Member for New England Barnaby Joyce is facing growing calls to retract and apologise after spreading a false claim that the New England Highway would be shut six days a week for turbine deliveries to the Winterbourne Wind Farm. The claim has been rejected as false by a number of locals, and debunked by the developer, a major TV network and an independent fact-checking project.
While most national media were focus on Mr Joyce’s baseless claims of China being behind the Telstra outage, a video by Mr Joyce making a false claim about the New England Highway being closed for 6 days a week to enable delivery of wind farm turbines to Walcha was busily being shared amongst various anti-renewables, anti-government, and pro-One Nation spaces online, particularly on Facebook.
The false claim started with Voice for Walcha, which misread a letter from Transport for NSW to the wind farm’s developers, posted publicly on the NSW Planning Portal. The letter dealt mainly with moving turbine components through Newcastle, but included a section flagging future work still to be done on the route from Muswellbrook to Tamworth and on to the project site.
“Noting the schedule provided between the blades and the towers, this would require closures of the Moonbi Range for six days a week,” Transport for NSW stated in the letter.
The letter went on to ask developers whether routes, upgrades or measures had been considered to reduce the impact – a question about future planning, not a decision already made.
“Have any alternate physical upgrades been explored, or alternative measures been explored by the proponent to ensure that the Moonbi Range would not be required to be closed six days a week to permit the movements through the Moonbi Range for these two types of component deliveries?”
Voice for Walcha stripped out the heading and context, and presented the planned brief closures as all day closures, and as settled fact rather than logistics still being negotiated, complete with an AI generated image with American school bus and fake scenes. The text next to the alarmist claim and fake image said that the information was in “the fine print of the EIS documents”, when it was in correspondence from Transport for NSW, and completely fabricated that this would mean New England Highway traffic would be diverted onto local roads.
Mr Joyce then repeated the false claim in a video and escalated it further, claiming that traffic will be pushed onto dirt roads incapable of managing such loads, and warning “someone’s gonna get killed.”
Vestas, the company managing the turbine transport, rejected the claim outright. Under the current plan, which Transport for NSW says still needs further work to reduce its impact, there would be 16 pauses a week on the route, averaging five minutes each, between 1am and 5am.
Several locals called out the claim as false on the Voice for Walcha page within hours of it being posted, before Mr Joyce’s video went up. Channel 7 later reported the claim was false, with the response from Vestas.
As concern about the false claim grew, it was debunked further by The Frackman Project, an online advocacy page run by anti-fracking campaigner Dayne Pratzky who now factchecks claims in relation to energy projects.
“Is the New England Highway really getting closed six days out of seven? According to Vestas, the company actually doing the job, say no,” The Frackman Project said in a post.
“Sixteen road pauses a week, five minutes average, ten minutes max, between 1am and 5am. No closures. No dirt road diversions. No drama.”
“So before anyone shares this further you gotta ask a simple question, did Barnaby Joyce even pick up the phone and ask?”
Mr Pratzky followed up on Facebook with a direct challenge to Mr Joyce and Voice for Walcha.
“If the transport plan is as Vestas has described, will Barnaby Joyce and Voice for Walcha remove or correct their social media posts claiming the New England Highway would be closed for hours?”
“If they have evidence that those claims are accurate, they should publish it. If not, they should correct the record.”
“If the truth is on your side, you don’t need to mislead people,” he said.
As the Channel 7 and Frackman videos circulated, locals began asking why Mr Joyce had not corrected the record. On the Glen Innes NSW Community Noticeboard, Tom Bombadil wrote that the community deserved better.
“Will Barnaby Joyce, admit they were wrong? Glen Innes residents reply on accurate information and representation,” Mr Bombadil wrote.
“Regardless of how you feel about Renewable Energy, it is irresponsible for your Federal Member not to have done their due diligence, before spreading misinformation and manufactured outrage. Our community deserves someone, that does not seek to divide us.”
Some locals have also questioned why Mr Joyce would repeat a claim of Voice for Walcha, when just days prior Brendan Moylan was caught also not checking the facts before repeating misinformation about support levels for the Renewable Energy Zone and false claims that developers were leaving the area.
Mr Joyce was asked to respond to the claims of misinformation, and whether he had checked the source rather than just repeating the claims, but did not reply by deadline.
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