

The report strongly criticises the planning restrictions, arguing they discourage a shift to low-carbon energy, make it more difficult and costly to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and damage the local economy.

“Many proposals for new wind farms in Victoria have been withdrawn. Lost investment has been estimated at $4 billion and 3,000 jobs,” the report says, quoting figures from the Clean Energy Council.

The Labor party has promised to repeal the restrictions if it wins government in next years’ state election. In the meantime, the new federal government appears unlikely to encourage the industry.

A spokesperson for Industry minister Ian Macfarlane says the government will commission a study into “the potential health effects of wind farms”, and confirms that it will go ahead with a scheduled review of the federal renewable energy target, due next year. It has already tabled legislation to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which would otherwise invest $5 billion in renewable energy over the next 5 years.

*

Two weeks after the forum in Seymour, VCAT finally approved the permit for Cherry Tree. It is now only the second wind farm to win planning permission in Victoria since August 2011.

The tribunal said the Victorian and NSW heath departments had expressly stated “there is no scientific evidence to link wind turbines with adverse health effects”, and that view was backed by the National Health and Medical Research Council.

It rejected the survey evidence of health concerns tended by anti-wind groups, the Waubra Foundation and the Landscape Guardians.

“To be of any real value such surveys need to be carried out by qualified professionals on respondents selected by accepted random selection methods, and subjected to an analysis that yields statistically valid results,” it said.

The tribunal had earlier ruled that the visual and noise impacts of the project were acceptable, and that the turbines would not cause problems with bushfire, salinity, erosion, aviation or loss of wildlife habitat.

It was a comprehensive victory, both for the company and the wind industry at large.

On the same day, the South Australian Environment Protection Authority released the results of its study of noise from the Waterloo wind farm. Nearby residents who had previously complained were asked to keep noise diaries; in them, they noted “rumbling effects” even at times when the turbines had been shut down. The authority’s recordings showed the turbines meet local and international standards for both audible and low frequency sound.

Ketan Joshi, from Infigen, says his company understands that this evidence, and the VCAT decision, won’t change everyone’s minds. “We’re aware that a lot of these concerns don’t magically vanish as soon as you get approval.

“The industry really depends on good community engagement. People need to be deeply involved in the development, otherwise you’re likely to face opposition.”

Joshi confirms that Infigen hasn’t met individually with Gary Morris. “It’s hard to talk to everybody one-on-one, because there are a large number of people around our projects,” he says.

For Cherry Tree, the company had held two public meetings, as well as stalls at a local festival and a tour of the Hepburn wind farm. But for future projects, it is considering ways to give locals “a much bigger stake in the shape a wind farm takes”, Joshi says.

The anti–wind farm push in Seymour began with a public meeting coordinated by the Landscape Guardians. One of the speakers was Max Rheese, executive director of climate change denial groups the Australian Environment Foundation and the Australian Climate Science Coalition.

At a council meeting held in October 2012, just two days before the local elections, nearly 40 people spoke against the wind farm. Among them was Peter Mitchell, the chairman of the Waubra Foundation. Subsequently, the foundation, which has tax-deductible charity status, sought donations to fund its case against Cherry Tree before VCAT.

In response, BEAM, the local environment group, distributed a “myth-busting” flyer supporting the turbines, together with Friends of the Earth.

“They’d managed to scare the pants off a lot of people,” says Leigh Ewbank, from Friends of the Earth. “There’s no way developers can compete with a political campaign of that nature. And it isn’t dying down, despite all the evidence showing that wind energy is clean and safe.”

The “contemporary health panic” about turbines has drawn the attention of public health academic Professor Simon Chapman, from University of Sydney. Chapman, who is renowned for his work on tobacco control, has traced the health and noise complaints made about Australia’s wind farms.

In a paper published in October, he revealed that only 129 people have complained – a tiny proportion of the population who live near turbines – and almost all of them did so after 2009, when critics began publicising the alleged health worries.

There have been no health complaints in Western Australia, which has 13 wind farms.

“A majority of wind farms, even big ones, have no history of complaints at all,” he says. “The complaints line up with half a dozen wind farms that have been targeted by the anti–wind farm groups. That’s the ‘nocebo’ hypothesis: if you spread anxiety you’re going to get anxiety.”

“If you tell people that something is going to happen to them and you demonstrate people who are worried, then it becomes a communicated disease.”

The final speaker at the Seymour forum was Doug Hobson, a farmer from Waubra with a thick goatee beard. He has eight turbines on his property. “The wind turbines have helped underlay what we’re doing as a farming community,” he said. “It takes the lows out of farming.”

He explained that almost all the people of Waubra do not want their town’s name to be associated with the anti–wind farm group, the Waubra Foundation. In November they mailed a petition with 316 signatures asking it to change its name.

“Niney-five per cent of the people in Waubra are in favour of the wind farm,” he said. “Country people don’t like change, but it does just become part of the furniture.”

*

The only other wind farm approved in Victoria in more than two years is at Coonooer Bridge, a small farming community north-west of Bendigo. Its story is very different.

The project is being developed by Windlab, a spin-off company from CSIRO founded in 2003. It has since built turbines in Australia, Canada, USA and South Africa. Soon after it began, Windlab identified that the hills near Coonooer Bridge were particularly windy: in fact, their steady, strong winds offer a renewable resource among the best in the world.

But in 2012, when Windlab began to consider building turbines there, Luke Osborne, the project’s director, knew that wind energy was becoming controversial in rural areas. He knew from personal experience, because he has turbines on his family farm near Canberra.

“It had become clear that we needed to work on gaining a ‘social licence to operate’,” he explains. “It wasn’t good enough just to get it approved. It needed to have a much better level of local acceptance.”

His team began a series of town hall–style meetings with everyone who owned land nearby, as well as one-on-one conversations, in which they devised the ownership model for the project. “We said, ‘We not only want people living nearby to share in the financial benefits, we also want you to help guide how we do this’,” Osborne recalls.

In less than a year, the five-turbine project had been approved by the local council. It will produce enough electricity to power 11,000 households.

Thirty landholders are shareholders. The farmers with turbines on their properties agreed to take lower rent, and the company, slightly lower profits; those returns are shared among the neighbours. As with many other wind farms, it will donate money to the community – in this case $25,000 each year. Everyone within 5 kilometres of the turbines will get a vote on how it’s spent.

“We haven’t had any outsiders come in opposing the project,” Osborne says. “I hope that’s because we haven’t given anybody a reason to invite them in.”

Osborne modelled his approach on the research of Dr Nina Hall, from CSIRO, who is studying the idea of “social licence to operate” for wind farms.

In interviews with rural residents, her team has found “strong community support for the development of wind farms”, including from those who don’t speak out through the media or political forums.

Hall concluded that people’s attitudes to the local impacts are shaped by the way a project is run.

She noticed that people opposed to wind farms would initially talk about technological worries. “When we dug a little deeper, we often found their opposition was based more on concerns about process,” she explains. “Things like how they found out about the development, and whether they felt they had influence over the design, location and the final decision about whether it would go ahead.”

Ian Olive is one of those people. He has been farming near Coonooer Bridge all his life, continuing the work of his parents and grandparents. Now the 69-year-old tends his crops and merino sheep with the help of his two sons, whose young families live on the property too.

Although he supports renewable energy, Olive is not pleased by the prospect of turbines near his farm. His family would prefer “to keep the status quo”, he says. He expects the turbines, standing on the low mountain range on the south-western horizon, will be “a stark monstrosity against the natural beauty” of his skyline.

But equally, Olive says, Windlabs couldn’t have conducted its consultation any better: the scheme has created no resentment between neighbours. He says “the company has done a good job in helping the community” through its annual fund and the shareholdings for surrounding landowners, including his family.

For Osborne, gaining the trust of families like the Olives represents the project’s biggest triumph. “We’ve tried our best to make sure the benefits for the local area are real and well understood,” he says. “It’s not a silver bullet – not everyone wants to live near turbines – but for the majority it has made a difference.

“I’m a big believer in the fairness of this model. I hope what we’ve done here will help the industry.”

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