The Renewable Energy Alliance supports Tasmania establishing a legislated Code of Conduct for renewable energy projects.
The Draft Tasmanian Renewable Energy Code of Conduct (Draft Code) provides a strong foundation and is broadly consistent with better practice emerging across Australia, particularly its establishment of a minimum standard for community participation, emphasis on community influence and benefit sharing, and public reporting. The final Code should retain these elements while substantially strengthening community and First Nation engagement and partnership, supporting coordinated regional benefit sharing, strengthening a number of baseline standards and demonstrating a clear link to the Developer Rating Scheme.
We make the following specific recommendations regarding the Draft Code:
- Retain mandatory legislated status.
- Retain the baseline and leading-practice structure in the final Code.
- Strengthen the community engagement baseline, with IAP2 “Collaborate” as the minimum expectation for substantive community engagement and maintain IAP2 “Empower” as leading practice, where community decision-making is appropriate.
- Create a standalone Tasmanian Aboriginal engagement and partnership principle, co-designed with Aboriginal organisations and incorporating Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), cultural competency, resourcing and benefit/equity participation.
- Apply the final Code from the earliest project-development/site-selection stage.
- Apply relevant ongoing obligations to existing projects, with transitional arrangements.
- Strengthen compliance and enforcement, including committing to independent audits, corrective directions and consequences for persistent non-compliance.
- Require transparent outcome-based annual reporting, including how community input changed project decisions and what benefits were actually delivered.
- Require projects to participate in the Developer Rating Scheme as a baseline.
- Include coordinated regional benefits, co-designed with the community in areas with multiple projects.
Read more in our full submission.
