Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

On 7 September this year, at the height of the northern Victorian floods, communities in the upper- and lower-Goulburn catchment, in the electorates of McEwen, Murray and Indi, were watching helplessly as their infrastructure was destroyed, homes inundated and crops and livestock drowned. So I sent off an urgent email begging the Victorian Premier, John Brumby, and his ministers to have a heart and turn off the north-south pipeline pumps, and to do it immediately because the extra water being released out of Eildon Dam for Melbourne was making the flooding worse.

I know it is shocking and decent people will find it hard to believe but, even as we were battling the flood disaster, Melbourne Water continued to demand that 300 megalitres per year be released out of the dam into the flooding river so it could be piped away to rain-soaked Melbourne. And absurdly the state’s Goulburn-Murray water authority was also releasing 130 megalitres each day from the dam as environmental flow. This meant that every day the equivalent of 430 Olympic-sized swimming pools were being pushed into the flooding river, backing up the tributaries and adding pressure to the levies downstream.

The Victorian government was either oblivious to or could not have cared less about this. We watched the TV news showing Premier Brumby in his suit lumping sandbags for the cameras while 430 megalitres were being pushed every day into the flood to send water down the pipeline to Melbourne. But it seems that even the Victorian government can be shamed into action sometimes, and within hours of my emails on 7 September they turned off the north-south pipeline pumps at Yea. (Time expired)

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