Mr BAYLEY - I have a few questions on poles that I was hoping you could help me with. I know there has been contention over poles on private land in years past, particularly in the agricultural sector, a lot of concern, and it has chewed up a lot of farmers' time and energy. Can you give me an update on where that's at? Have you got any situations before the courts at the moment? And can you broadly point to this situation being resolved?
Mr McGOLDRICK - In terms of private poles, I do not believe we've anything in front of the courts. To give the committee a rough idea, we've about 62 000 private poles out there in Tasmania at the moment. Many of these are just one or two poles leading into a direct connection to a property. Some of them are more. But in total there are 62 000, which is a small number compared to the hundreds of thousands of poles that TasNetworks has. But, of course, they're a vital part of our power system and they do present some risks.
We have been working to analyse those risks. We've been working with the property owners but we've also been working with I believe it's the Department of Justice on a process about how we deal with a situation where we discover a pole that's substandard, that needs some work on it. Michael, would you be kind enough to provide us some more detail on that?
Mr BAYLEY - Before you do, I guess liability issues, particularly when it comes to bushfires and the like, resulting from those private poles.
Mr McGOLDRICK - We have to be extraordinarily careful in the upcoming bushfire seasons, because we're in a cycle now that will be a multi-year cycle. We are upping our attention on this. We're doing very targeted veg management; we're doing lots of inspections, we're making sure our assets and, indeed, where we can inspect them, individual other assets are in good shape, private assets are in good shape.
Mr WESTENBERG - I think you've covered the key points, Sean, for that. We do continue to carry out safety inspections of private assets at the request of the Government. TasNetworks continue to engage with key stakeholders who own private electricity assets to provide clarification and transparency regarding their obligations as responsible owners.
Mr BAYLEY - Where are you sourcing your poles for new installations and the like, where are they coming from at the moment? I'm sure you are aware we're in a climate and biodiversity crisis. Are they still coming from the native forest estate, be it private or publicly owned?
Mr McGOLDRICK - It is more managed forestry. What we use now is almost an engineered pine product, a natural pine product that we put some -
Mr BAYLEY - Treated?
Mr McGOLDRICK - We treat it appropriately. I believe we get the majority of our poles on island from properly managed pine estates, so it's not native logging on native forests. We may get some other poles of a different type off-island. For example, we have some poles that are made of composite fibre material that are more fire-resistant, more suitable for complex connections, stronger. We're beginning to install those round our network as well. I believe they come from off-island. We're constantly looking for different materials that will improve the resilience of our assets and performance.
