Let easement acquisition run alongside environmental assessment, not after it
Victoria amended its law in 2026 so compulsory easement acquisition for transmission can proceed concurrently with the environment effects process, having identified the sequential requirement as a cause of delay on VNI West and the Western Renewables Link. Modelled against the sequential pathway, one dependency edge is worth about eighteen months.
Steps this would change
Rationale
This is the only reform on this site that has already been legislated, and it is therefore the most valuable one here — not because it is the largest, but because it can be checked.
The database models the two pathways identically except for a single dependency edge. The sequential pathway runs 3,495 days on the critical path. The Victorian pathway runs 2,955. The difference — 540 days, about eighteen months — is attributable to the resequencing alone, because every duration in both models is held identical by construction.
The logic is the ordinary logic of this database. Environmental assessment and easement acquisition examine different things and are performed by different parties. Assessment asks what the line would do to the environment. Acquisition asks what the landholder is owed and how the interest is transferred. Neither answer determines the other. Requiring one to finish before the other begins is a sequencing choice, and Victoria has now said so in legislation.
Who could act: New South Wales and Queensland, on their own transmission frameworks. This is a state power. The Commonwealth's role is confined to whatever conditions attach to Rewiring the Nation financing.
What to watch instead of assuming. The honest use of this entry is as a prediction that will be graded. Victoria has changed the edge; if VNI West and the Western Renewables Link do not move materially, the model is wrong about something and this site should say so.
What is being traded away
The objection here is about power, not about time, and it is serious enough that this entry is deliberately not celebratory.
It brings compulsory acquisition forward to a point where the route is not final. A landholder can be served with acquisition process over an alignment whose environmental assessment has not concluded and which may still move. That is a real transfer of burden onto the person with the least capacity to bear it, and describing it as a process efficiency understates what has happened.
It may not even be faster. Negotiating an easement over a provisional route gives the landholder every reason to wait for certainty before settling, and gives the proponent less to negotiate with. The model holds acquisition at 540 days in both pathways precisely to avoid assuming the reform makes acquisition itself quicker; if concurrency makes it slower, part of the modelled saving is illusory and could in principle be negative.
It cuts against what the evidence says the real problem is. VNI West slipped about two years on landholder engagement — on relationships, trust and the terms offered, not on the statutory ordering of steps. The Dyer review reported at the end of December 2023 with nine recommendations on community engagement, all accepted in principle. A jurisdiction that adopts the acquisition resequencing and not the engagement reforms has taken the part that suits the proponent and left the part that suits the landholder, and should expect the resulting litigation and resistance to consume what the resequencing saved.
That is the specific failure mode to watch for if NSW or Queensland copies this.
Precedent
Enacted. Amendments to the Electricity Industry Act 2000 (Vic) in 2026 permit concurrent compulsory acquisition. This is not a proposal in Victoria — it is law, and the question is whether other jurisdictions follow and whether the saving materialises.
Sources
- Amendments to the Electricity Industry Act 2000 (Vic), 2026, permitting compulsory easement acquisition concurrently with the environment effects process
- Reporting on VNI West completion moving from 2028 to late 2030 on landholder engagement and assessment
- Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner, Community Engagement Review (Dyer review), December 2023, and government response accepting all nine recommendations in principle