Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It started during the height of the Great Depression and was finished in 1935: I'm talking about Wyangala Dam. It cost 1.3 million pounds. It was built with a dam wall height of 85 metres. Now there's a proposal on the table to increase that by 10 metres. The initial cost is $650 million. I appreciate that cost will now be substantially more, but we need to get on and do it.

That is agreed to by Tom Green, the chair of the Lachlan Valley Water. He says:

We're urging the NSW Government to get on with this project to both greatly reduce the chance of major flooding in the Lachlan Valley and improve water security for irrigators and towns like Forbes, Parkes, Cowra, Condobolin, Lake Cargelligo and Hillston.

He's right, of course: increasing the dam wall by 10 metres would increase the dam's capacity by 650 gigalitres, more than the Sydney Harbour. Melissa Brown, who runs Wattle Bower, downstream of Jemalong, with her husband, Tom, is keen to see the dam wall raised, as are many others—farmers, irrigators and the people in the town of Forbes, who are now facing their second major flood in five years with the peak expected to reach 10.2 metres tonight. It's time we got on with it.

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