When sheep and cattle farmer Lindsay Marriott sat before the Senate committee on information integrity on climate and energy, he was there to describe what gross misinformation about wind farms looks like when it arrives in a small regional community – and what it costs the people who live there.

Lindsay hosts wind turbines on his South Gippsland property, and recalled how a well-organised anti-wind campaign, backed by “amazingly powerful people” turned neighbours against one another and targeted anyone associated with the project. The result, he told the committee, wasn’t just heated disagreement — it was a campaign fuelled by falsehoods and intense social pressure.

“The sad thing is that the good outcomes, the people that are living with wind farms, no one ever hears how that’s gone," Lindsay said. "My lived experience is the opposite to the majority of talk. And I find it unbelievable that after all this time with so many wind farms operating, there’s still the nastiness and the anti and the absolute nonsense said about wind farms."

Lindsay sat alongside RE-Alliance National Director Andrew Bray, who said, “coordinated misinformation campaigns… [are] eroding public confidence in renewable energy across the country.”

Local Energy Hubs are our proposed solution to counter this misinformation cycle.

Read more in '“Every component of my life was attacked:” How wind farm misinformation tore community apart' in RenewEconomy.