Social License to Operate
The social license to operate is made up of three components: legitimacy, credibility, and trust.
AusNet need to partner with the community in every aspect of planning, development and decision making, including the development of alternatives and the identification of a preferred solution. Community engagement key to the success of any major infrastructure project and is most successful when it establishes and delivers on clear expectations and gives people the opportunity to influence decisions.
Social license is another thing again: the informal “license” granted to a company by various stakeholders who may be affected by the company’s activities. Such a license is based on trust and confidence – hard to win, easy to lose.
The social license to operate is made up of three components: legitimacy, credibility, and trust.
Legitimacy: this is the extent to which an individual or organisation plays by the ‘rules of the game’. That is, the norms of the community, be they legal, social, cultural, formal or informal in nature.
Credibility: this is the individual or company’s capacity to provide true and clear information to the community and fulfil any commitments made.
Trust: this is the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another. It is a very high quality of relationship and takes time and effort to create.
To regain its Social License to Operate, AusNet need to place decision-making in the hands of the community and implement what the community decides, not use old technology and present alternative corridors that do not minimise impacts and simply do not work.
“AusNet needs to do better, the government needs to pay attention, and all behind the project need to get it right. If they don’t, the social licence of renewables will be significantly harmed.”
“The Government has been urging us for years now to leave behind the energy generation of the past – that is coal and gas – and yet here it is proposing to connect the energy generation of the future with the transmission technology of the 20th Century”
“The failure of the RIT-T process to fully consider the WVTNP’s costs, in the manner of a full economic impact assessment, seems extraordinary.”
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The only way to make a difference is to get involved. It’s easy to sit back and wait for others to do something but when you are staring at 75-85m towers in a few years time, you will kicking yourself for not doing something when you had the chance. This is OUR only chance to stop these towers, so get involved now.
Welcome to the home of Darley Power Fight. A group of residents in Darley, Coimadai and Merrimu, united against high voltage transmission towers passing through our backyard. We came together through the realisation the transmission line will divide a narrow corridor between Darley and the Lerderderg State Park; altering landscape character, causing widespread damage to critical habitat for threatened species, increasing fire risk to the Park and thousands of residents, destroy our visual amenity, harm local agriculture and will impact businesses and property values. It will completely desecrate, in a few years, what nature has taken millions of years to create.
