“I am not here to sell you a monorail,” federal MP Adam Bandt said.

However, the situation’s parallels with the iconic Simpsons episode were ripe. An out-of-towner wheeling out an unpopular conversation at a community meeting hoping to come out with a win. 

“It’s not an election year and I am not here asking for your vote. This is about saying we are facing a very serious issue,” he said.

“We just have to look around Australia to see transitions done badly and see how they hurt communities. We can either bury our heads in the sand and wait for the next big multinational power company to close its coal fire station for its own selfish reasons or we can come up with a plan.”

The crowd (filling more than half of the Lithgow Workies’ showroom) were ready to discuss. Seemingly everything was on the table from wind power capacities, to establishing a universal basic income, Tesla home batteries and electricity bills. A comment about chem-trails, however, was greeted with, “that’s a conversation for another day”.  

At the core of Mr Bandt’s introductory address was his plan to create an authority that would oversee the transition from coal power to renewable energy production, in particular the employment of those living in longstanding energy-generating towns. 

“The first thing the authority would do is come up with a timeline for the replacement of coal with clean energy by 2030,” he said.

“This authority could then start asking a series of questions, the first of which would be: can we build renewable generation in the places where there is existing coal fire power generation.”

“The second question is if that’s not going to fill the employment gap what new industries can we attract to the area and how are we going to do it? If there’s still going to be a shortfall of employment then we work on a simple principal of no one left behind.” 

“It’s probably not the case that everybody will get a job in renewables, agriculture or tourism but at the moment there’s no one even trying.”

Greens member of the NSW Legislative Council Jeremy Birmingham, a resident of Orange and former councillor, said that Orange’s recovery from the Electrolux factory closure last year provided a good example for ‘transition towns’. 

“They just made the decision to go and 500 jobs were lost,” he said.  

“Cadia [mine] boomed and busted. What really held over the economy was proactive local government. They knew this was going to happen and they asked what do we have here that we can build on?

“We’ve got vineyards, orchards, food. We also began working with the university to bring in the school of dentistry and the rest, and that university will hopefully bet there, like us, for thousands of years.” 

“But that takes planning, working out what have you got how can you build on it.”

Mr Bandt also argued that the transmission infrastructure in place in Lithgow due to coal mining could make it a preferable location to establish renewable energy generation.