27th June, 2025.
I contribute to debate on the report of the Legislative Assembly Committee on Environment and Planning—which is the best committee, as the chair said—entitled The electricity outages affecting Far West NSW in October 2024. The committee staff were amazing and the inquiry was really good. I talk about my experiences and learnings regarding not only the Transgrid outage last October but also the real-life ongoing experiences of people living in some of the most remote communities in New South Wales. While many members would find a power outage an inconvenience, or a couple of weeks of rolling outages very annoying, those communities stopped functioning. Normally if one suburb goes without power, people simply drive to a neighbouring area and life is bearable, but those folks lost power.
People lost their phone connections not only because they could not charge their phones but also because the Telstra towers were battery powered and the batteries did not last more than a couple of hours. Generators were put in place but were removed prematurely. Usually when there are small blackouts, a technician needs to travel for six hours from Dubbo to restart power. If there were generators, I must say they sold out very quickly, and their prices went up exorbitantly. The issue then became sourcing fuel for the generators, but fuel became a problem because some bowsers require the internet for payment and people did not have the internet. Those people are extremely resilient. They are used to power outages, but not like that. Yet still they dug deep and helped each other out.
Stores and clubs shared refrigeration and air conditioning, and provided power so that people could use their phones. The RFS supplied generators, delivered food hampers and provided other services, as did the Country Women's Association and golf clubs. Health was a concern. Some health practitioners slept at work so people could access support. It was fascinating that Health could not tell the emergency services who was vulnerable or without power due to privacy issues, but when people sign up for power they declare that it is vital to them. Information was unavailable, even though it was available elsewhere. Babies had to endure 45-degree heat, and people on home dialysis had to stop midway through the process. But the biggest issue was communication.
The commercial arms of electricity supply, including Origin Energy and Red Energy, dealt with the issue differently. Red Energy gave some customers a discount on their next electricity bill, and Origin did the same, but only after personal inquiries were made. It was all different; it was messy. Credit was given to the member for Barwon and his office, as well as ABC radio, as they were often the only source of information that the community received. The unregulated areas, greater Darling council and Broken Hill council, received delayed notice of the oncoming catastrophe. The information only came to them by social media. There were very few reports from people in the community that councils did anything to communicate with or assist them.
The local regional emergency management committees met or instigated action at various times, but reports from many residents in many of those towns were that they did not know where their official emergency building was. Transgrid was poor in its communication during the outage and failed to answer any emails requesting information after the outage or address any of the claims that were made. Transgrid representatives sat through our town hall meetings and, as people presented, took them aside and tried to deal with them. Effectively, Transgrid used our meetings to make contact with people when, until then, it had not made any effort to connect. One of the most frustrating things for the people of the Far West was that they were surrounded by solar and wind farms, but commercial agreements stopped those sources of power from being used.
Government services told us that they were prepared and that they had pre-deployed people from the north coast of Australia. While people in those communities are extremely resilient, they were let down on this occasion. I believe emergency services require improved communications and further training.