Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My fine city of Redlands has always paid it forward, and we had fabulous water infrastructure from the Straddie aquifer. But now, with Labor's interconnector, we are part of the SEQ Water Grid. A small part of Capalaba remains reliant, through a treatment facility, on the water from our magnificent Leslie Harrison Dam, just 20 minutes drive from the Brisbane CBD and one of the finest freshwater courses—crystal clear—you'll find anywhere. But there's no recreation on that dam: don't put so much as put a fingernail in that dam or you'll face arrest. They're fiercely protective—like a dog sitting on a haystack—so that everyone can look at this fine dam. Except that Labor mothballed the dam gates. It used to be a beautiful dam but, as they say with a hashtag: #damn Brown made our dam brown. Labor elected not to put those gates back on, leaving it as a naked spillway with no flood mitigation and no water security availability. They figured out how much it would be to put those gates back on and it was all too much for the Labor Party.

SEQ Water have taken a responsible attitude, getting the engineering advice from top-tier firms like GHD as to whether this dam can have a true future, not just for water security and not just for protecting all the downstream fields that flood every second year, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars—I want to see, ultimately, if it stacks up—but also recreational use of this fine freshwater dam just 20 minutes from the Brisbane CBD. This is a jewel in my electorate. At the moment, it is a mudflat and a swamp: State MP Don Brown stands responsible. We can do so much better.