The Central West could become a major provider of renewable energy according to Dr Amanda Cohn and Kay Nankervis.
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Dr Cohn is the Greens candidate for the NSW Senate and met with the party's Calare candidate, Ms Nankervis, on Thursday.
The party previously announced that if the Greens were elected into power at the upcoming election, they would implement a system in which the government would pay 50 per cent of wages over a ten year period for any business that takes on a worker who used to work in coal or gas.
"It's not the workers who need to pay for the move away from fossil fuels, it's big business and governments who have to bear the burden," Ms Nankervis said.
"That's one of the things that we're going to be looking after in Calare. That's particularly important to the people in Lithgow, the people who live just outside Mudgee and the people involved in the mines in Orange."
The Calare candidate said they'd like to see sections of the Central West become open for solar farms which could be placed near towns and not away from them.
"That way we can build the infrastructure linking up fossil fuel free energy and building a network of EV charging, so the Central West can become one of the first regional areas to start shifting much more strongly to electric vehicle use," Ms Nankervis added.
"It's in regional areas that people need to move to electric vehicles as fast as possible because of the huge cost of diesel fuel.
Dr Cohn said "the writing is on the wall" for coal and gas industries.
"This region has the opportunity to not just be self-sufficient in terms of energy, it has the opportunity to be an exporter of power," she said.
"This region has the opportunity to not just be self-sufficient in terms of energy, it has the opportunity to be an exporter of power.
"This region is on major transmission lines and there's already been huge private sector interest in investing in this region. Calare deserves a representative who is going to be part of the change and part of the future, rather than clinging on to technology that's going to be out of date."
Asked why she thought the people of Orange should vote for her, Ms Nankervis cited a "growing number" of people in the city who are concerned about climate change.
"The people of Orange are a very smart group of people who are increasingly environmentally aware," she said.
"They want to vote for the candidate who is making the strongest case for fighting climate change and that's the Greens and that's me."
As for the Greens' voting preferences in Calare, the pair said they would be advocating for Kate Hook second on the ballot, followed by Labor, Nationals, UAP and One Nation in last.
"We are definitely preferencing the best way we can to make sure that we don't have a return of a ScoMo government," the Calare candidate added.
"We think (One Nation's) policies are problematic. We want to discourage people with anti-vaxxer and anti-mandate views that we think are extreme.
"We think Pauline Hanson's One Nation is based too much on xenophobia and racism and we don't want to have anything to do with it."
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