Anti renewables campaigners are increasingly weaponising community concerns about battery storage systems, spreading misinformation that threatens to derail Australia’s urgent energy transition.
Australia, like other carbon intensive nations, must take decisive action to prevent climate change impacts from becoming irreversible.
Sadly, the energy transition is increasingly bogged down in a culture war quagmire that is driven by conservative media, politicians and vested interests.
Misinformation is rife, and shared widely on social media.
A common line of attack against renewable energy systems – such as wind turbines, solar panels and batteries – is the supposed ‘threat’ of heightened fire risk.
In reality, renewable power facilities do not present a significant fire hazard, though battery storage does raise specific considerations that must be carefully managed.
The Australian Firefighters Climate Alliance (AFCA) has produced a briefer to consider the risk profile of storage and the practicalities of responding to fires in Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) facilities.
We hope it helps to offset some of the misinformation and hysteria that is often promoted by anti-renewables activists, by providing information from sources that can be easily verified.
Any new human activity in rural areas brings some level of new fire risk.
That is true of housing, farming, and industrial land uses, each of which has a specific risk profile.
BESS systems do bring particular risks that need to be managed.
However, anti renewables campaigners frequently radically overstate the risks associated with energy storage facilities, creating fear in communities where BESS are proposed or may be located in the future.
We hope that this briefing provides a more reasoned approach to the question of development of BESS facilities, one that leads to informed community involvement in decision making.
Check out the briefing paper at https://australianfirefightersclimatealliance.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/bess-fire-risk-factsheet_compressed.pdf.
Cam Walker, AFCA spokesperson
Cashflow tax would create unnecessary complexity
CPA Australia has raised serious concerns with the Productivity Commission’s recommendation to introduce a cashflow tax.
It will create unnecessary complexity, increase compliance costs, undermine Australia’s productivity agenda and ultimately cost consumers.
The proposed tax is a complex hybrid model that contradicts the government’s stated goal of reducing and simplifying regulation.
The cashflow tax is not simplification – it’s a radical, untested experiment that introduces multiple layers of complexity.
This additional tax will create uncertainty and confusion for taxpayers and advisers alike.
This complexity will drive up compliance costs, increase administrative burdens and make Australia’s tax system harder to navigate for businesses already struggling with red tape.
The proposal would impose a new tax structure alongside existing arrangements, effectively increasing the tax burden on Australia’s most productive businesses.
While headlines of higher tax rates for large corporations may be received well by the public in the short term, they will result in long term pain for everyone through higher costs.
Australia already has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world at 30 per cent.
Now the Productivity Commission recommends increasing this to an effective company tax rate of 33 per cent and reducing dividend imputation credits.
Adding another layer of complexity – and higher taxes – sends entirely the wrong message to investors and risks driving capital offshore.
By attacking the strongest businesses today with higher taxes, we weaken the entire economy.
Small businesses and consumers will ultimately pay the price in the form of higher costs and reduced growth.
CPA Australia supports the Productivity Commission’s recommendations to reduce regulatory burdens and improve policy development, but urges the government to reject the cashflow tax proposal.
We need reforms that lift productivity and attract investment, not experimental taxes that push up prices and weigh on growth.
The Productivity Commission’s proposal misses the big picture of comprehensive tax reform, which the GST should be at the heart of.
This proposal is a tax grab with serious consequences for the whole economy.
Jenny Wong, CPA Australia tax lead
