GROVES, Ms Donna, Advocacy Committee Member, Engagement Institute SHORT, Mrs Marion, Chief Executive Officer, Engagement Institute CHAIR: Welcome. Although the committee doesn't require you to give evidence under oath, I should advise you that the hearing is a legal proceeding of the parliament and therefore has the same standing as the proceedings of the House. The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament. The evidence given today will be recorded by Hansard and attracts parliamentary privilege. I now invite you to make a brief opening statement before we move to discussion. Mrs Short : Thank you. We're very pleased to be here today, so thank you for the opportunity. I do have an opening statement that I'll read, just to get it on the Hansard. The Engagement Institute is the peak body for the community and stakeholder engagement profession, representing almost 15,000 members across Australia and New Zealand. Our members work across government, industry and the not-for-profit sector, including mining, energy infrastructure and First Nations engagement. Australia's critical minerals opportunity is significant. Our central proposition is that social licence and economic development are not competing objectives. Meaningful engagement is one of the conditions that enable responsible projects to proceed, strengthen investment certainty and support enduring regional benefits. Social licence cannot be granted by government or secured through communications alone. It is earned and maintained through conduct, relationships and demonstrated accountability. It is also dynamic and must be supported throughout the project life cycle, including closure and regional transition. Engagement must therefore begin before important decisions are effectively fixed. Communities and traditional owners need clarity about what they can influence; sufficient time, and accessible, transparent information to participate; and evidence of how their contribution affected the decision. Where an issue is not open to influence, that should also be stated honestly. This reflects the Engagement Institute's principles of respect, influence, impact, cohesion and inclusion. Traditional owners should not simply be recipients of proponent led consultation; they should have genuine agency in determining how engagement occurs and, where appropriate, be supported to lead these processes. This requires investment in governance and negotiation capability, access to independent advice, and action to reduce the cumulative cultural and administrative load created by multiple projects. Engagement across Australia and New Zealand is world leading. It is mature and sophisticated. However, challenges include fragmentation, inconsistent standards and the need for better, more consistent delivery of First Nations engagement. Engagement should also be recognised as a professional and technical discipline. Qualified engagement professionals should participate in project governance and advisory structures with sufficient authority, time, budget and resourcing. Engagement is not merely a communications function or an activity undertaken to satisfy an approvals requirement. Finally, we encourage the Commonwealth to lead a nationally consistent, outcomes focused framework for engagement in critical minerals projects. It should align Commonwealth, state, territory and local requirements, while remaining flexible enough to reflect different communities, cultures and project contexts. Such a framework should require proponents to demonstrate not simply that engagement occurred but what influence it had, how commitments are being tracked and whether promised community and regional outcomes are being delivered. Our submission contains seven recommendations. Today, we particularly ask that the committee recommend a national coordination of engagement expectations; meaningful traditional owner participation and capability building; professional engagement expertise within project governance; and transparent life cycle accountability. Good engagement will not remove every disagreement. It will help ensure that decisions are better informed, relationships are stronger, and the economic benefits of critical minerals development are more legitimate, equitable and durable. Thank you. CHAIR: Thank you, Mrs Short. We appreciate that excellent summary of your submission. Well put. There are a couple of things that I want to explore just before we move to my colleagues. The first one is that I do concur with you about the definition of engagement. And everyone has a different definition. Projects by their very nature can require different levels and different kinds of engagement. So I'd really like to expand on your very first point—what does good engagement look like in a practical sense? The other thing you said—and I think this is really, really interesting—was: Appoint Engagement Professionals as Technical Experts to Governance bodies/Advisory groups What makes an engagement professional? Is there a qualification? How do we determine what that looks like? Is it a membership of organisations like yours? I absolutely understand your sentiment, and I don't disagree with it. But what does that look like? That is where I'm going with that question. They're my two broad areas of interest. Then I'll defer to colleagues, and we can go on from there. Mrs Short : Would you like to take the point on engagement? Ms Groves : Yes. I've been brought along because I've been doing engagement for 33 years in resources, infrastructure and renewables. I'm very heartened by some of the legislative changes around the country at the moment. I'm based in Melbourne, and I lead a national role. I'm originally from Sydney, but I have been leading some on-the-ground projects in Queensland. We've had some changes to state legislation in Queensland where you are required to do a social impact assessment and a community benefit agreement before you lodge your planning application. That has transpired to excellent engagement, because you can't not tell people what the project is if they have to tell you how it's going to impact them. Community benefit agreements, as we know, in resources and renewables, are worth $10 million to $20 million for communities, and for First Nations communities. When it comes to traditional owners, we're not required to do a shared benefit agreement in some states; in others, we are. But we did one in Queensland for a project with Isaac Regional Council under the new legislation, and we've just lodged one of the first planning permits under the new legislation. I was very heartened to see what I thought would be cumbersome play out in reality to be an excellent community benefit agreement, an excellent shared benefit agreement. Both council and the proponent who I worked with were very, very happy with what came out of it, and so were the community. So we were able to find what the needs were in the community, meet them with the community benefit agreement and really consult, really engage and change the project at a point. We haven't put the planning permit in yet, so we could make changes that suited the community. So, while I would have told you at first, 'How is this legislation going to work?' in reality, it was excellent. I think the council had a lot to do with that. In Queensland, they have QREC, which are a state based organisation for renewables. They've been excellent in developing community benefit agreements, getting developers to join together and getting resources together as well. So, while I've worked a lot in resources and renewables, I'm quite heartened by the changes. In Victoria, we've got similar changes coming through. On the border, we're working with quite a few communities. I think, if we take that angle—that we should bring our social impact assessment forward—we're actually giving the information to communities. We're telling them what the projects are, we're letting them buy into the development of the projects, and we're letting them get tangible benefits. If you put forward a renewables or resources project, it impacts that community, but the money goes to the wider community. So how do we look after those directly impacted, and how do we look after the environmental concerns and the wider community? But I think government's actually starting to really think about it. I'm really heartened that you're all here. I think it's a great thing. I think it means that what we're doing out in the communities—because our job is simply to talk to communities, to bring their voices back to you and say: 'These are the impacts of the projects, this is what the community is saying, and this is how we're working to make this better.' That doesn't mean that every project should go ahead. Community engagement is not about getting a tick on a project. It's not about getting agreement. It's about actually discussing the impacts of the project and seeing if we can move forward with them. But, practically out in the field, while some of the legislation is cumbersome, when you have good councils, when you have good proponents and when you have people that are genuinely committed to the process, it works. In renewables and resources, if it's just a developer, that's when we tend to have a problem. If you're just going in, smashing out a project and walking away, it's very hard to build social licence—or 'social performance', which is what we would generally call it now. If you are developing a project, you're constructing it, and you're in the community for 30 years—whether it's resources, renewables or whatever it is—then you can genuinely use your social impact assessment, and that stage, to build relationships with the community and maintain them going forward. As to traditional owners, it's things like revenue, benefit sharing—there are a lot of opportunities, now, with the federal funding as well. When you can bring those in early, and bring everybody on the journey, and truly listen, in developing the project, it makes so much difference. Thirty-three years ago, I wouldn't have believed I would have had this conversation with you today. CHAIR: That's encouraging. Mrs Short : I'd like to add in some 'ands'! Engagement needs to be strategic. It needs to be at the front end of a project, before decisions are already made. We talk about engagement needing to have the right purpose, the right time, the right people and the right reasons. You have to be clear on influence. Communities need to understand what they can influence and also what they can't influence. You've got to report back to them—just filling in some of the gaps, with Donna. You've got to be able to report back to them, so they can understand the impact and outcomes of decisions that they've influenced, or understand the reasons why they haven't changed. There are a lot of ingredients to get right. But you do need to make engagement strategic, not a tick-a-box exercise. It's not a communications exercise. It is a two-way relationship process. So, if you have that strategy, and then you have your operational plan underneath it, which will help you choose the right methods and approaches that you need to have—you sort of tick through those, as part of your question: 'How do I know what strategy? How do I know how we want to engage with communities?' If you have that strategy and the plan right, then the rest of it will cascade down, as opposed to building it from the bottom up. In terms of engagement professionals: yes, there is a certification program; we offer it at the Engagement Institute. But we're also a wonderful body to ask for recommendations—just like you would ask any of the other peak bodies for their sectors about who would be a suitable technical adviser and run a recruitment program on that. There are a whole stack of Donnas out there that represent Engagement Institute very well. CHAIR: Thank you for that. I'm going to go to colleagues now. Who would like to pick up a line of questioning? Dr TRISH COOK: Sure. CHAIR: Thanks, Trish. Dr TRISH COOK: Hello. So you're advocating for a framework, upfront. Do you have examples or suggested models for going forward, or is every engagement bespoke? Mrs Short : No. I think there's an opportunity for a nationally consistent standard. We're seeing the development of the standard for community engagement under the EPBC Act; that is probably the one that, most recently—we were very involved in the development of that standard, right back to the development of the DCCEEW guidelines, after the Andrew Dyer review into community engagement in the energy transmission projects. So it needs to be strategic, but it also needs to be flexible so it's not prescriptive on what type of engagement method. Not every project is going to have a town hall, and not every project will have a high level of influence, and so you won't be looking to a co-design method on it. So it needs to set a minimum consistent baseline. At the moment, we have so much fragmentation across the engagement sector. In New South Wales, when they put out their community participation plan for consultation, it referred to over a hundred different guidelines and standards in New South Wales. We know that, in the energy sector, there are more than 60 standards, guidelines and contractor conditions that I think engagement proponents have to meet. This creates inefficiencies, delays and confusions. Dr TRISH COOK: I think, potentially, renewables are a good case study of how not to do it, in some ways. Ms Groves : In some ways, definitely. Yes. Mrs Short : But we have pockets of great practice. Ms Groves : We do. Mrs Short : Donna gave an example. And we draw them from other sectors. We can draw them from local government. We can draw them from First Nations communities, where we have had really good examples of what strategic engagement can look like. That delivers more timely and better outcomes in terms of project delivery. Dr TRISH COOK: Presumably that engagement is not just once off, up the front? Ms Groves : No, it's ongoing. Dr TRISH COOK: Throughout the life of this project and beyond? Ms Groves : Yes, absolutely—even engagement for the initial project development and then ongoing engagement from an operational context. That's definitely best practice. Mrs Short : And right through closure. I was a child in Nhulunbuy when Comalco built our school. I went to school in demountables there until then. All of the kids in Nhulunbuy went to school in two demountables, and they built us a beautiful school. Of course, now they're in the decommissioning phase. So that responsibility to community needs to go through. CHAIR: It is interesting. The life of project is, I suspect, the same as the life of consultation. David, did you want to pick up there? Mr FARLEY: I think we're moving into an interesting era. We're definitely coming off the back of the Pax Americana era, and we're not only seeing a challenge for global resources but also seeing those available resources used as a tool of negotiation and a tool of weaponisation as well. So one of the things that I think are important in these discussions we have is the criticality of time. We haven't got the windows and the luxury of time that we had before. I'm not advocating that we short-cut or short-circuit anything. But at the moment, especially in critical minerals, the capital is coming from a sovereign perspective. It's sovereign nations investing—not equity firms, not pension funds, not banks. It's sovereign nations coming to other nations and saying, 'We need these minerals and we need them quickly because the defence of our nation, the technology of our nation, is relying on it.' So what we've got to be really cognisant of in these engagement processes now is time and why we are doing it. One part of the world has embargoed the other part of the world from accessing their minerals, so it's disenfranchising them out of the growth curve of technology. But also, as we're engaged in all these conflicts around the world, we're exhausting what reservoirs we've got of the critical minerals, because they've been applied and we've got to renew them. So I think you have to be cognisant here that the consulting side, your side of the equation, really must get to understand the urgency—the criticality of time—with which these negotiations or these consultations have got to take place. It's more of an observation and a statement to you: don't expect the world to have the luxury of time that we had, because we haven't got it any more. Mrs Short : I think you'll find that we agree with you on that point—that good engagement done at the right time for the right reasons will actually move projects along much more quickly. The challenge that we have is that it's quite often brought in late, as an afterthought, when decisions are already made. We know that community opposition and outrage have contributed to quite expensive delays, particularly in the infrastructure sector, over the last decade. More than $40 billion of projects have been impacted by community opposition. Our position is let's get this right at the front and do good engagement with communities so we can move it ahead more quickly towards the end. That is just good change management. Mr FARLEY: Yes. Do you think your institute is fully aware of what I call the criticality of what we're trying to do with critical minerals? There is an overwhelming urgency, beyond a red flashing light, that we get this going. It's not as if Australia is on a war footing, but other parts of the world that are on a war footing are requiring this now. And, ultimately, if the troubles expand, the demand expands exponentially with that. Mrs Short : We don't see engagement as a roadblock. We see engagement as the opportunity to open gateways. We're not across the specific criticalities of your projects, but, believe me, my members come across timeline pressure every day in their jobs. Another example out of poor New South Wales is that I read in the Sydney Morning Herald maybe 18 months ago that the consent-approval process for offshore wind farms was over nine years in New South Wales, and they were considering reducing engagement from four weeks to two weeks, which they went about. Clearly, engagement's not the barrier to wind farm consent problems. So, yes, reform is necessary, but our point is that, if engagement is strategic, it can be a value-add to projects. It is a value-add to projects. Donna, do you have something to add? Ms Groves : I think you're actually talking about materials that can help war efforts, aren't you? Mr FARLEY: Well, not only war efforts but the whole technological curve. Whether it's building out AI centres et cetera, it's a matter of making sure that the Western world can keep its position. It has lost its position for the moment for critical minerals by being reliant on China. China has embargoed the West, literally, for it. So there's this urgency for us to explore in what I call safe provinces, and Australia is relatively safe. My concern is not so much the engagement. My concern is: are your institute and your people really aware of what the government are trying to achieve in the timeframes they're trying to achieve it in? Ms Groves : We certainly get briefed by government. You're in a little bit of a territory that's probably out of our normal domain. If we're talking minerals in terms of powering Australia as normal then that's when social licence would be weighed up. If you're talking about something that becomes a matter of critical national emergency and security, I would imagine that social licence would not be at the forefront of the decision-making, unfortunately. But it depends. If we're talking about— Mr FARLEY: Well, it's the latter we're talking about. I've learnt names of minerals I've never heard before. But it's really interesting where they play a role in either a data centre, a missile, an aircraft or in the space program. They are critical to them, and that's where the race is on at the moment. My question to you is: is the institute—the people you're representing—fully aware of the urgency or the brief, I suppose, that the government has given us as a committee to get on with the job? Ms Groves : Well, our members work with clients that put timelines pressure on them all the time, and they have to be creative around what we can do. The preference would be more strategic to get better outcomes, but if the ability to influence an outcome is low then that's part of our submission as well: be clear on what can be influenced and be clear on what can't be influenced. CHAIR: I think it's also beholden on governments to communicate that urgency as well. We have a role to play in this as well. This is all part of this inquiry. We're talking to communities. We're talking to institutes like yours about social licence and how to go about not getting social licence but working through the achievement of social licence on big projects. But it is true that there is a level of criticality to this. Ms Groves : Which is tough because you get elected based on social licence, so it's a fine line, isn't it? The community are not going to take well to having data centres dropped in left, right and centre without consultation and engagement. I'm seeing that in suburban Melbourne at the moment, where councils are calling in data centres and bringing it to councillors. I live in Casey, which is an outer suburb in Melbourne, and we've just had it called in. I've never seen such a backlash in such a community about a data centre. So if that's happening in what you would probably call working-class Australia and the community is going to stop it, I can see it coming because the councillors want to get voted back in, so, on something that the community are so ardently opposed to, they're not going to lose social licence. So where is the balance with the criticality? Is it around information? Is it around government giving that information that you're talking about? Because if we don't have social licence, we will have these things stopped. CHAIR: Indeed. Ms Ambihaipahar. Ms AMBIHAIPAHAR: My question is really about how do we measure quality engagement. It might be easier to talk to an example that comes to mind, and maybe also address Mr Farley's concerns around timeframes. Is it something that you could talk to? It could be the number of participants and the types of engagement. I am happy for you to maybe use an example. Mrs Short : There are a couple of things. We are about to launch an engagement timeframes policy actually, and we're very happy to share that with the committee. It is supported by a guidance tool for practitioners. In the middle of October it will be available, and I would be really happy to share it with you. The Engagement Institute has a certification tool for engagement quality standards. We launched it last year. It's called an EngageMark certification. We actually look at nine elements. We look at governance, leadership and culture because we know that, if we don't have those three things right, we're not going to see good, consistent delivery of engagement practices. We look at capability resourcing, expertise, impact, evaluation and, as a standalone element, First Nations engagement. Behind it we've built an engagement maturity model and something that I call the brain, which was really, really hard to build. It assesses organisations across the nine elements and the maturity model to give them a certification of gold, silver, bronze or 'did not meet', and then we publish those on a public-facing register. We're looking at making that available at a project level as well, and that will become a consistent national benchmark for how we evaluate good engagement. People are doing different ways of slicing and dicing engagement, but, as the Engagement Institute, we think those nine elements together are critical for assessing good engagement. But it does need to be very outcomes focused. How many people you connected with and what methods you chose to deliver are just part of achieving the outcomes. Ms Groves : Sometimes it's not even about the amount of people. Sometimes you get fewer people because they're not objecting to the project. I have to tell you that one of my measures is how much I hear from the local MP, because, if it's a problem, I hear a lot. If it's not a problem, I can barely get in to breathe. It's like: 'Alright, you can send the information. It's okay. The community is happy with it.' So we try really hard to work with the local MPs, but it's okay if they don't have the time for us to brief them. That's often because there isn't an issue. For me, best-practice engagement—and I'm really happy with the project we're doing in Macenzie River with Isaac Regional Council, which we've just lodged the planning permit for. I would consider that successful engagement. We got out to the wider community. We got out to the landowners. It wasn't that we didn't have people with issues—we certainly did—but we managed to address the issues. We managed to make changes to the project. We managed to come up with a best-practice community benefit agreement, which I'm delighted with—our shared-benefit agreement. I can see that the social impact assessment was robust and best practice, that we're genuinely meeting the needs of the community through the project and that the community is overwhelmingly quite happy with the project so far. We go out for planning consultation shortly, but I believe we did the work upfront to develop it. In answer to your question around criticality, I think the government has a lot of responsibility there, because the rules and framework that you put in for us to address are our timeline. I can get a project and do a social impact assessment, a community-benefit agreement and a shared-benefit agreement in six months. So I can have a project ready for you to approve in six months, but it's what guidelines you give me that I have to address, and I work with the development managers. I can do it even quicker if I need to. We can meet your timelines, but it's how robust and what you need from us. There's not a lot of trust when it comes back, probably for good reason. There are a lot of people that don't do things beautifully out there. But, in terms of that criticality, it's what we have to address in developing the projects. Mrs Short : I think the trade-offs are the issue you're facing. To move projects along faster, the trade-off may be reduced social licence or reduced community benefit. If those trade-offs are okay, that's a decision for the decision-makers. Decision-making and engagement are the critical parts of engagement. Ms Groves : Absolutely. Communities respond to transparency. They respond to openness. They respond to us giving them the information. People have different levels of technical skills. The most success I have in an engagement is: 'I offer the full technical report, but do you want a summary?' You give the information. Okay, you're concerned about watercourses. You're concerned about contamination. Here's the expert. Here's the report. What level do you want the information at? What do you need? It is going back and giving people the information. If they think something's being hidden, that's the biggest problem, in my opinion, in engagement. So transparency, openness, being upfront— Mrs Short : That language. Ms Groves : Yes. CHAIR: If time permits, I wouldn't mind coming back to community benefit, because I actually think that there is a real nexus between this criticality of time and community benefit if we can do that well. I'm not talking about buying off communities because we're in a rush. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that, if there's a level of understanding of the importance of this and people can genuinely see both the big-picture benefit of a safe and prosperous technological world and also receive things at a local level that makes their lives better, that's important. Trish? Dr TRISH COOK: I agree. With respect, Mr Farley, I don't think the criticality part is really within what we're looking at here in our terms of reference, but I take your point. And you also mentioned the EPBC Act. If something's of national significance, it can override. But I think that, for the purposes of our inquiry, we really need to understand what good practice looks like and how it adds value to the process. Perhaps, if we had national guidelines or national standards, there could also be a clause where, if something was critical or of national significance, it could be within that just like it is with the environmental standards. Mrs Short : Recognising the role of a federal decision-maker on national issues—like I say, decision-making is an important part of good engagement. Dr TRISH COOK: It wasn't really a question; it was just to get around the point, saying, sure, there will always be international pressures. But will a local community go with that? Only if it's of national significance should we be able to hurry that up. You might be aware that I have an issue with Alcoa in West Australia. They had 59,000 submissions to the government's community consultation, mostly objecting to the expansion of the bauxite mine in the jarrah forest. Now, I imagine trust is everything. In your experience, if you lose trust, is there a way back from that? Ms Groves : There is, but it's a tough road. I'm seconded into a developer and operator at the moment, and some of the projects that we've taken on already have a level of mistrust. It's very important that I go in and point to the other examples where we have built trust, saying, 'This is who we are, these are our values and this is how we develop them.' So, yes, you can, but it's tough. As government, you know that too. People see that you might have made a decision that they think is not with your values, and you need to be able to explain that it is. But I'm heartened to hear what you say, because I get criticality but I also get that it can be an excuse to bombard communities or bulldoze them. When we can do engagement quickly, we can be transparent, we can be honest, we can develop projects. If we're given the impetus, we can do it quickly. We have the skills in this country. We're considered the best in the world at community engagement. We can do best practice. It's not an easy field. Nobody likes being yelled at. The good thing when I got to be a middle-aged woman was that they stopped yelling at me. They yell at the young engineers that come with me! It's a tough field, but it's also extremely rewarding. I've been doing community-benefit agreements for 20 years, and it feels like people are just hearing about them now. But now there's no choice. A developer can't say, 'Oh, we might do it.' They have to do it. There's an amount. There's a 'This is what we're doing.' From my perspective, that's the biggest windfall. 'I've got this money to help the community. Now, how are we going to spend it?' Mrs Short : I think we might be surprised. If we asked the community, 'This is happening. What could it look like?' how might they help us answer it? CHAIR: I think it's actually interesting to look at it from a community-benefit perspective as well. When you go into a community with a big project—let's just hypothesise on this for a minute—is it a value proposition where you go in and say: 'This project's worth this? Therefore, there is a formula to say that there's going to be X community benefit'? How do you distil that down? I've also got examples where there's an amount of money floating around for a local government organisation. They might have some priorities within an LGA, but these don't necessarily align with the members of the community who are most impacted. They might want a main street done up somewhere, but that's not really the benefit the community needs from the impact of the project. In your experience, how do you come up with community benefits? Is it a matter of going to the community and asking, 'Well, what do you want out of this?' Is it a conversation with local government, or is it all of them? Ms Groves : It's all of it. There is a prescriptive fee. It depends on whether it's a resources or a renewables project. Solar is generally $850 a megawatt; BESS is $150 a megawatt. That depends on the state. The fee changes. But there are formulas. There are set amounts. The social impact assessment is the key, because councils do have their drivers. I've just negotiated a CBA in Victoria. Victoria is very tough, because there's no money; it's all gone, and a lot of the social services are not being funded. So there's no money there at the moment for food banks and basic services, which are being funded by the state government. On the one hand, the councils would like to see that shortfall addressed, but, on the other hand, they think the state government should be providing it. But the state government has infrastructure and other things happening. How the money is decided has to be justified through the social impact assessment, which is an independent study. We consult around that. They do the assessment. Food shortages in this particular LGA were really an issue. There was funding from the CBA to the food banks. Then there are health services, and there's the transition from schools. They found that dropout rates in year 10 were a problem, so the CBA is funding some programs in the schools. The local Aboriginal community, as part of their shared benefit agreement, were getting $20,000 a year, directly to the traditional owners, and then there were further funds. They're putting it towards a gym for their local youth, so they've got somewhere to go. That all had to be justified through the SBA. Councils certainly do want to fund things where they've got shortfalls, particularly if state governments—if money is running out. But if it's not justified, the shared benefit agreements and the SIAs have to justify it. That's why it's working so well, in my opinion, in Queensland. Bear in mind, that's our first one. The legislation only changed in July, and you have to have your CBA and your SIA before you lodge, and I had an amazing council to work with. CHAIR: We're hearing from them tomorrow. We'll look forward to hearing what they've got to say about this as well. Mrs Short : We have a case study of a wonderful Aboriginal community in New South Wales that was having their front door knocked a lot in terms of the energy transmission projects in their area, so they created their own community strategy. Going back to your point about criticality and timing, I'm fairly certain we know that we have a fairly good idea of the communities that are going to be impacted by this. If there was an opportunity for them to start front-footing their community strategy so that they could be prepared for these conversations when they come up, wouldn't that make sense? Ms Groves : And it's not buying off communities. They welcome the funds. In every CBA I've done, there has always been a component for the local sporting groups or the local chess club. So there's a $50,000 amount. Don't forget that CBAs can be $10 million to $20 million, but they put in $50,000 a year for grants for the local sporting groups because that's really important. In every community, those groups come up as social cohesion. I could pretty much say that I can see that the CBAs do reflect the needs in the community. CHAIR: Does anyone else want to ask a question? Mr FARLEY: I have one last question about the CBAs. One of the big things we've learned about water and the clean energy policies is that, yes, it's good to get those grants, but what's really missing is what's called the intrinsic value or worth. In the water case, if you lose the water from the area, you also lose the jobs that that supported, such as truck drivers. Likewise, with solar farms, if you take an intensive irrigation farm out, you lose the intrinsic value. You might get $50,000 for your softball club, but in reality it was worth an annual annuity of probably $500,000 a year. It's about understanding the intrinsic value as opposed to the cash payment. The annuity value, instead of the cash payment, is what keeps all of these communities alive. Ms Groves : Yes, and then balancing that with solar farms to employ people full-time. You have grazing as well. A lot of the solar farms we have built have grazing in them, so they still have intrinsic agricultural value. You can graze sheep under solar panels. Mrs Short : That will be picked up in the social impact assessments. Ms Groves : Yes, absolutely, it comes up in the social and economic impact assessments. Mrs Short : Yes, I agree with you there. Mr FARLEY: But what I'm saying is that you take it from one higher value of intrinsic worth to the community to a lower one. A solar farm, when it takes over an irrigation paddock, gives it a lower intrinsic value instead of a higher one because of the intensity of the inputs et cetera. But anyway, I do believe that you want to be careful of looking at a cash payment once a year as opposed to the intrinsic annuity value of the industry that was there. Mrs Short : I think it comes down to the quality of the work that's being undertaken by the proponent. If they're doing good social impact and economic assessments then they should be considering these things as well in their entirety. This is where that transparency element is so important, because it's not just enough to have a good engagement strategy; you've got to be giving good data. CHAIR: Thank you so much for your attendance here today. It's been valuable. I don't know if your document is going to be released by Monday 12 October. Mrs Short : I can send it to you that week, yes. CHAIR: Yes, that would be most handy, if you don't mind, if you could forward it to the secretariat. You'll be sent a copy of the transcript of your evidence and you'll have the opportunity to request corrections to any transcription errors. But again, thank you so much for joining us today..