Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I think he was truly one of the greatest of Australians. He built the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He built the underground railway system in Sydney, which is still being used today almost as it was then, which gives you some idea of the man's foresight. Dr Bradfield won the international engineering prize for the underground railway system. He built the Burrinjuck Dam, which provides the major contribution of water to the MIA, the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, and ensured Sydney's water supply with the other dam that he built outside of Sydney.

Dr Bradfield also built the University of Queensland, by the way, and the Story Bridge of Brisbane, but he is most famous for what he did not build, which was the Bradfield scheme. The idea was to take a little bit of the huge mass of floodwaters of North Queensland, where we get 200 and 300 inches of rain every year, put it back into Central Australia, put it into Lake Eyre and make it rain, with 30,000 megalitres of evaporation and precipitation falling over the Murray-Darling, doubling and trebling the amount of water in the Murray-Darling. For what it is worth, I read the reports and I think that he was dead right. He was a man far smarter than anyone in this place, I can assure you. His alternative was to dig a ditch from Spencer Gulf, fill Lake Eyre up with water and make it rain that way, but we would choose the revised Bradfield scheme proposals, using that water on the rolling black-soil plains—the richest soils in the world—of inland North Queensland. Bradfield stage 1 is in fact— (Time expired)

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