There are moments in public policy when you read a document, glance at the date, and briefly wonder whether someone has accidentally fed the printer a filing from another era.
The Western Australian Planning Commission’s draft Renewable Energy Planning Code is one such moment. Released for public comment at the end of 2025, it poses a question of pressing contemporary relevance: how close to your house should a 300-metre-tall wind turbine be built?
This would make perfect sense if it were 2005, when the Kyoto Protocol entered force and governments enthusiastically set about rearranging the economy. Or 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed amid much weeping and talk of being on history’s “right side”. It might even make sense in 2016, when Donald Trump entered the White House and set fire to the comforting idea that climate policy could forever float above economics and politics.
But it is not 2005. It is not 2015. It is not even 2016. It is 2026.
And in 2026, after nine uninterrupted years of state government, the government has finally decided to set some minimum standards for where these things should be built when renewables are placed next to housing. One does wonder why it took so long.
This matters because 2017 marked the quiet end of Australia’s bipartisan climate consensus. Not because Australians suddenly stopped believing in climate change, but because it slowly dawned on voters that emissions reduction came with costs — higher power prices, a shakier grid, and the discreet relocation of inconvenience onto people who happened to live where infrastructure was cheapest to build.
In Western Australia, those people have overwhelmingly been farmers.
During Labor’s time in office, more than a dozen wind farm projects have been proposed. Curiously, the ones floated off Perth’s metropolitan waters or around Bunker Bay were knocked on the head with remarkable speed — the invisible hand of influence working exactly as advertised.
The Wheatbelt, meanwhile, became the go-to location.
Predictably, every proposal has generated neighbour concern and community opposition. Yet it has taken nine years for the government to arrive at a planning code to address those concerns — and when it finally arrives, it manages to be worse than anyone imagined.
Three issues dominate community anxiety: distance, noise, flicker and visual amenity. To spare busy readers the pain of technical detail, let us start with setbacks. The draft Code relies on a formula of 1.1 times turbine height. In practice, a 300-metre turbine may be placed about 330 metres from the nearest house.
This is reassuring if your chief concern is whether the turbine might fall over. It is less comforting if your concern is living next to it.
Internationally, this approach is — how to put it politely — adventurous. In parts of Germany there is the well-known “10H rule”, requiring turbines to be set back ten times their height. In the United States, numerous counties impose setbacks of 1.5 to 2 kilometres from non-participating dwellings.
These rules are not expressions of climate denial. They are expressions of property law, landscape protection, and the once-uncontroversial belief that people should not be industrialised against their will.
Noise fares no better. The draft Code leans heavily on predictive modelling rather than lived experience. Denmark, by contrast, caps night-time indoor low-frequency noise at 20 decibels — roughly the sound level of a very quiet rural night — recognising that sleep disturbance occurs well below traditional averages. Canada tried more conservative standards repeatedly and still ended up in court.
WA’s solution is refreshingly simple: rural areas are allowed higher night-time noise, on the implicit theory that people who live in quiet places have been unfairly deprived of comforting background sound — street noise, traffic hum — and should therefore be gifted the gentle thrum of a wind turbine rocking them to sleep.
Shadow flicker is treated with similar optimism. In Germany and Sweden it is a hard constraint. Here it is something to be “managed”. Just work the tractor north–south instead of east–west and you’ll be right.
Visual amenity receives the sort of cursory attention usually reserved for footnotes. This is entirely reasonable — provided the government is prepared to apply the logic consistently. If it is good enough for Caballing, it should be good enough for Cottesloe. If the Avon catchment must absorb turbines, perhaps the Swan River can share the load. Kings Park would make a splendid demonstration site.
Solar farms do not escape the generosity. Anyone who has driven between Sydney and Melbourne will be familiar with the industrial mirror-fields lining the highway. In Japan and Europe, such developments require deep setbacks, glare controls and serious decommissioning bonds. The WA Code largely shrugs. It is, apparently, the price farmers must pay to save the planet.
Which brings us to the question the Code barely asks at all: what happens at the end?
In Western Australia, mining companies are required to lodge environmental bonds to ensure land is rehabilitated when projects end or companies fail. This is not radical. It is not ideological. It is a recognition of reality: projects end, markets turn, companies go broke, and directors move on.
Yet somehow, for renewable energy projects — which are just as industrial, just as intrusive, and often backed by special-purpose vehicles with a lifespan suspiciously aligned to subsidy regimes — we are invited to rely on good intentions.
The last thing Western Australia needs is a landscape littered with abandoned turbines, concrete footings, access roads and rusting infrastructure because a proponent walked away when the economics no longer stacked up. We already know how this story ends. We just pretend not to.
If environmental bonds are good enough for mining, they are good enough for renewables. The principle is the same: if you profit from industrialising the landscape, you should also pay to clean it up.
The underlying assumption of the Code is that policy targets justify elevated tolerance for intrusion. Internationally, the opposite principle applies: the greater the external cost, the tighter the standard.
Farmers, it turns out, are not second-class citizens. The right to quiet enjoyment of land is not an urban indulgence. It is a principle embedded in planning law across the common law world.
Western Australia has abundant land, a concentrated population, and roughly half the state in Crown ownership. There is no shortage of options. There is only a shortage of political inconvenience.
If renewables are such a social good, they should be socially shared — starting with Crown land. State forests would be as good a place as any to begin. Until then, spare us the sermons about fairness from a system that quietly shifts the costs onto those furthest from the river.
And if the Bibbulmun Track does end up lined with turbines? At least walkers will be able to admire their values in motion as they trudge past.
