Alex Somlyay (Fairfax, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I was interested to hear the comments of the member for Oxley, because they give the member for Wide Bay the grand opportunity to make sure that every person in the Mary Valley gets a copy of that speech on behalf of the federal Labor Party and the Labor Party of Queensland. The member for Wide Bay and I share a common electorate boundary. Areas in the Mary Valley have moved between our various electorates over the past 20 years, so I know the area very well. I share with those people who live in the Mary Valley the heartache that they have been through in this process for the last two or three years.

When Peter Beattie first announced the building of this dam, I was absolutely horrified, and I was not horrified on environmental grounds. The grounds that I was horrified on were that the Mary Valley is some of the best agricultural country in Queensland, something that is becoming a very rare commodity with the urban sprawl that is happening in our region. The member for Wide Bay, as the minister in charge of roads at one stage, was, together with me, involved in a process where the state government had to determine the route of the new Bruce Highway. There was a road being planned from Cooroy to Curra, and there were five alternative routes. There was a lot of heartache for people because their land was threatened with resumption, and the member for Wide Bay stepped in and said, ‘No, we will have the highway following the alignment of the current, existing Bruce Highway to minimise the impact on residents.’ I applauded the member for Wide Bay, the minister at the time, for that, and so did the people of the Mary Valley. Imagine our shock and horror—my shock and horror—at the fact that, when we and the Department of Main Roads had finally determined this route, we had the situation where a state minister was determining the route of the new Bruce Highway and a state minister in a room next door was planning to flood it. At the same time as the minister was planning to build the road, the other minister was planning to flood it. That was my first concern.

My second concern was that the state government deregulated the dairy industry. The dairy industry in the Mary Valley was one of the best and most efficient in Queensland in its time. A lot of money was put into the Mary Valley—again, through the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, the member for Wide Bay—under the Dairy Regional Assistance Program to restructure some of those industries and farms and give them the opportunity to build bigger and better dairy farms. All that—I think it was over $100 million—would have been flooded and wasted, and all the Commonwealth money that was put into the Mary Valley and those dairy farms was wasted.

It was only then that we had the first protest meeting in Gympie about the dam, which I went to. The member for Wide Bay could not be at that very first one, but I was there and I told the crowd at Gympie—there were over 1,000 people; that was an initial reaction to this dam—that the Commonwealth could only intervene on the basis of the environment. We cannot intervene on the basis of land use. Land use is purely a responsibility of the states. I told them that a case would have to be put up on environmental grounds if the Commonwealth were to stop this dam.

The state Labor member for Noosa had the guts to come out and oppose this dam. She resigned from the Labor Party over it, and it cost her her seat. I can guarantee you that the people of the Noosa area and the people in the Mary Valley will never vote Labor again because of the way they have been treated over the Traveston Crossing dam. It is an absolute travesty that the work of four, five or six generations has just disappeared, that their livelihood has been taken from them and that their way of life is gone. (Time expired)

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